Why We Do What We Do: A Top 10 List

"He must turn from evil and do good; he must seek peace and pursue it."

1 Peter 3:11

I have a great nautical adventure story in Good Hope, but all of my scenes and sequels depend on one specific turn- the hero of the story has to get on the Elissa in the first place. In earlier drafts my readers were entertained with the story, but when it came to the simple act of the hero committing to a year-long adventure of sailing to the Cape of Good Hope on a Nineteenth Century square rigger, no one was buying it.

So, I've researched the topic of motivation, and I'd like to present to you what I think are the Top 10 Reasons we do the crazy things we do. And I’m not talking about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs here. My audience for Good Hope likely has shelter, a toilet, access to food, and possibly sex on a somewhat regular basis, so that list didn’t help me at all.
For my purposes, I started with the bias that all motivations occur in two simple camps- we are either moving away from something (Avoidance), or moving toward something (Pursuit). There is a third camp, but I will reveal that at the end.

WHAT WE AVOID:

1.We Avoid Pain. Pain can be inflicted physically, mentally, or verbally. We avoid situations where our lives are threatened, our physical body could be harmed or our mental well being is compromised. In effect, we run away from death physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
2.We Avoid Fear and Uncertainty. We don’t walk into a barn that looks like it could fall down. We run from the dark hallway to the lighted kitchen when we get up in the middle of the night. We run away from the idea of death. If we are not certain of the outcome, we may avoid making a choice either because we fear a possible outcome, or the uncertainty of success paralyzes us.
3.We Avoid Judgement. And we avoid those that are under judgment. We tend to avoid those who persecute or judge us for out beliefs. This item is very similar to fear, but I think you will agree that it has every right to be its own entry.
4. We Avoid Boredom. Even comfort and luxury can be boring. We want something to stimulate us or we do not feel alive.
5.We Avoid Oppression. Don't confuse this one with judgement. We abhor being slaves in the gross sense of the word, or in the lesser sense, we reject restrictions on our life and our liberty.

WHAT WE PURSUE:

1.We Pursue Pleasure. Do I have to explain this one? In all ways, we want to be pleased, fed, satisfied, or sated.
2.We Pursue Acceptance: When you are looking for that shoulder to cry on, whom do you go to? Why, the person most likely to accept you, of course. We want encouragement. We need words of affirmation. We desire recognition for our deeds.
3.We Pursue Excitement: I have included the pursuit of knowledge and understanding in this entry. The new technology, the new movie, the new religion, the new anything is exciting because it helps us feel alive and engaged. We bungee jump. We go back to school. We read a new thriller. We feed our curiosity, because it is exciting.
4.We Pursue Life: The new diet, the new health craze, the new doctor. We don’t want to die, and we are attracted to those things which affirm or contribute to our life and our health. Water is a reflection of life. Think about it. How often do we use water as a decoration in our civilizations? Pools, fountains, falls, wells, beaches, shorelines. All of them symbolize life and we are attracted to them.
5. We Pursue Freedom: I’ve heard it said that you can judge a country based on how many people are trying to get in, and how many people are trying to get out. America still appears to be a land of freedom in that regard, but I wonder for how long?

And what is the third camp I mentioned earlier?

It is the absence of movement- a motivation to do nothing. It is comfort in its negative form or the state at which we have become too comfortable to change, or too comfortable to risk change. This, I think, is the worst and most dangerous motivation of all. The greatest sin among sins is to see a need, and do nothing.
So, once again, I ask my readers to add to this list, come up with your own, or comment. We talked about freedom last time, but now it’s time to get even more personal. What motivates you? What are you running from? What are you running toward? And where in your life do you find yourself sitting on your hands?

P.S. And what motivation did I pick for my main character? We are told in seminars and books on writing to create dynamic, vibrant characters that are not one-dimensional, but leap off the page. So, as it turns out, there was not one particular motivation that fit my character, but several. It was a great lesson for me personally, and as a writer. I've found that my own motivations for doing things can be complex and sometimes contradictory. It's what makes me human. In the same way, my main character is motivated out of fear, uncertainty, and boredom, but he also desperately wants excitement and freedom. He is now much more interesting to write about than the one-dimensional character he was in my first draft, and, I must say, he's also much more human.

