I have a book deal!

If you have ADD, are twitchy from caffeine, or due to long term twitter exposure have trouble w/ thoughts longer than 140 characters, read

The Short Version I have a book deal!  My books about a young woman working for the Fairy Godfather are going to become “in-your-hands” “on-the-shelf” books, courtesy of Ace. 

If you are deep in the Query Trenches, waiting for contest results, refreshing to look for form rejections, or doing the dance of desperation while on submission, read

The Long, Long Version

The tale of how this came to be doesn’t start with that story, or even the story before that.  It starts with a story about a flock of chickens.  Talking chickens, stuck somewhere in the mountains, attempting a migration home.

I liked to think of it as “Warriors, only with chickens.”  The cunning among you will immediately spot a flaw in my clever plan:  Chickens are well equipped to become dinner, and poorly equipped to do anything else.  There’s a reason why you never read a headline that say “Chicken kills family of six, eats them with gravy.” 

You’ll also never read about “Flock of Chickens learn to pick locks, break out of government lab and go on rampage.”  My kids have a flock whose most aggressive act is to make us breakfast.

But I wrote the story.

And when my magnum opus was done, I figured that while I waited for agents, editors, and Hollywood to form a rioting mob in front of my house, I might as well keep writing.

So I wrote about vile monsters, genetic tampering, and misshapen, un-socialized abominations.  Also, middle school students.  When that was done, I had the good sense to sit on it.

See, for reasons I couldn’t quite put my beak on, the chicken story didn’t garner rave requests. It gathered form rejections faster than a strawberry grows mold. Eventually, I gave up on it.

While I tried to figure out how to prevent the same problem that killed the chicken story from plaguing my new next-best-seller, I kept writing.  One evening, I sat down at a fresh Word document, and in that desert of white, I typed two lines:

“I’ve got it, Grimm.”
“I’ll believe that when you do.”

Who were these people?  What was she after?  Why?  Everything grew out from there.  When I had a fair chunk of the story ready to roll, I took it to the online writer’s workshop I use, Critique Circle.  There, critique partners gently informed me that while the voice had potential, the manuscript needed love and attention.

Write what you love.

Write the story you want to read, but can’t find.

Those two bits of old advice made all the difference in the world.  Why?  Because the number of times I read my own story as I edited it would amaze you.  I honestly have no idea how many drafts I went through, but the novel slowly passed through the stages every novel does, becoming something I wasn’t just happy with, I was proud of.

Into the Trenches
So one October day, I caught myself editing a chapter, and making a change…then changing it back in a second pass.  For me, that’s always been the definition of “done” – when my changes don’t make it better, just different.

So I researched the dreaded query letter, conjured up what I thought was a great query, and sent it out to my five favorite agents.

One day, when I’m braver, I’ll post that original query letter.  It’s a poster child for “how to never write a query letter.”  Grammar errors.  Rhetorical questions.  Backstory in the QUERY letter.

I gathered a set of form rejects, and deserved every single one of them.

So I went to Absolute Write and spent time in Query Letter Hell.  The letter I produced with their feedback avoided all the pitfalls of the first one…but lost all the voice.  I chose to believe the advice of the experts there, and sent out another round.

This gathered me a few partial requests, which turned into full requests, but no offers. 

Once more, I sat down and wrote a new query.  I took some of the previous query and added the voice that I hoped would hook them.  And about that time, Liana Brooks posted about a contest, hosted by Brenda Drake.

Winners, Losers, and Also-Rans
Not Pitchwars.  Trick or Treat with Agents.  I wrote a logline, I wrote a summary, and I entered the TTWA contest.

I didn’t make the cut. 
So I entered another one.
Also didn’t make the cut.

It’s tempting to look at those and say I failed at each of those contests.  That’s true if you go by “Did you make it to the agent round/did you get requests/did you get an agent” metric.  Another good way to look at it was that with each entry, an opening I swore I couldn’t improve got sharper, more focused.

In December I entered yet another contest, Pitchmas, by Jessa Russo and TamaraMataya.  This one stands out because it was the first point at which I heard “I love it” from an agent.  That agent wasn’t ready to offer representation yet, but the fact that someone said “I love it” without a qualifying “but” did wonders for my soul.

And now we come to Pitchwars.

