“He lifted his hands to the skies and sounded a long weird call that seemed to shudder endlessly out into space, dwindling and fading, yet never dying out , only receding farther and farther into some unreckoned cosmos. In the silence that followed, Conan heard a sudden beat of wings in the stars, and recoiled as a huge bat-like creature alighted beside him. He saw its great calm eyes regarding him in the starlight; he saw the forty-foot spread of its giant wings. And saw it neither was bat nor bird.”
— (excerpt from The Scarlet Citadel, by Robert E. Howard)
Goal, Motivation, and Conflict
Happy Tax Day, everyone! I hope y’all got your taxes done on time and that ol’ Uncle Sam is treating you fairly ( * insert raging diatribe here * ). Hard to believe April is half over already, although we are only ten days into the second round of ROW80 (which is one-eighth of the way through, for all you non-math majors out there). As I mentioned in my last blog post, I have been trying to strengthen the plots of my three stories by giving my main characters and villains strong goals and motives. I had been struggling with this concept for awhile now, but then I discovered a book on the subject called GMC: Goal, Motivation & Conflict (The Building Blocks of Good Fiction) by Debra Dixon. I read her book straight through on Monday, fell in love with her system, and started working it out on graph-paper yesterday. So far, within my world-building project, I have thirty major characters, which includes ten major villains (each will be developed into their own stories later). So, for each of my characters, on a full-sheet of graph-paper, I created a grid with three rows (Goal, Motivation, Conflict) and two columns (External, Internal). Within this gridded worksheet, I have been brainstorming the the most important starting questions of any story; the "who, what, why, and why not" questions. The "who" is the Character, the "what" is the Goal, the "why" is the Motivation, and the "why not" is the Conflict. Each of these questions are expressed in terms of the plot (External) and the character development (Internal). The beauty of this layout is that you can see the entire story-arc of each character, and when compared side-by-side with other characters, story-ideas and conflicts between enemies and allies start emerging. It's a great way to view new, developing characters while they are still simple (non-complex), unsullied by contrived personalities or background-stories that may not fit them. Once these basic questions are answered, I can then delve deeper into the details of the characters and their story. I recommend this intuitive system to those who want to develop strong plots with motivated characters. Anyway, that's what I have been doing for the last couple of days. Let me know if you have any comments or questions about the GMC system.
That's all for now. I'm behind on my word-count elsewhere (yeah, you guessed it) and I'll be typing feverishly until midnight after I post this.
Please visit the other writers in the ROW80 Community...
I use a variant of this system, from a book called Rock Your Plot. It is incredibly helpful to know the characters' GMCs, and now, when I plot each scene, I always write a GMCD (the D is for the Disaster at the end of the scene; the thing that makes people NEED to know what happens next).
ReplyDeleteThese are so important, because I am an intuitive writer, and my plotting is basically, Who What Where Why and how ( the what is the basic thrust of the scene's action; the why is the character's goal and motivation in that scene; the how is the conflict, the disaster -or resolution if it's an ending scene - and a brief paragraph of what I expect to happen in the beginning, middle, and ending of the scene).
Of course, my characters have their own ideas - and I always go with them, even when they change things up in mid-sentence (yes, T'Pol, I'm glaring at you, and don't you dare raise that eyebrow or try to get at my shoulder for a nerve pinch!). Maybe because of that character development, their ideas (yes, even or maybe especially T'Pol's) are always better than what I plotted, and they fit the story arc, making it stronger or more richly textured.
Hae fun with the graphing- I've never tried that approach, but I may, in the future....I can see how it would be useful to visualize it, and I have a bulletin board.