I wrote two chapters on my novel on Saturday.
I have four chapters to go.
I’ve been stuck for months. Stuck because I knew that I needed my character to do something at the very end that she would never do. I needed her to make a horrific choice and I couldn’t motivate her.
So I happened to catch a random comment Jim Bell made on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. He pointed to a post he’d done on Novel Journey about the Q factor.
His Q factor post was about foreshadowing so when your character whips out his secret weapon it’s not a total surprise. There’s nothing worse than reading books where the character conveniently takes off his coat and lets his wings out so he can fly out of danger when no one knew, not even the author, for the first three-hundred pages, that he had wings.
You cannot save the day by throwing in some new device.
But then Jim used that thing we all know–you have to foreshadow physical help that is going to effect the outcome of the story–and moved it into the moral, emotional, inner conflict a character faces. The internal struggles needed a Q factor as surely as external ones. Maybe more so.
I could not make my girl do the thing I needed her to do, because I’d not given her proper motivation. I’d not equipped her earlier to make the choice I needed her to make later.
So I added in a moral Q factor. She learns something before the climax that makes it possible for her make a decision so horrific that it seemed she would rather die.
Go read the Q factor post. It got me writing again. Yee haw!
