 Hello and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, my name's Jackie. I'm an aspiring writer and I am attempting to write a fantasy manuscript for the third time now. If you're not new here, welcome back. So the project, which is being referred to as my fantasy hot mess because it's a hot mess, is going much more slowly than I anticipated and in fact at the beginning of the year or the end of last year, I thought maybe I could knock out a draft in a week. That didn't happen, but I have had a couple of spurts since then of like days or weekends where I've gotten a lot of words out and then I feel like I almost go back to square one and start thinking again. And the reason for this is because one question keeps coming up, which is why or why now? Why is this character taking this action? Why does he or she want to do this? Why are they doing it now? And on one hand, part of me thinks like maybe I should just write and push through and figure it out later. But the thing is, I feel like that's much more helpful advice for a first draft when you're trying to figure out the story. By the time you're on your third draft, you should figure out the answers to these questions, I think. And I'm not sure how helpful pushing ahead with what would essentially be yet another first draft would be if I can't figure out the answer to these questions. So why are these questions important? Well, why is all about character motivation? So what do they want? What don't they want? What are they afraid of? Who do they care about? And every action they take should have something to do with that. So they're either pursuing what they want, they're helping or protecting the people they care about, they're trying to avoid something they don't want, etc. And if an action doesn't clearly address one of those, either the action isn't relevant to this character, or I haven't clearly figured out the connection between the action and whatever that character wants. And admittedly there are some things that are reactive. But even those, I think, can be tied to what the character wants, if you go down to the very basics, which is to survive. So if someone's attacking you, then I'm not going to ask myself for every punch. Now, what is the character's motivation in this moment? Of course. But I'm talking about, like, large actions that happen in the course of the plot. Why now is, why is it happening now in this story? Why did the character choose to take this action today, rather than yesterday, or tomorrow, or five years ago, or five years from now? And that one has proven to be even more challenging than the pure why question. And I think the big reason for it is because in my first draft of this book, and even in my second, and for context, the first one I did 15 years ago when I was at university, the second one I started a couple of years ago, but I really did in 2019. So the first version of this book was literally just a university student doing some scribbling, and that's nothing against university students. There are teenagers even who write awesome books and get published. I wasn't one of them though. So my, um, my outlining approach then, or my plotting approach then was, oh, it's been a while since there's been a fight scene. So let's put a fight scene in here. And I'd have a random statue in a maze come to life and attack the protagonist, which had nothing to do with anything. So the first draft was basically completely thrown out. The second draft, I'd been thinking about the world for so long that I had all of these storylines and characters that I wanted to incorporate. And independently, I think there's a lot of gold seems a bit egotistical, but there are a lot of good stuff there. Like I think a lot of the concepts and world building and even character motivations, they were good. But what I struggled with was having everyone in the same story. It sort of seemed like I just put them into the book. So they were all in the book, as opposed to their stories genuinely tying up with each other. So that's one of the things I've been trying to look at now that I'm doing another draft. And my process has been, I'll do a bit of writing and then I'll get stuck. And so I'll try just summarizing what will happen in the book. And when I summarize, all of the questions become really obvious because they're not buried in a scene that I really like, which is why are they doing this and why is this happening now. So an example is one of my point of view characters, Aubrey, he is the third son of the king. He has been locked up in a tower for about 10 years because he has magic and we don't like magic in this world. So they discovered this when he was a kid, locked him up and sort of erased the fact that the king had a third son. And he's been locked in this tower and trying to figure out how he can have a place by his father's side in a legitimate role for the empire. And he's tried a few things. He's simply tried to be good and not cause any problems. That didn't help. He's tried to send messages through his staff and that hasn't helped. And so the idea was that the book starts with him escaping from the castle. And the idea is that he's tried everything. It's not going to work. You know, maybe leaving the kingdom isn't what he wants, but it's better than being locked in the tower. Like clearly he's never going to have a role by his father's side so he'll leave. So that's all fine. There's motivation for him leaving, but I was doing the summary. I'm like, why does he do it then? Like why, what about this night was the night that he decided to go? And this has happened so many times in the book. And