One memorable night several months ago, I lifted my tablet off the nightstand. It was late, I was over it, but I was going to get through Chapter 12, damn it. But I felt like the story was meandering into a dark, uninteresting hole. So I told myself, "Let's see what Writer's Digest has to say." Instead of clicking on their actual Facebook page, I accidentally loaded everything that had been tagged with #writersdigest, where, lo and behold, someone had tagged a friend with this: "Elle, could you provide a link to the quiz?"
I am not ashamed to admit that I clicked to see what the heck they were talking about. Divine providence, I thought. It took me to a quiz on character motivation, designed to uncover your "storytelling superpower". Seemed innocuous enough. I started the quiz.
At first, the questions seemed kind of silly. "Pick a season". Okay, sure, whatever. Now I have to pick a color? *sigh* Fine. A photo? Between the ocean, mountain, and desert, duh, I'm going with ocean, have you even read my book description? I made my selections of that and other such nonsense for another thirty seconds or so, and submitted the quiz, feeling like I'd wasted a good half minute of writing time. And then it gave me a result that blew me away:
Superheroes? I never, ever, ever- are you listening? EVER- thought of myself as writing about superheroes. But when I read the description, I realized that they nailed it. My leading lady, Mida Efren, wears sealskin, not a supersuit. But she has an underlying motivation to protect those that she loves. And that motivation seeps into every scene, every interaction, every moment she shares with the reader. Mida wants nothing more than to end her people's suffering, and she'll accomplish it by any means necessary.
You know, I don't know that I fully appreciated my main character before I took this quiz. She seemed sort of selfish and inexperienced; at odds, even, with Efrenen tradition. But once I began critically examining her motivation, her reason for being, the story pretty much wrote itself. I wonder if that affects how we live our own lives in the same way. Once we uncover our deepest motivation and follow it above all else, do our own stories pretty much write themselves?