My Journey as an Author - 25
Back on Track with My NaNoWriMo Novel: The Ghost, the Skeleton, and the Sad Girl
It's been a rocky start to November for me and my National Novel Writing Month project. I was churning along, working on the outline of my novel The Ghost, the Skeleton, and the Sad Girl, when disaster struck - my laptop died!
Well, it did not die so much as become an incoherent mess, much like me, so we had that in common. Stuttering, stopping, crashing, refusing to boot, I expected the worst. And, well, it took a while to fix things. I ran through all my options, and narrowed things down to a kernel error for Windows. My guess is the diagnostic tools were wrong, and it was probably a dll, or dynamic link library that was corrupted. But safescan refused to operate, CHKDSK turned up no bad sectors, and MemTest also came back with a full bill of health. I was forced to use DISM, which also did not want to work, at first. CheckHealth came back without errors, but attempting RestoreHealth seemed to process something and fix the problem. It did not give a log, or mention any error, so who knows what went wrong, where it happened, or if it will crop up again. Ah, the joys of a Windows laptop. Next one I am running linux.
With my trusty writing companion out of commission, I fell behind on my goals, forced to work like a barbarian with a pad of paper and pen, hashing out ideas and scenes. But I'm excited to say I'm back up and running now that my computer is fixed!
It feels so good to be typing away on a working keyboard again. When your technology fails you during NaNoWriMo, it can really derail your progress. It is demoralizing. I am sure that it has made many quit. But the hour my laptop worked felt like Christmas morning. I arranged back-ups, brewed a fresh pot of coffee, and dove right into my spooky yet heartfelt ghost story.
Now that I can immerse myself in my manuscript again, I'm refocusing on crafting resonance through strong character motivation. The motivations of your characters, ghostly or otherwise, are the driving force that pulls readers through the narrative. Their desires are not just there to resonate with readers, but directions which inform where they will go and what they will do along the way.
The key is making sure your protagonists have compelling, relatable motivations. What inner goals and conflicts drive them? How do their unique personality traits shape their actions? You want readers to know, to identify. Even when they are wrong, or surprised, the very thought and expectation is what drags readers along on the journey.
Legendary authors like George Orwell knew this well. Much of Orwell's work was fueled by his motivation to expose and address social injustice. You can see that passion channeled through the motivations of his characters, like Winston Smith in 1984. For him, it was not precisely the character, so much as the story, itself. He was story motivation. Indeed, he began writing by attempting to identify and address an injustice in the world. Everything came from that.
But while Orwell's author motivations clearly influenced his characters, that's not always the case. Sometimes an author's motivations have little connection to what motivates their characters. Other times, the author and characters align closely. Both approaches offer their own intriguing dynamics, and going between these two poles affords an interesting dynamism.
As I get back on track with my NaNoWriMo manuscript, I'll be digging deep into my protagonists' motivations and dreaming up ghostly motivations of my own. Here's to a November full of inspired writing!