Posted by Jim at January 18th, 2006

I’ve been going over prior drafts of my novel lately, reflecting on my mistakes and considering what I have to do to fix them and improve this thing.

One of the biggest mistakes I made in my first and second drafts is faling to establish character motivation adequately. Basically, the main character moves from one scene to another as dictated by the coolness of the plot idea and not so much because it flows naturally from the character’s wants and needs.

Obviously this is a problem and must be changed.

What’s harder, of course, is to figure out exactly how I’m going to change it.

A key part of the story is that there are multiple time lines. In some of them he starts working for a particular man and as a result he becomes part of terrible things, eventually losing much of what makes his life worth living. The character and ideally the readers know that this is a possibility for the main character as well. A major tension in the story, therefore is whether he will do this himself.

To my mind, this means that I will have to make doing terrible things in some way attractive to the character and perhaps also to the reader.

And that sounds hard. So, I’m still thinking about how it will work.