Showing posts with label GMC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GMC. Show all posts

Monday, February 18, 2019

Goals-Motivations-Conflicts: The Engine That Keeps a Story Running

GMC, plotting, scenes
By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Without a strong GMC, your story engine can stall. 

With “What’s your story about?” being a common question for writers, it’s easy to think about our stories as being one conflict or idea. We pose a problem, and then the book is spent trying to solve that problem. We postulate an idea, and we go on to explore that idea. We introduce a character, and we live in that character’s life for a while.

While stories might be about one problem, the plot is actually made up of many pieces all building on each other toward a resolution. Just like words form sentences, sentences form paragraphs, and paragraphs form pages, which is turn create scenes that form chapters and chapters that form acts. Everything builds to create a larger construct.

At the end of it all, is a novel (or short story if you prefer).