Taking Notes: Put Your Behind in the Past
Once upon a time there was a terrible bad guy who wanted to do terrible bad guy things. There was only one thing standing in his way: he had no clue why he wanted to do bad things. There is nothing worse than getting knee-deep into a story and finding out you have no idea why the villain is doing things. This glaring problem stopped my writing progress for months. I had a great story idea, and awesome characters to go with it, but I could not figure out what was motivating my villain to want to destroy the world. Without that piece I couldn't make any progress on my story. Who even is this guy? In the years that I'd been working on this story, I had neglected to think about what happened to all of my characters before they are introduced. Those experiences (still yet undiscovered) played a major role in the characters' decision making. This was glaringly obvious when it came to my villain. I needed him to want to destroy the world. That was the crux of my whole story. All o...