often the answer is because plot because I need him to leave now. So then in a few days he's going to bump into the other point of view character and then they can go off on adventures together. And because plot is not a good enough reason. So even though the writing process has been quite stop and start, there has been a lot of thinking going into this book and trying to answer these questions. My camera overheated so if things look a little bit different now, that's why. So then if I look at my other point of view character, Perry, most of her why now things make sense because she is presenting at the International Exhibition and that's happening on a certain day and there's a countdown to there. So things are generally tied into that. However, there were questions around why she was doing certain things. So I came up with an idea of having her steal the McGuffin before it gets stolen from her because originally it was sort of just in the first version of the book, very first one I did, she didn't even have it like the antagonist just got it somehow. In fact, she and the antagonist had nothing to do with each other until the final battle scene. In the most recent version of the book, so the one from 2019, like just a random person and a cloak gave it to her because I couldn't figure out another way for her to get it. So in this version, I thought maybe she could steal it and okay, we'll do it like this. She is going to present her invention at the International Exhibition and Rain who's like the headmaster slash governor, I've got to come up with a better title for him. He tells her no, takes her spot away from her and she is mad and she decides to take this because it belongs to him and he created it. And I was trying to make this more believable. So I was trying to come up with reasons like why he would make that decision rather than just plot to give her motivation to steal the McGuffin. So I thought maybe he could have someone else present because he's in some sort of partnership with them or their family. And then I went, well, why would Perry go and steal the McGuffin then rather than just sabotaging the other person's exhibit? So how I got around it was that Rain has decided they're going to present the McGuffin at the exhibition and that's why she steals it. So that's gone and then hopefully she can have a spot and then chaos will ensue. But what's been really interesting this month is even though my writing progress has been so slow, in fact, I've barely done any writing. I have done a lot of thinking and this thinking has been really helpful for filling in holes where they existed. And I think if I just push myself to keep writing and try to hit a certain word count goal every day, I wouldn't have had the time to do this thinking and would end up with a third draft that still had a lot of the problems of the second draft. So in this somewhat rambly video, what I really wanted to do was one, acknowledge the role that thinking has in the writing process and acknowledge that thinking time is valuable, brainstorming is valuable, outlining is valuable, even reading other books and picking out part how the author did, what you want to do is valuable. Not everything comes down to how many words you've put out. And I wish there was a better way to quantify the results of the brainstorming, thinking, outlining, researching time because I feel like after having spent the last, what, three weeks mostly just thinking, I'm in a much better position to get this book done. But if I look at my tracking spreadsheet for the year, it looks like I've really done nothing over the past few weeks. So I wish there was some better way to honor that as part of the writing process. The other point I wanted to make is that why and why now are such important questions. And now that I've like had this little epiphany, especially the why now one, sometimes I read other books and I start asking myself like, why is the character doing this now? Like why didn't they do it yesterday? And when it comes to Aubrey's escape, why now? Well, I've been thinking about tying that to the international exhibition as well. I think it would be really nice if everything in this book ties into this event that's happening on this date, especially because the antagonist plans tie up with this event as well. But just like why was relevant for why Rain was stopping Perry from presenting, why now is also relevant to the other figures in Aubrey's story who once he escapes, he gets caught and he is given a mission, which is to steal a MacGuffin. And it's like, well, why does the king and his sidekick want it now? Like why haven't they attempted to steal it before now? Why would they have this plan for, I don't know, let's say world domination hinge on whether or not this person happened to escape from his cell? So I don't have the answers to all of these questions, but knowing what the questions are and where the holes are is really helpful. So I guess all of this is a roundabout way of saying, if you're stuck in your story and can't figure out why it isn't working, go back to the questions, why and why now? And maybe that'll help you, if not find the answers, at least figure out what the problems are. So I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please give me a big thumbs up because it helps with YouTube and the algorithm. If you have any questions that are really good for filling in plot holes or just helping you move on constructively with a story, please let me know in the comments below because I'm sure why and why now are not the only ones. And other than that, I will see you next time. Bye.