How to Write a Brilliant Novel: The Easy Step-By-Step Method of Crafting a Powerful Story (Go! Write Something Brilliant) (5 page)

How does GMC (Goals, Motivation and Conflict) work in a
character?

For example, let’s say we have a character who has a goal to open a bookstore. She has invested every last cent into the bookstore, so if it doesn’t succeed, she’s a flop. Her external goal is to have a successful bookstore. Her internal goal is to fulfill her father’s dream, which was, ironically, to own a bookstore. But this deeper goal can’t be reached just by the act of opening the bookstore. Why? Because of her motivation. Her father died, and not just any death, but a death she caused. Her motivation is guilt. So her inner goal, driven by her motivation, is to atone for her role in her father’s death. So what’s the conflict?

She buys a rundown house to turn into a bookstore, but it’s in serious need of repair. She isn’t a great handygal, nor does she have a lot of extra money. She needs cheap labor, so she hires a handyman/drifter to help her. However, mishaps keep occurring that push her further and further away from her goals. Which leads her to believe that the handyman she hired is to blame. The conflict is the house, the handyman, and her feelings of failure.

Good
conflict
should
push
your
character
further
and
further
from
their
goals,
yet strengthen their motivation to push
ahead
.

Many, many people develop characters based simply on GMC. And that’s okay. In the end, you should be able to succinctly say what your character’s GMC is. However, getting there should be a more introspective process, which I think, in the long run, will help you in developing plot.

Throw away the list!

When I began writing, I did what seemed logical—I filled out character lists. Answered hundreds of questions. But my characters still felt flat, and more than that, their actions, dialogue, and conflicts didn’t seem to ring true. At the time, I was homeschooling, and as I looked at developing my children’s self-esteem, it hit me. People reveal themselves from the inside out, based on how they see themselves, on the five elements of self-esteem:

• Identity
  
• Purpose
  
• Competence
  
• Security
  
• Belonging
  

When we begin with these elements, we can create three-dimensional characters and even develop a plot driven by these nearly breathing people.

Let’s keep dancing through discovery with a WALTZ

Let’s start with a quick overview:

1. Who Am I?
   Identity: How do I define myself? Identity helps you define:
   
   • Your values
     
   • Your greatest fears
     
   • Your greatest dream
     

1. At All Costs?
   Purpose: What is my Noble Cause in life?
   
2. Let Me Do It!
   Competence: What am I good at? What do I rely on when I am overwhelmed?
   
3. Teddy Bear
   Security: Where do I go for safety? What do I do when life is falling apart?
   
4. Zone
   Belonging: Where do I fit in God’s world? Where do I believe I belong?
   

All these components work together to make you a three-dimensional person. Let’s see how they fit together in creating your character.

Getting to the bottom of your character’s motivations, values, deepest fears, and greatest dreams!

Who am I?
How do I introduce myself? I have an identity—as a wife, a mother, an author By those three words, I’ve given you a glimpse into who I am, based on your understanding of what those words mean to you. Everyone has an identity, a way they describe themselves. Knowing how our character defines himself or herself will help us understand their motivations. This also helps us figure out what their greatest fears and dreams are, and gives us insight into crafting that Black Moment.

Let’s take a character I mentioned before: author Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan—a CIA analyst rising in the ranks who hasn’t had much field action. He’s a family man who wants to keep the world safe and out of WW III. In the movie
Hunt for Red October
his greatest fear is misinterpreting the actions of a Russian sub commander, whose sub has gone AWOL, and accidentally igniting WWIII. His greatest dream is to be right—and gain access to this sub. His motivation is his family, keeping them safe.

Knowing a person’s identity helps us define their goals, and also reveals the means we can use to destroy them.

Just for fun, let’s create a character and walk him through his identity. We’ll call him Joe the Drifter.

What kind of person defines himself as a drifter?

Maybe someone who has a hard time putting down roots? Avoids commitment? Why?

• Maybe he grew up in a broken home?
  
• Maybe he had a commitment, a family, and saw it destroyed.
  
• How?
  
• Maybe something happened in the family.
  

Like what? Maybe a loss of a job, or what if it involved an unexpected pregnancy, a child with physical challenges? What if his parents had a child with special needs, and it was too much for his father, so he left them? What if his mother is left with raising Joe’s brother by herself, and she struggles financially and emotionally with his care?

How has that shaped Joe? He’s learned that families with children who have unexpected challenges might not stay together. What if that condition was genetic? That would make Joe iffy about a relationship and commitment. He’d be afraid of this same thing happening to him. It would keep him from settling in too deep. What other components go into being a drifter? Maybe Joe likes adventure and new challenges. Maybe he’s good at fitting in, at solving problems, at being a temporary savior.

The key is to keep asking why, until you get to the underlying motivations of your
character’s identity.

Once you’re there, it’s not too hard to discover the three things that will drive your plot and give your character resonance.

Identity helps you
define:

Your character’s values

Your character’s greatest fears Your character’s greatest dream

Values:
These are the things that Joe desires, whether he has them or not. They are the longings that drive his actions. For example, because of his past, Joe values trust and family. Although his trust in relationships was destroyed, he needs them, and he yearns for the family he lost.

