GMC |

I’m a panster. For all of you non-writers that means I write by the seat of my pants. The story unfolds with each new letter on the page. I don’t know where its going to go until it gets there. Is it the best way to write? No. But it was the only way that worked for me. I found that I didn’t like knowing the entire store before I wrote it because it lost some of the magic. That’s not to say I wrote completely in the dark. I always knew what the next two scenes were going to be. But it does mean I wrote myself into quite a lot of corners that took a bit of rewriting to get out of.

Recently I found myself in the position of having to write a synopsis before the story was written–on deadline no less! Can we say pure, unadulterated panic? Luckily I have wonderful CPs (critique partners) who remained very calm and talked me off the ledge.

After I stopped hyperventilating, I sat down and thought really hard about what I needed to know about my characters that would drive the story forward. If you’ve been in the writing community for any length of time you’ve heard of Debra Dixon’s GMC. Each character must have a goal, a motivation to reach that goal, and a conflict that arises that they have to overcome to achieve the goal.

Being a panster, I never really paid attention to GMC. Oh, I had it in the back of my mind but it wasn’t something I wrote down on paper and referred back to occasionally. So, when it came time to write my synopsis, I had to find something that worked for me that would focus the story.

I came up with nine simple questions that ended up being my lifesaver. After answering each of these questions I had my character arcs down pat and half my synopsis written: