Reversing Motives

And with this post, I’m diving back into Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass. I didn’t completely abandon it over the last week, but I haven’t had big chunks of time to work without distractions, so this exercise has taken longer than usual.

I think the title of this exercise is a little misleading. The main point of the exercise seems to be digging down through the characters and their motivations so that you don’t just stop at “the easy or obvious answer” but there’s no focus whatsoever on taking an opposite approach to the scene, just a different one. Maass has you take any scene with your protagonist and figure what their motivation is as written and what their objective for the scene is. Then, you brainstorm a list of ALL the possible reasons why they might want this objective. Once you’ve created a list, you take the last one and rewrite the scene with that reason in mind as their primary motivation.

Maybe I’ve done this one incorrectly and missed the original intent, but I played the Why Game. Maybe you just need to get a variety of UN-related reasons on your list, but since these characters are pretty defined in my head, the resulting ideas I came up with related to one another. Anything else didn’t seem appropriate. So, I started out with my hero and came up with the following:

Goal: Get heroine to open up to him during dinner — she’s shy and ignoring him and he takes it as a personal challenge.

Why?

He wants to prove he can be a good boy.

Why?

He’s annoyed his hostess sat him next to her to keep an eye on him.

Why?

He’s scared his hosts were serious about kicking him out of their household.

Why?

He’s tired of being considered just barely socially acceptable.

Yes, let your inner toddler free to explore and keep asking why as long as you can stand it. Personally, I hate when my kids (tweens now) decide to be silly and play that game, but it is useful here in writing. Too often the first idea to pop into your head is very simplistic or very obvious. The deeper you dig into the why’s of the piece, the more interesting, fresher and honest it can become.

So I’m off to finish rewriting this particular scene, picking one for my heroine and then doing at least 3 more for each of them. Fun, huh? You betcha.