Knowing your character’s values makes for excellent internal conflict. And here’s the key: Pitting a character’s values against each other makes for great character angst. For example, let’s take Joe: If his values are trust and family, then he’s going to do what it takes to earn someone’s trust, and value that. Likewise, he’s going to protect the family he has—his mother and brother. But, what if those two values were pitted against each other? What if he had to sacrifice the trust of someone in order to protect his family? Or sacrifice his family to earn the trust of someone he cared about? Makes for good inner conflict.

It also leads to mannerisms and ancillary info
rmation. Like why Joe might carry a picture of his family in his glove compartment, or have a soft spot for kids, making him volunteer at a children’s shelter. Perhaps, also, he’d be secretive about all this, not wanting people to know about him.

Knowing your character’s values and motivations helps you create inner
conflict.

Discovering your
character’s greatest fear and
greatest dream will help you
define the external
conflict.

Let’s return to Joe’s identity:
Drifter

Knowing his past and his motivations, what would be Joe’s greatest fear? What if his greatest fear was to be in a relationship that went bad? And what if it went bad in the same way his parents’ did—by having a child with special needs? That fear will keep him drifting, and out of relationships.

But will his greatest fear be greater that his greatest dream? His greatest dream also stems from his identity, and it is probably being a family again. What if his dream is to put his family back together, and even more, have someone love him more than his father did—someone who would stick by him even if the worst happened?

We now have components to begin creating our plot. Joe’s motivation, Joe’s values, Joe’s greatest fear, Joe’s greatest dream. But we need one mor
e component before we can go on to plot building and creating conflict.

Donald Maas, in his book,
Writing the Breakout Novel
, would call this “Noble Cause.” Every character has to have something inside of them that drives them—that makes us like them regardless of what they’ve done, or who they are.

~ In
The Fugitive
, it’s the fact that Dr. Kimball saves the little boy in the hospital. He’s a doctor at heart.

~ In
The Hunt for Red October
, it’s that Ryan wants to prevent WWIII.

~ In Joe’s case, the attempts he makes to put his family back together will make us like him. What if he is secretly doing everything he can to earn money to support his mother and his brother? What if, when he disappears and seems to drift, he’s really visiting them and helping his mom?

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’ve been talking about
Happily Ever After
, my first book in the Deep Haven series. Joe’s brother, Gabe, has Down syndrome, and Joe is in town to reconnect with his brother and earn his forgiveness. This is the Noble Cause behind the scenes that make us forgive Joe for being aloof and a drifter, and a seeming saboteur.

When looking for a Noble Cause, go back to your character’s deepest desire. Joe wants a family. He wants to build that which his father destroyed. So Joe will spend his life protecting and caring for his brother. It’s also that Noble Cause that makes Joe memorable. It causes him to do things like sacrifice himself for others, maybe go fishing with his brother, or adopt a stray dog.

The Noble Cause makes us fall in love with our hero or heroine, and puts them in our hearts.

Create Conflict they can’t live with!

Conflict is what drives a story. We talked about inner conflict—that conflict between competing values. And we pinpointed the external conflict by determining our character’s greatest dreams and greatest fears. Now, let’s use all that to create some conflict. Conflict can come from many sources: other people, weather, events outside our control, bad choices we make. A good story is driven by a character’s choices. And the story is enhanced by their Noble Cause and motivations. We want our characters to be frustrated and feel out of control. How do we do that?
Attack their competence!

What is that one thing you fall back on as your strength? Can you organize, take charge of things? Can you re-varnish furniture? Can you write?

Let’s go back to
The Fugitive
. What did Dr. Kimball do to solve his wife’s murder? He went to a hospital and submerged himself in that life. He even momentarily broke out of his disguise to help someone who needed surgery. He counted on his competence to get him through.

The competence is where you can hurt your character the most
. You’ve all heard that good plotting
makes each situation
worse.
You
accomplish this by
taking
away
a
character’s
competence, bit by
bit.

Consider Joe in
Happily Ever After
. Joe is a handyman. He prides himself on being able to tackle any situation and fix whatever the problem is. But what if everything he does backfires, through his fault, or through no fault of his own?

• In
  The Fugitive
  when Dr. Kimball saves the little boy, suddenly the agent chasing him has a new lead on him, and he’s trapped again, his end goal now
  thwarted.
  
• One of my favorite scenes in
  The Hunt for Red October
  is when submarine
  captain Markos Ramius, played by Sean Connery, turns to Ryan and says, “Oh, I’ve heard of the book you wrote. It’s all wrong.” Suddenly everything we’ve assumed about
  Ryan’s competency is destroyed, and there’s the question: Are they all in big
  trouble?
  
• For
  Joe,
  his
  efforts
  to
  help
  someone
  only
  leads
  to
  more
  trouble
  for
  them.
  Suddenly, even his identity as a drifter/handyman, the guy who can solve problems, the temporary savior, is shaken.
  

In
the end,
Joe’s
confidence needs to
be completely
destroyed,
which is a
great place for
God
to
step
in
and
do
something
incredible.
Destroying
your
character’s
competency
also
helps to build to your Black Moment
.