I haven't had as much time to write as I hoped this week because, true to form, I blew off the book club book until the last minute and have been furiously reading to finish it before we meet tonight. Insult to injury: it's Fifty Shades of Grey. Thank dog I'm almost done.
Today my goal is to finish reworking the goal/motivation/conflict charts for the four key characters. The GPRP allotted me an hour for this. HA! I've put in at least four over the last few days. It sounds deceptively simple: all I have to do is write down what the characters want, why they want it, and what's standing in their way. But then it gets more complicated, since protagonists tend to have more than one goal, and there's both external and internal goals/motivations/conflicts, and I need to work out the steps to achieving each goal and the motivations and conflicts for each step. I had to go back and re-read like half of the Donna Dixon book to remind myself how all this stuff works. And my first crack at the GMC from last year was a giant mess.
While it's been a lot more work than I anticipated, I feel good about what I'm getting. The goals are more urgent, the motivations more compelling, and the obstacles more logical. I think when I'm done with the chart I'll do a problem/solution chain for each external goal in the book, to help me better see how all these goals are crashing into one another and making plot.
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