But what's my motivation?

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of starting the story of The Gift of the Greenstone for me was constructing a backstory for the main characters (specifically the protagonist, Jaden Scott) that would have enough heart and driving force to carry an entire narrative from the first page to the last. As a character, Jaden was pretty fully fleshed out from the beginning in terms of where he was in life when the story started. Yay!

...right?

Not quite. It took countless revisions for me to feel like I had given Jaden's past enough emotional weight and believable depth to not only propel the motivations of the main character for the entire story so that who he was and what he did felt real for the reader in a very powerful way, but to craft a character with so much heart and raw humanity that each and every conflict in the narrative not only felt genuine and potent, but life-changing. And as you can imagine, each alteration to Jaden and any other characters' backstories resulted in me rewriting their personalities and actions throughout the novel since they were no longer the same character they used to be. It was a vicious, vicious cycle, I tell you!

I think this is one of the most difficult and discouraging tasks a writer faces because coming up with a plot is relatively straightforward: character experiences something that forces them to reassess or abandon their life or world as they knew it, conflict arises because of this revelation, character must respond/confront the problem (which can be internal, external, usually both in good fiction), character overcomes the obstacle and we find satisfaction in the conclusion.

Yes, I pretty much summed up every single plot that has ever been written in some way. But that's precisely the point. That's a plot; not a story.


Now a story on the other hand, well, that's what draws us in, engages and enthralls us because we invest emotionally in not only the characters and the events that take place throughout the narrative, but we invest in what those events mean to the character and how they affect the entire story.

In essence, we stay motivated as a reader because of the motivation and moving action taking place in the characters' hearts and within the very soul of the story.

And in my opinion, that is something you can't just create out of thin air or stumble into because you have a couple good ideas for a good sequence of events. You can outline a plot and brainstorm a character and the events he or she will experience throughout the narrative. But you have to craft a story.

At least I did. Again and again and again. Until a chronological sequence of events became Jaden Scott's story. A story I absolutely had to tell.