Gary

Re-Titled

Yes, the title of this blog has changed. I am enrolled in "31 Days to a Better Blog," and our lesson yesterday was to refine the mission of our blog and write an "elevator pitch."
Since my blog is more of a personal essay on the challenges of writing the novel Good Hope, I decided that it needed a slight overhaul. I hope those of you who follow will appreciate the changes that are on the way. You will also be happy to know that I have finally resolved my issue with motivation for my main character, so I can continue the rewrite of Good Hope with much more assurance and speed.
Full Speed Ahead!

Gary

What a Ship Is...

"Wherever we want to go, we go. That's what a ship is, you know. It's not just a keel and hull and a deck and sails. That's what a ship needs. But what a ship is... what the Black Pearl really is... is freedom." – Captain Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean.

For a silly franchise movie, Pirates did produce at least one bit of memorable dialogue. For me, anyway. The concept expressed in that particular quote is part of why I wanted to write Good Hope. The characters involved in my modern-day nautical adventure all want one thing- freedom.

There is a parking lot near my home where several classic car enthusiast park on Saturday nights to show off their hot rods. Beautiful things: tail fins, massive grills, and real V8 engines. I was pointing out a few of them to my wife tonight, and remarking about how flair and style are no longer part of automotive design, and she asked why I thought it was important in the first place. It struck me that Marie looks at a car as a means of practical transportation, because at heart, she is a very practical person. So to her, it's all just decoration. But I realized, at that moment, why classic cars of the Fifties move me in the same way as elegant ships from the Age of Sail. It's because they represent the same concept- Freedom. Freedom of the open road, freedom from small towns and small ideas, freedom of expression in fire-striped decals and shiny black paint jobs.

In this new century, our cars are aerodynamic and designed with efficiency in mind, because we aren't really going anywhere anymore. Are we? Other than just back and forth to work?

Sadly,the freedom of our automotive past has gone the way of our nautical past. Our culture is very different than it was back when '57 Chevy Bel-Airs ruled the blacktop. We don't cruise Route 66 or take cross-country drives to the coast. Are you kidding? Who wants to drive all the way to Atlantic City or San Diego? We get on a plane for that. And the mystery of "What's around the next turn?" disappeared with the invention of GPS navigation devices.

I guess we find our freedom in other ways now, and maybe I'm wrong, but with all of our advances, there just doesn't seem to be as much freedom around as their used to be.

I'd like to see some comments about this, dear readers. Do you yearn for freedom? How do you find it? What do you do? What is your freedom?

Gary

The Lost Art of the Sail Makers

Last September, hurricane Ike, the third most destructive storm to make landfall in U.S. history, devoured Galveston Island. Ike’s twelve-foot storm surge raised the iron-hulled sailing ship Elissa, moored at pier 21 on the northwest side of the island, nearly level with the concrete sidewalk that leads to her visitor’s center. One-hundred-and-ten mph winds tore at her for twelve hours but never managed to find a grip on her lines or mast. However, one of her most important sails, the fore lower topsail (ironically referred to as the “storm sail”), was shredded like a formal dress shirt ripped apart by a pack of snarling wild dogs.
Nearly five months later, sail maker Jim Brink has traveled from San Diego to Galveston to create a new storm sail for Elissa. Since there is no available building large enough to act as a sail loft in Galveston, this skilled craftsman, who has designed and constructed sails for movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean, is using the grand ballroom of the Ashton Villa, a historic 1859 residence, to spread out the required 630 square feet of sailcloth.

I have to admit, after all the research I did on Elissa’s history for my novel Good Hope, including walking her decks and interviewing her crew, it never occurred to me that there are only six people in the nation with the skills necessary to refit her sails. That’s right-six. Skills that were once considered essential to our seafaring heritage are now almost lost to antiquity.

So what does this have to do with writing?, you ask.

Let me tie it in for you.

Recently, a friend and fellow member of the Humble Fiction Café sold a short story. All of the members of the HFC feel a sense of kinship when someone makes a sale because many of us contribute to the early development of these stories with suggestions, critiques, and editing. So we were somewhat surprised when the publisher returned the story with some proposed corrections for “grammatical and punctuation errors.” Now here’s the rub. Not only were the suggested corrections wrong, the publisher’s letter proposing the changes contained punctuation and grammar flaws. Any English major could see it.

