GMC thoughts from June

No, not the auto company, I’m talking about:

Goal
Motivation
Conflict

Yep, the old GMC of writing. I had some thoughts on this the other day and decided to write them down.

We have GMC all the time in our everyday life. We all have things we want (goal) and why we want it (motivation) and why we think we can’t have/get it (conflict). For example, my goal is to post a blog every Monday. My motivation, why I want to post a blog, is to get my name out there in the writing world where people will know me. My conflict (why I can’t always blog) is that I work full time, have three kids and barely have time for my own writing. What I need to do is find out how I can achieve my goal even with the conflict. When I figure that out we have a story, or at least a scene.

I believe that GMC changes throughout a story. The story might start out with an ultimate goal but that can change when the main character learns something they didn’t know before or their needs change from the beginning of the story. I see this often in romance. Sometimes what the hero or heroine sees as a conflict in the beginning of the book is not really a conflict after all. The heroine thinks she will never marry because she is illegitimate, and it turns out the hero doesn’t care – he’s illegitimate too!

There are also the GMC’s of the scenes in the book. In the opening scene of Ordinary Me, my young adult book, the main character Kate learns she’s failing chemistry and needs a high grade on the next test to pass. Her goal (what she needs) is to pass the class. Her motivation (what she wants) is to catch up with her chemistry studies. The conflict (what is preventing her from achieving this) is that she doesn’t want a tutor because her parents might find out. As it turns out, she attends tutoring in school, but with a popular hottie tutor, which also deals with her internal goal (what she also wants, but is something she keeps to herself) that she would like to be popular.

Of course there are thousands of different views on GMC and how they work or don’t work, but this is just my take on things.

Okay, I met my goal for this week, how about you??

Thanks for reading,

Best,
June

www.junesproat.com