Getting It Together

So I've been stuck with my story, right? I've felt for a long time like I've been staring at a wall, and over time realised my characters had no direction and I didn't know how this story could possibly progress.

What really started my latest endeavor with it was when I realised that my bad guy had no motives. And the motive that I had previously considered was kind of really lame. My second idea for him was also lame-- closer, but still pretty pathetic and cheesy. Without a direction for the bad guy, my main characters were left living their lives as they normally would, nothing was changing or harming them.

So decided to get my ducks in a row. I've never been good at keeping a storyline together. At some point I had created documents with information on my characters, but nothing super fancy or even coherent. What I did this time was open a brand new word document, format it in the OCD fashion I've had lately (due to typing up recipes for my mother) and start collecting lists. A list of my main characters. A list of the secondary characters. A list of the bad guy and his group. And then I went into information on the countries-- Country A, ruled in this fashion/by these people, significant characters to the storyline from that country, etc. Country B, ruled by these people.... and so on. As I started to organise myself, put my thoughts down, I committed (at least for now) to naming countries and characters that had thus far gone unnamed which made them more tangible to me. I put key points of characters down, things that I had to remember throughout the story.

Little by little, over the course of a couple of days of playing with this, I fleshed out how I wanted the bad guy to interact with his cronies, his supporters, and how he would deal with other people. This spread to considering how other characters interacted with each other, even if they wouldn't see each other until chapters later. I eventually came up with a direction for the bad guy. I ran the suggestion past my husband, and he agreed that it was pretty good and definitely do-able.

My husband mentioned to me once that you really don't have to think about politics or technicalities with characters. They're people. They think like people. Their individual personalities will determine how politics work. How does King A treat his people? His family? What does he think of King B next door? So on and so forth. That's all there is to it. And that same idea I accidentally applied to figuring out my way around the wall. How does this character react to this idea or this other character? That's all there is.

I'm getting excited again about my story. I was so discouraged for so long, and now I feel like I actually have a story I could tell. I don't have everything figured out, but I'm getting there. And it's all because I decided to organise myself and get it together...

(It's also really nice to have all my ideas in one place, so I don't have to go hunting through four different documents just to find what I was trying to remember.)