motivation

Motivating the Reluctant Protagonist

December 12, 2017 By David Corbett

In a recent workshop I gave, two of my students had a similar problem: both their protagonists were stubbornly resistant to doing what the story required of them.

This suggests the often-encountered problem of a writer trying to force a character into doing something contrary to her nature. But that wasn’t the case here. Instead, the characters were consistent and credible within their fictive worlds. They just were having difficulty facing up to the challenges their stories presented.

One of the protagonists was a young woman who inadvertently caused her mother’s death when, as an adolescent, she foolishly tried to use her magical powers.

The other was a doctor in a corporate hospital who discovers medical decisions are being made purely on a cost-benefit basis, and people are being allowed to die for the sake of profit.

The reluctant hero is by no means an exception in fiction, of course. Christopher Vogler, in his seminal The Writer’s Journey, discusses at length the hero’s “refusal of the call.” This refusal is typically anchored in self-doubt or even outright fear; the character sees the challenge ahead as overwhelming, beyond his real powers, a recipe for disaster.

That formulation certainly applies in both of the example I’ve given, but in much different ways.

The girl with magical powers is afraid of who she is.

The doctor is afraid of what he must do.

As will become increasingly obvious as we discuss this further, these problems are by no means mutually exclusive. But for the sake of the discussion let’s for the moment keep them distinct in our minds.

Through my teaching, writing, and reading, I’ve begun to see that protagonists come in two distinct varieties:

Those whose compulsion to act is indeed driven by a sense of calling.
Those whose compulsion to act is driven merely or primarily by a longing to escape a current or previous state of crisis or deprivation.

This distinction matters because characters who have a sense of calling will likely both begin and end their ordeals with a much difference understanding of themselves in the world.

I will get back to our two examples shortly. But first, I need to lay the groundwork for why exploring their resistance suggests these two distinct approaches.

[Read more…]

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Motivation: Make Writing Dessert Again

July 12, 2017 By Kim Bullock

I admit it. For years I hesitated to invite anyone into my home, cringing even when my parents crossed the threshold. If there is a way to keep a house clean while sharing it with a husband, two children, three dogs and a Maine Coon cat, I haven’t found it. Dust happens. Fur happens. Clutter happens.

My kitchen was the stuff of nightmares. The forty-year-old popcorn ceiling literally came apart at the seams, raining bits of plaster on me while I attempted to cook. My husband unsuccessfully tried to pry up the once-white kitchen sink years ago, leaving behind a buckled and rusty patch on the lip. The counters didn’t quite match the back-splash, which no longer matched the cabinets because the chipping paint had become dingy. “This summer,” I told my husband, “we will tame this eyesore.”

In our family, there is not actually a ‘we’ in household projects involving cosmetic improvement. If you want to build the largest computer network in the world, my husband is your guy. He can scatter neutrons and is a whiz at calculus. Coordinating colors, though? Evenly painting a cabinet door? Um…not so much.

Determined not to lose all writing momentum during the remodel, I promised myself I’d do that first each day. Write a scene in my manuscript and then I could scrape the ceiling! Finish the chapter and then I could paint the inside of the pantry! What did I do on day one? Facebook. What did I do on day two? Errands. Word count: 0. Work done on kitchen: 0.

It took me weeks of floundering to realize the flaw in my plan. You see, I didn’t really want to scrape that ceiling. In fact, cleaning a public restroom with a toothbrush sounded more appealing than standing high on a ladder under a deluge of falling plaster bits. No writing = no dust in my hair.

Nearly every writing advice book or column I’ve read emphasizes putting the writing first, but it turns out that this strategy doesn’t work for me and, in fact, may have been working against me for years.The next morning I forbid myself from opening my manuscript until the ceiling was down and the mess cleaned up. Work done on kitchen: Goal met within two hours. Word count: 1200. The next day I painted the ceiling and still wrote 700 words.

Psychologically this makes sense if you look at the situation as a five-year-old might. Pretend your writing is an ice cream sundae and a dreaded chore is a heaping bowl of lima beans. [Read more…]

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Just Tie the Darn Knot

September 3, 2016 By Jo Eberhardt

My nine-year-old son is so much like me, it hurts. He’s sensitive and earnest; he dislikes conformity, even when it’s in his best interests; he can be literal-minded and pedantic; and when he’s anxious, he tends to adopt a “my way or the highway” mentality that’s the very epitome of unhelpful. He’s also curious, creative, intelligent, strong-willed, and has a social justice streak a mile wide.

