To put it another way, I’m not a fan of the “write down everything about your theoretical character” school of character creation. Unless it is directly relevant to the story at hand, or provide some sort of contrast with what is occurring in the plot, the character’s favorite food or the slogan of his alma mater is probably not something I need to plan out ahead of time. I would rather create a character with some basic attributes, flesh out the personality in my mind, add a memorable quirk, and then let the smaller details come on their own. However, this character requires something to actually make me want to write about them, and something to carry them through to any resolution (or lack) that the plot may take: to wit, their motivation.

Among the most elemental plots is the quest story. In a quest story, the protagonist seeks a thing, not necessarily tangible, Alfred Hitchcock called it the MacGuffin.^[2] The actual identity of the MacGuffin is unimportant. The actions that drive the plot focus around just why our protagonist wants the MacGuffin. The tangible object can be another person (love story), an ideal—the MacGuffin could even be the lack of something.^[3] What is most important in this story is that the wants of the character are what’s driving the plot, and not the plot that’s driving along the character. The distinction is subtle, but simple.

My favorite technique for generating a story idea is to develop a character and put them in a situation that is totally out of their experience, and letting their reaction drive the story. I want to analyze for you “Week Three,” a short story that was part of my Fifty-Two Stories project.^[4] Gregory, the story’s protagonist, is a child. He’s mischievous, aggressive, and unrepentantly childish, as well. What he wants is to resist and to control, hence the behaviors that put him into three weeks of detention. His antagonist, Mrs. Hofflan, wants nothing more than to teach Gregory that he is not the center of the universe. The confrontation between the two that climaxes the story epitomizes how a character can react to a revelation that shocks their worldview. Gregory’s understanding of the impact of his actions forces him to re-evaluate his wants. He loses, and he is no longer the center of his personal universe.

Any story, without the proper motivation to anchor it, and propel the plot, will fall flat. There are a myriad of wants and motivations: fear, love, anger, hunger, escape, sleep, and victory are a few that could, when done well, create interesting and captivating stories. The most important thing, however, is not what the motivation is, but how the writer wields it, and connects it to the story. If a writer’s protagonist is reuniting with a childhood friend, but spends the entire story stoned in the back seat of a car while her friend get into a violent drug deal, they have not fully connected the motivation with the story—as well as committed a grievous error in point-of-view.^[5] A character with motivation, as well, gives the reader something to relate to, a universality that is at the heart of the best fiction.

1. It is worth taking a minor digression here to discuss character-driven fiction versus plot-driven fiction. To put it extremely simply, character-driven fiction has a plot which is driven by the natural behavior and machinations of the characters, while plot-driven fiction has characters that work to serve an overarching story. Personally, I really question if any well written piece of fiction requires this distinction. A story with well written characters and no plot is worthless, and any story with an elaborate plot is worthless if the characters are flat. The trick for any writer is to balance out the natural character with a captivating plot, and the way to do this is to fully understand your characters and their motivation. Hence, this article. ↩
2. I, in my aborted Fifty-Two Stories project, had a little fun with this term in a story titled “Egg McGuffin,” and the reader can probably guess what the MacGuffin was. ↩
3. Think Lord of the Rings here: the MacGuffin is the absence of the Ring, not the Ring itself. ↩
4. Site to be relaunched soon. ↩
5. One of the “benefits” to taking a fiction writing course is reading stories like this. It can be fixed by either making the protagonist active, or moving the central character to someone else. ↩

The biggest downside to having a low-traffic blog is that there is nobody to yell at you if you miss an update, or start slacking with cheap list-based posts and context-free links to other sites.^[2] Fortunately, I have Merlin Mann to yell at me, instead. On top of that, I’ve been reading/listening to On Writing by Stephen King, and it’s been a revelatory experience. I’m not the biggest fan of his fiction^[3], but as a writer and a proponent of the craft, he’s top notch. Merlin’s article and Mr. King’s memoir were the catalyst that the atrophied creative part of my brain needed to wake up from a deep slumber.

It really clicked the other day when I bought a new notebook—something everyone should carry at all times. For reasons I cannot gather, I stopped carrying mine, and now it’s probably in a box in a storage shed. That same day I wrote my first new poem in over four months.^[4] I realize, in retrospect, that plenty of ideas had flitted through my head in the last few months, but I had not written an of them down to work on later—save one.^[5] Also, while searching through a digital junk pile, I found part of a short story written, perhaps semi-consciously, in the vein of Donald Barthelme’s dialectic short fiction. What struck me about this was, unlike most of what I write and put aside, finding this piece again, I felt satisfied to read it. The story certainly needed work—it was only about a page, and nowhere near finished, but what I had was entertaining and readable.

Right now, I feel like I’ve woken out of a lucid dream. There is a lot ahead that I want to do, a lot that I want to say, and a lot that I want to read. I want to finish this post with a promise: I will write three substantial articles for this blog until the end of the year, and step it up in 2009 to four or more. The promise isn’t for my readers,^[6] it is a promise for me. After all, if writing is really what I want to do, maybe I should actually do it.

1. I actually have a few other passions, but the literature thing is what this site is actually about. ↩
2. Those last two happened to hit this site pretty hard before I totally fell off the wagon. It’s like a disease. ↩
3. Horror isn’t my genre. He’s good at what he does, but what he does isn’t really what I go for. ↩
4. The last poem I had written, actually was “ink on paper” back in April or May-ish, but only posted here last week. ↩
5. The story involves early 1980s Japan, and I like the character I came up with very much. ↩
6. When I wrote the original draft of this post, I was bringing in about ten to fifteen views whenever I had an update. However, the essay I wrote on David Foster Wallace’s suicide brought in way more than that. Hopefully, I can convince a few of you folks to stick around. ↩

Whenever I get to the 10,000 word mark on a novel-project, I hit a wall. This has happened with every attempt I’ve made in the past few years. Sometimes, I can squeeze an extra couple thousand words before I hit that wall, but 10,000 is the usual barrier.

This is not a post where I shall whine about being blocked, however.

This time, unlike the last, I will beat it. I will chip away at the wall until I break a hole and push through for another 10,000 words, or more. Here’s my strategies:

1. Skip Ahead - So I’m having trouble with the current part of the novel. What’s to stop me from writing a later section, detailing where I hope to take the plot to? Answer: nothing. I’ve got the ideas, I just have to get them down.
2. Brute Force - Even if it’s just 100 words, I’ll add something to the novel. Even if it’s crap, even if I’ll edit it out when I revise it, I’ll add it.
3. Break Period - So I’m blocked now. I’ll wait until inspiration strikes. Unlike NaNoWriMo, there’s no hard and fast deadline. If I need a breather, I’ll take one.

I’ll sit down in a few days, and create something from nothing, add another chunk of words to this text, and move on. The block will fall. That’s all there is to it.