October Novel Prep Challenge

I took a quick glance at your outline again, since it's been some time since I saw it. As I noticed at the time, your story has a similarity to mine in this respect. And it took a while for me to figure out what the real "set up point" of my story was too.

There's no need to explain my story itself. The similarity is, our main characters have an underlying motivating factor at a deeper level than the overt goal we're stating. It isn't a different goal; this isn't a case of ulterior motives. It's the reason they care about the overt goal.

In my case, it's why my character cares so much about righting an injustice that happened not to himself or his loved ones, but to someone he barely knows at the beginning of the story. As a writer, you can only go so far with 'my character is the hero'. What I really needed to know is, why does he choose to be the hero? Especially when he's risking a lot to be one.

So you have Michael. He does what a good protagonist should do during the inciting incident; he rescues the distressed damsel. Of course he does, he's the hero. He's presented with a terrible situation that he can do something about and he does it. It's the right, meet and salutary choice for any upstanding hero. No further explanation needed.

What we don't know is, what is his motivation for continuing to have contact with Janet after that? A meeting at the hospital is reasonable, but the hero deciding to help her out by giving her sign language lessons, that's a big flag right there. Something is going on here, and that something has a reason. It isn't that he's smitten with her at first sight-- that's the world of "happy families are all alike" where boring stories come from. Something happened earlier in Michael's life to make him want to keep helping Janet.

Write about whatever that was. If you hadn't come up with a motivation for this action of his, then do it now. And don't worry about writing a complete story. Just identify what the story is and write the most important scene from it.
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Regards,
Eric Fretheim
Assistant Prep Leader, 2015 October NaNoWriMo Prep Challenge

"It is perfectly okay to write garbage-- as long as you edit brilliantly." ~C.J. Cherryh

“No, writing 50,000 words in a month is normal. You are not crazy. This is not insane.” ~Teri Brown