There are pros and cons to this similarity. We understand each other without needing to put in any real effort, but, on the other hand, we drive each other nuts in a way that no one else in the world can. Because we’re so similar, I often find myself having to give him advice and guidance on situations that either I’ve faced in the past, or that I deal with every day. Thus, in the crucible of parenthood, I find myself learning at least as much as I’m teaching.

In fact, it’s my son that I have to thank for my new writing motto.

The Eternal Sunshine of the Creative Mind

If there’s one thread that seems to tie all creative people together, it’s that we’re interested in everything. A word, a phrase, an image, a scent… anything can lead our minds on a whirlwind journey of curiosity. That’s a wonderful thing — especially in the Age of Google, when answers are but a few key-strokes away. But it can also make focus and productivity a billionty times more difficult. Especially in the Age of Google.

My son’s mind works in the same way. We recently had a conversation that started with him asking a question about why some people measure in inches and we use centimetres, which veered into a brief history of the French Revolution, paused on the apocryphal tale of Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake!”, took a side-route to the meaning and etymology of the word ‘apocryphal’, jumped to an overview of Les Miserables, and finished with a discussion about the difference between justice and law. At the end of it all, neither of us remembered if his original question had even been answered.

Come on, we’ve all been there.

But as cool as boundless curiosity is, it’s important to be able to tell your creative mind to take a breath. Just for a minute. Just long enough to actually get something finished.

Stop, Collaborate and Listen

[Read more…]

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Why Do You Write? And Why Aren’t You Writing?

August 15, 2016 By Cathy Yardley

Alone is a reality TV show where ten competitors get dropped off on various parts of Vancouver Island, and are forced to figure out how to survive by themselves. The last one standing won half a million dollars.

My son is charmed by tales like My Side of the Mountain and Hatchet, and my husband is a fair outdoorsman. As for me, I’d be the idiot who dies in the first hour because I tripped on a limpet shell and managed to strangle myself with my own rucksack. (I am what you’d call “indoorsy”.) Nonetheless, I was still hooked.

Who takes on this kind of lunacy? [Read more…]

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The Duplicity of A Character’s Desire

March 20, 2016 By Guest

Today’s guest is the venerable Michelle Hoover, a true literary luminary who has won the PEN/New England Discovery Award been a MacDowell Fellow as well as a Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University. Currently the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University, Michelle also teaches at GrubStreet, where she leads the Novel Incubator program. Her debut novel, The Quickening, was a Forward Magazine’s Best Literary Debut Pick, a finalist in the The Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award, and a 2010 Massachusetts Book Award “Must Read.” Her second novel, Bottomland, released earlier this month (Grove/Atlantic) and is a March Indie Next Pick.

The Duplicity of A Character’s Desire

You’ve heard it before: What does your character want?

Many a world religion has found its purpose in dousing this terrible human business of wanting things—and wanting them desperately. But the drafts of many early writers are muddled with protagonists who have no greater existence on the page than a pair of eyeglasses. By temperament, writers tend to be observers. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have much material. In a recent class, an older student of mine raised his hand to explain that his protagonist didn’t so much as “want things” but “preferred to offer his observations on life.” The room groaned (albeit politely). I imagined said protagonist as the thinly disguised student himself, with a longer name, a larger nose, and a rougher jacket.

It’s ego that keeps a writer and his protagonist-twin tidy at the sidelines, pontificating. Desire is messy. Desire is stupid. Desire bares a person’s heart and makes him do messy, stupid things. That’s frightening stuff for the kind of person who’d rather read a book about a bunch of strangers at a party than attend one. The biggest excuse I hear from writers with flimsy protagonists is that their characters don’t know what they want. “That’s what the story is about.” No, I answer, it’s you who doesn’t know what your characters want. And there your characters are, doing cartwheels, hoping you’ll pay enough attention to them to figure it out.

In From Where You Dream, Robert Olin Butler reminds us that without a character’s yearning, “nothing resonates in the marrow of [readers’] bones.” He goes on to differentiate between the type of desire expressed in entertainment fiction (e.g., “I want a man, a woman, wealth, power, or to solve a mystery or to drive a stake through a vampire’s heart”) and that expressed in literary fiction (“I yearn for self, I yearn for an identity, I yearn for a place in the universe, I yearn to connect to the other”). He later scolds his fellow literary writers: “But that there must be yearning the genre writers never forget. We do.”

Butler’s biases aside, he has a point. Literary writers tend toward dreaminess and a fair bit of snobbishness about these things. As Phillip Gerard describes in his essay “An Architecture of Light,” the literary writer is so “beguiled by the stunning inspiration effect of the finished cathedral” that they “fail to imagine themselves in the place of the artisan contemplating how to build the damned thing.” Flannery O’Connor is a bit more direct: “The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.” [Read more…]