Why? If you've spent any time at all with a toddler, you will probably be sick of this question to the point where just the sound of the word makes you ill. But it's a question that you should always be thinking of when creating a story. You may have heard this called "motive".
Motive is why characters do anything. It is also what makes the story believable. If you have a character that decides to randomly start fighting the guy passing by on the street, it is very strange. This lack of motive is why we don't have people just walk down the street and start fighting in real life, with the exception of drunks, but even then, there is a reason no matter how small.
Without motive, your characters are not believable, because they don't act in ways that you would expect of any being. This includes irrational beings, because even if someone is irrational, there will be some sort of twisted logic that makes sense in their mind which provides a logical (at least to their point of view) reason for what they do.
In addition to unbelievable characters, the entire story is then made unstable. If any plot points happen without a suitable motive, the entire story is destabilized and the reader won't be able to immerse themselves into it. Ideally, your reader will be able to completely imagine the story that you tell, because there are no flaws in it. I'll have several more posts on this I believe.
This is why it's really important to have a motive for all characters to have a motive. Large, very important motives will affect the main plot, and thus be more obvious if they aren't there or are flawed, but even the small motives are problems if they don't logically make sense. And if just one of these small motives is flawed, it casts doubt on all the other motives, large and small alike.
What motives do you find in your characters, and what motives do you notice the most? A couple common ones are revenge and love – what else have you seen?
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