When one or more of my characters are laying limp and brainless on the page, I pull them out and temporarily replace them with others. Okay, Kraydja can’t get herself out of this fix… what would Batman do? What about Shirley Temple? General Patton? Donald Trump? Donald Duck?

Just the process of looking at the problem through very different eyes can free the creative juices.

Here’s my understanding of this: I’d say that in any story the character should always want something concrete. He should always have an outer, visible goal. If you don’t have this, then the reader (and you the writer) don’t know when the story’s done and whether the character solved his problem/achieved his goal or not. This can/should be paired with an inner motivation/goal. “Understanding loyalty” is a good inner motivation, but then you need to figure out what that actually looks like on the outside for that character. Maybe it looks like robbing banks because that’s how he shows loyalty to his gang and what he wants is to be able to stop robbing banks without looking like a traitor and being kicked out of the gang. Those are all concrete things you can show. Because no one says “I want to understand loyalty,” unless they are abstracting from what they really want, which is always something concrete. If your character is saying to you, “I want to understand loyalty,” then you need to ask him “Why?” and “What does that look like to you? What will that get you?” And you’ll end up with something concrete that you can actually show on the page. I think if you have a story that you’re already writing, then you must have a lot of this already, but you need to get out of the abstract level of thinking he wants to “understand loyalty” and into the concrete level of what that looks like to this particular character.