How’s that for calling you out, Mun42?
Angela’s class isn’t the first place I encountered the concept of GMC. It’s mentioned on page 10 of Writing with Emotion, Tension, & Conflict, with an order to get it and read it.
After I started reading Angela’s lessons, I realized I was being prodded in that direction anyway, so I got the Kindle version of GMC. I got about 20% through GMC when I realized I needed to take notes, so I’ve been doing just that. Lots of notes. (Confession time. I’m a character-driven mostly pantser. Cantata has a plot, but it reads like a soap opera. I did indeed write down motivations, goals, lessons the characters need to learn, and all that–but not in a easily-referenced fashion. More like you’d expect from a pantser.)
Anyway.
The basic premise of GMC is that every character must have both external and internal goals, motivations, and conflict. A way to summarize is like this: Person A wants to X because Y, but Z. X=Goal, Y=Motivation, and Z=Conflict. You do this both for external and internal items (“climb a mountain” and “find own self-worth” are examples of each). Yes, a character can have more than one of each, or series of them. Internal GMCs are related to lessons the characters need to learn.
Every character’s GMCs should collide or mesh with the other characters, otherwise they don’t belong in the same story.
The GMC provides a map of the plot as well as where the highs and lows are.
Every scene must have at least one element of GMC and must accomplish at least two other tasks, like introducing a character, foreshadowing, providing sexual tension, etc.
That’s what I’ve absorbed so far in a nutshell. I’d read some of these things elsewhere, but never so concisely in one book and so well. Debra Dixon goes through Wizard of Oz and some other movies to illustrate the theory. Very accessible.
Now come the links.
- GMC Worksheet
- A blogpost with examples
- Another blogpost with pictures of post-its for visual plotting
- Yet another blogpost with details on the Big Black Moment discussed in GMC
Caveat: I make no money off of any of this. They’re just books I’m finding useful and Amazon has pretty much everything so it’s a convenient place to link to.