Now don’t get me wrong, most of the HFC members are not qualified, professional editors-but the writer who submitted the story is. She is an editor for a local Houston magazine and has seventeen years experience in the industry. We sometimes refer to her as the “Comma Queen” for her ability to turn our drafts into red-streaked pages that look like they came from the floor of a Victorian barber shop.
Our author was ready to pull her submission if the publisher insisted on printing it with their changes. She prevailed, and I’m glad to say that everything turned out for the best, but the incident makes me wonder about the current literary culture and the vanishing trade of the copy-editor.

Right now in Japan, the largest growing market for literature is called the “cell phone novel.” These stories are not only read on cell phones, they are written on cell phones, and mostly by amateurs who use text shortcuts and questionable grammar. Even with glaring flaws that traditional publishers would reject after reading the first paragraph, the demand for cell phone novels is booming. Granted-they’re free, so there isn’t a huge demand for them to contain expertly polished prose, but consider this: three of 2007’s top five bestselling Japanese novels were written on cell phones.
The closest thing America has to this type of market is fan fiction, and while it still carries the stigma of being written by hacks and amateurs, the number of Harry Potter inspired stories at Fanfiction.net is nearly 400,000, and the demand continues. I won’t even speculate on how long it will take for Twilight-inspired fan fiction to surpass that total -okay, maybe fifteen minutes, but again, most of these free-to-read short stories, novels, and novellas are full of punctuation, grammatical, and stylistic errors.
So how are publishing companies responding to this trend?
They are laying off editors by the hundreds.
After all, if the public is willing to pay for novels that editors at publishing companies previously rejected, like the current bestseller Still Alice, then why retain those services? I’m sure Still Alice contains easy to read sentences and is relatively free of punctuation errors, but the point is, author Lisa Genova had to edit the novel herself. Or, in much the same way that Jim Brink was hired to shape the sails of Elissa, maybe Ms. Genova hired a free-lance editor to help shape the prose of her manuscript.

Fast-forward.

Imagine a celebrated fiction writer in the year 2150 who desires to create a late twentieth century hardbound copy of his current masterpiece-just for nostalgia. The plot, characters and story may be novel for the time, as the word implies, but where will he find someone with the skills to make his prose flow from the pages like a refreshing stream? Who will help edit the text so his readers won’t be yanked out of his beautifully created world by jarring sentence constructions and gross misspellings? And how many practitioners of that ancient skill will be left in the world? Twenty? A dozen? Six?

I’m afraid it will be a lost art by then. My editor friend and those like her may become tomorrow’s sail makers.

I only hope somewhere in that rapidly approaching future, the Elissa will still be sailing, and when someone in the Galveston Historical Foundation gift shop hands visitors a copy of my book, it won’t be titled Gud Hop.

Sea Change

Yes, I have some new decor thanks to the folks at Jelly Pages. Since the novel I'm working on is nautical by nature, I thought it was time for a seafaring makeover. This format helps me focus on the task at hand, and I hope it puts you, my readers, into a "rudder and tackle" frame of mind- minus the sea sickness of course.

The title of the novel is Good Hope. It chronicles the adventures of Randall Grayson, a modern, middle-aged business man who joins the effort to recreate a historic voyage to the tip of Africa aboard the Elissa, the official Tall Ship of Texas.

The story of Good Hope began as a National Novel Writing Month project back in December 2007. Now, three re-writes later, it is the subject of a Six Month novel writing project that the members of the Humble Fiction Cafe' have selected as our 2009 project. We have specific goals to reach each month, and the intent is to have a finished product available for review on July 4th of this year.

This will pose as a double adventure for me. Good Hope was my first completed novel, but revising it into a manuscript for publication will be a unique experience and no easy task. Secondly, much like my main character, I'm very likely in over my head, but as I persevere I will be able to keep you up to date on the tragedies and triumphs along the way.

It will be an interesting six months, so strap yourselves into your bunks, and get ready to take on water, because this is indeed an adventure of fictional proportions.