Nanowrimo is one month away.

Well, it’s October, and among other things, that means it’s time to get ready for National Novel Writing Month! The forums have been swept clear in the annual autumn cleaning and the new website rolled out. I’m still not sure what I’m going to write this year, but I found a delivery slip on my doorknob this evening when I got home, so hopefully I’ll be able to pick up ‘Goal, Motivation, Conflict’ and another great book from Gryphon press to help fire up my imagination. I also snapped up Holly Lisle’s ‘Create a Character’ workshop book from Amazon, since the big sale was held over for a day and a bit. 🙂

Still really excited about being an ML for this year, and a little nervous. It’ll be a fun ride, that’s for sure.

So let’s see, what else has been going on? I did quite well with my September goals, all except for posting a full polished story up on fanfiction.net, which just took too much time. And I haven’t settled on my October to-do list just yet, but I put in more time this evening on lesson 18 for ‘How to Revise your Novel.’

I’m excited. Did I say that already? Are you excited?

Still waiting for Goal, Motivation, and Conflict

As I mentioned, I really enjoyed the Dragon*Con panel by Debra Dixon about ‘Goal, Motivation, and Conflict’ and it reinforced a belief that I already had that this was stuff I needed to understand more to take my writing to the next level. I didn’t rush right home and order Debra’s book, but I remembered to place my order over two weeks ago.

And I haven’t heard anything since, which is starting to make me feel jumpy. I sent back an email inquiry today, just wondering if they had any news on shipping or when I could expect delivery.

I want to have a while to read this book and let the big ideas sink in, then start using them to figure out what I’m writing this year for Nanowrimo. And time is starting to draw somewhat short – there are only a couple days left in September, after all.

Is anybody else feeling anxious about Nanowrimo already? I’m not usually jumpy about it, but between the GMC thing, which isn’t an approach that I’ve used before, (though I remember being exciting about snowflaking my Nano too,) and signing up as an ML, I’m both really excited and nervous about chomping more than I can chew this time.

Goal + Motivation + Conflict =…

In going over what I learned at the workshop in Kansas, I keep coming back to something that I heard about on a Storywonk podcase – Goal, Motivation, and Conflict. It’s a good concept about how to make your narrative craft better, and I think that’s where I need to be focusing some of my attention in what’s left of this summer, possibly in connection with Camp Nanowrimo August. But I’m also not sure where to go or what to do to hone that aspect of my craft.

I’ve done a Google search on those terms, and found a bunch of interesting stuff, but unfortunately a lot of it seems to be pretty superficial – defining the terms, going into a few details about how to use them, but stopping at a screenful of information – which is about the right level of info to absorb in a blog post, but most of these places all have just about the same screenful, which is frustrating when I want to dig deeper. For the record:

• Goal – what your character needs to have, concretely.
• Motivation – why he needs it, on a more personal level.
• Conflict – who or what prevents him from getting it. (Or her.)

Have you heard of these terms? Can you suggest a course that I can take, or a website where I can really delve into the mysteries of GMC, preferably with exercises and worksheets and lots of crunchy examples? 😉

Blog the cat, chapter 3 – Characters

Blog the Cat post index.
In Chapter Three of Save the Cat, “It’s about a guy who…” Blake Snyder talks about how important characters are to a movie idea and pitch. I’m starting to like these offbeat chapter titles, by the way.

I’m certainly predisposed to the idea that well developed characters are central to telling a story, and that the characters should fit the plot well. Blake starts by telling how good characters give the audience somebody to identify with, somebody to experience the story for them. He also covers how descriptive adjectives for your characters can make the logline more compelling, which is interesting especially since I’ve been hearing a lot about how important it is to avoid overusing adjectives in prose fiction, but a script logline is certainly a very different kind of writing, so it’s not too surprising that the rules should be different there.

He gives this checklist for character-related elements to look for in the logline:

• A hero
• An adjective to describe the hero
• A bad guy
• An adjective to describe the bad guy
• A compelling, identifiable goal for the hero