Tiffany M. Davis

Total word count goal: 50,000

Total blog post goal: 30

Today’s word count: 1,691

Today’s blog count: 4

Total words written: 8,463

Total blog posts: 4

Happy Voting Day! Here in the United States, it’s Voting Day. This is considered Midterm Elections, being that it occurs midway through the presidential term. It also tends to be a period of low voter turnout, because most people don’t see midterms as important as the presidential election.  But since political figures who impact our lives on a more day-to-day basis tend to be elected during midterms, they are as important, if not more, than a presidential election. So if you haven’t voted, please do so if your polls are still open. I don’t care who you vote for–just vote. People died so that you could.

Okay, that’s my public service announcement (PSA) for today. 😀 Back to the matter at hand: NaNoWriMo!

My writing today involved character motivation. I know why my protagonist does what she does, and that’s pretty obvious. What wasn’t obvious was that of my protagonist (or anti-hero: haven’t decided which he will be yet). When I put it on paper today, it made things a lot clearer and gave me some additional options for furthering the plot.

It’s always important to make your character’s motivation clear. It helps you, as a writer, get your plot right; and it helps your readers engage with the book. If your readers don’t get why a character is doing something, the plot falls flat, they don’t like the book, and they don’t buy the book. Which is not good.

Your character’s motivation doesn’t even have to be all that deep or psychological. For example, you could have a character that likes to beat people up. A deep motivation could be that he was abused as a child, and lashes out as a result, and any myriad reasons that could be found in the DSM-V Manual. Or, he could simply like to inflict pain. Everything doesn’t have to be an ocean; it’s more fun to splash in a puddle. 😀

Because I am writing a medical thriller, I think of the two best examples of medical writing in the past few decades: Robin Cook, and the late Michael Crichton. Cook wrote the seminal medical thriller with his first book, Coma (which was made into a movie) and wrote dozens more.  Crichton was the creative and writing force behind this little medical show. Maybe you’ve heard of it: it was called ER. 😀  He also wrote this movie and book called Jurassic Park, as well as the cool medical thrillers A Case of Need and The Andromeda Strain.

Anyway, I hope that you are making progress on your writing, or blog, or both. Keep on truckin’!

Thanks for stopping by.