Novel Prep I – An Exercise

I’m in the midst of outlining my next novel. With my last one, I used a combination of paper/pen and, ultimately, writer’s software to accomplish this, and I’m doing the same thing this time around. I make some progress in the software (which I’ll talk about in another post) and then during my breaks at work I sit with a notebook and flesh it out.

I have a SLEW of writing books, as I’ve said elsewhere, most of which I haven’t read yet. So as I was walking past the writing-book bookcase (floor to ceiling, six feet wide, and they don’t all fit there) the other day, one of the titles leaped out at me, and it spawned what has turned out to be an interesting exercise.

The title was “GMC: Goal, Motivation and Conflict” by Deborah Dixon. I didn’t pull it off the shelf immediately (because I’m already in the middle of reading two other writing books, two novels, one play and three unrelated-to-writing non-fiction works). But it did stick in my head, and I started thinking about it.

This novel is much different to map than the last because it has an ensemble cast and focuses on the stories of each of them (as opposed to the last, which told everyone’s story through the eyes of one character). It’s important that each character be fully developed and interesting internally, and that their stories intertwine effectively. (Ok, it’s important that the characters be developed and interesting in the last work too, but since we’re seeing it through the eyes of one character, our ability to see the non-narrator’s goals and motivations is made more remote.)

Characters are more interesting if they have goals and motivations that are identifiable by the reader. (Main characters should have conflict, too, obviously, or you’ll find yourself in the unenviable situation of being plot-free.) This is potentially true of all characters, which means that the lesser characters might need to have goals that are self-evident.

Example: suppose your character is walking down the street and sees a kid standing there, just standing there, doing nothing. And there’s nothing unusual or memorable about him. Absent clear motivations for noticing him on your character’s part, your reader will probably find him uninteresting and may wonder why he’s being noticed at all. The kid could crop up later and be important, in which case by noticing him you’ve introduced mystery, and your character’s reactions to him at first sight should probably foreshadow that. But if you’re just noticing him to paint a scene, it might work better if you give him a self-evident goal, that is, a goal that we don’t actually have to talk to him or get inside his head to identify. A kid who’s standing with a sign that says “homeless, help me” and a hat out for change has a self-evident goal — to get enough money to support himself. A kid in a field running bases has a self-evident goal — to score a run. A kid walking down the road with a fishing pole has a self-evident goal — to go somewhere to catch fish. You can enrich your scenery in this simple way — make your non-characters come alive by having goals of their own.

But I’m digressing. I started to say that the title of the book stayed with me and I decided to use it as an exercise. I went through my six main characters one by one, and listed all the goals I could think of for each one, based on what I know about my story so far. Likewise motivations, likewise conflicts. Complex people have more than one goal, and main characters should be complex people. They want to pay their bills, live their dreams, travel, get a cat, lose weight, read 150 books this year, subscribe to their PBS station, find a boyfriend, grow their own tomatoes, get their boss fired, conquer their fear of flying, win the lottery and find someone else to mow their lawns — all at the same time. And in addition, they have subtler emotional and psychological goals — they want to be more spontaneous, control their anger, practice gratitude, be unafraid to take risks, stop caring what they look like and live richer lives — at the same time they want all those other, physical things.

People are like that. So you should be able to list a solid 5-10 goals each of your main characters has, easy, whether you intend that they should achieve them all or not. It will make your characters more well-rounded. One of my characters wants things as complicated as “to help other women her age rebuild the parts of their lives they’re unhappy with” and things as simple as “to cease being bored and feeling like she’s marking time.” The goals you list should be physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, if all those things fit into the type of book you’re writing. (For example, if you’re writing James Bond, I suspect you won’t give him a spiritual goal — although, if it comes up, it will turn out that he’s already as spiritually well-developed and accomplished as he is in other areas of his life. He’s that kind of guy. Which brings us to another wrinkle: having previously had goals and accomplished them is another way to make a character interesting.)

A good example from bestselling literature of this is Stephanie Plum, from the series by Janet Evanovich. Stephanie has fought a series-long battle with the top button on her jeans and constantly wants to lose a little weight and be in better shape. She wants to make ends meet with her bounty-hunting job. She wants both the men in her life (well, I see a potential for conflict here!). She wants not to be driven crazy by her family but still get to eat her mother’s pot roast. I suspect that just once she’d like to drive a decent car that didn’t blow up, catch fire, get crushed or otherwise become undrivable but I suspect that wish will go unfulfilled. She wants donuts. She wants her hamster, Rex, to be safe. She’s delightfully needy in terms of the number of goals she’s entertaining — she wants this, she wants that, she wants everything all at the same time. And like most of us, her attention wanders from goal to goal while she tries to keep her eye on whatever the main ball is at the moment.

Lots of goals are a plus. They give your characters richness, additional motivations, and plenty of opportunity for conflict — the things plots are made of. They also form a good checklist — if your character has 12 goals but only one motivation you can think of, you may have some work to do either recognizing that some of the goals are false, or that some of the motivations are missing. I’m not saying it needs to be a one-to-one relationship, but it probably shouldn’t be grossly out of balance either, unless the goals are somehow related.

For example, if your goals are to get your mother a new house, pay for your brother’s cancer operation, set up your retirement portfolio, and travel the world, you may be motivated by the idea of making money and that motive covers all those goals. But if you also have the goal of becoming a world-champion long-distance runner, being motivated only by the desire for more money isn’t going to cut it. If you haven’t established your characters motivation in this area, you may have difficulty when you reach the point in your plot where the person trying to hinder the long-distance running goal accuses your protagonist of doping — your reader may think, “Well, he doesn’t really care about this anyway, so it’s probably easiest to just let it go.”

Anyway, I’ve found it a good exercise and I hope you do too. And I think I’m going to go read that book!

~ by seriouswriter on July 22, 2007.