For those of you who don’t know, Brenda lives to cross Survivor and Pitch contests.  Each contest is similar to, but has variations from, the previous one.  I’m still waiting for her to have one where contestants get sent to live on a desolate rock, writing pitches in the sand for the agent flyover.  “I’m sorry, but PLAESE SEND HELF is not right for my list” and “I’m seeing a lot of SOS submissions lately” will be the most common response.

In Pitchwars, you applied to three mentors, who would pick a mentee to help.  They’d polish the pitch, work with you on your manuscript, then, come that happy day, your pitch and opening pages would be hosted on a blog.

I applied to Summer Heacock, Becca Weston, and Tina Moss.

I didn’t win.

Well, that’s not exactly true.  I wasn’t a primary choice.  However, Tina Moss chose me as one of her alternates.  And being made of ninja awesomeness, (seriously, she could kill me with her pinky), she helped me polish my pitch to a shine.

Pitchwars day came, and I personally contributed the majority of the load on Summer’s blog.

From that, I got five requests.  One of them from Pam van Hylckama Vlieg.  I can honestly tell you I checked and rechecked the spelling on her name at least five times before pressing send on the mail to her.  I had “Ms. Vlieg,” “Ms. Hylckama”, and “Ms. Van” as best guesses.  Tip for those who might query her – it’s all of those:  “Ms. van Hylckama Vlieg”

A few days later, the first agent, from the pitchmas contest got ahold of me.  She wanted to represent me!  More than anything, I wanted to say yes right then.  The problem was, I had full manuscripts out to about eight other people at that point.  So I reluctantly said “I need to notify the other agents with my manuscript.”

And I wrote out a letter to each of them.  For the record, if you are looking for how to do this, just reply to their request mail (so they know who you are and what this is in regards to) and say “I’d like to notify you that I have an offer of representation.  I’d like to reply by [date].” 

Some people bowed out immediately.

Some never responded.

Some said “We need to talk as soon as you are available.”

Pam van Hylckama Vlieg responded to my mail and said “I’ll read it over the weekend.”

The Call(s)

If you are a writer querying, it’s easy to develop this idea that agents are distant, mythical creatures like unicorns or honest politicians, combined with Wizard of Oz style giant flaming oracle.  Writers approach, tie their queries to a sacrificial goat or two, and lob it over the fence.

Flaming rejections come back.  Occasionally, a revise-and-re-sacrifice request.

The more I talked with agents, the more they seemed like actual human beings.  These names on the other end, they belonged to actual people.  Different people.  With different styles, but actual people.  Some of whom I had great discussions with, some of whom I talked to and both of us said “Is this really going to work?  No, I don’t think so.” 

By the time Pam mailed saying she’d like to talk, I thought I’d gotten over my agent-aphobia.

I thought wrong.

See, I’d read all those “Questions to ask during the call” posts.  I had lots of questions.  She had lots of answers.  I patted myself on the back for being prepared.  The problem came at the end of the phone call.

I can read z80 machine code in raw hex, despite being two decades removed from writing it.  I can occasionally recall my daughter’s name, and I’ve had her for nearly eighteen years.  When it came time to end the call, my mind went blank. 

I stared at the cell phone, trying to remember exactly what it was I was supposed to say to end the call.  Seconds passed--and it came to me.  I practically shouted “BYE” and punched the button to hang up.  A millisecond later, the part of my brain that attempts to understand social conventions kicked in.

I panicked. 

Of course, I couldn’t call her back just to say goodbye in a way that didn’t mark me as a freak.
Fast forward to the end of the week.  After more calls, more email, and more discussions, I came to Thursday night worried.  Not because I had to make a decision – that’s life.  Agents are like Highlanders: There can be only one.  I worried because I liked the people I’d talked to, and suddenly I felt a tiny hint of what it’s like sending rejections out to people.

Sometimes, it feels like the whole query process boils down to shouting “Pick me!  Pick me!”  Here I had people saying the same thing to me, and I felt bad for the people I didn’t choose.  Friday morning, I wrote out the response mail to each person.  Most of them I rewrote several times.  One I wrote at least six versions of. 

The final mail I wrote to Pam, saying that I was delighted to accept her offer of representation and looked forward to working with her.  That one I was happy to write.

That’s my agent story.

Life, Continued

As a writer, it’s easy to look to that next big milestone as “The thing we’re waiting on” and forget that life isn’t then.  It is now. 

The day after I accepted Pam’s offer of representation, my manuscripts did not, to my surprise, complete themselves.  I opened a WIP and said “The editing elves didn’t creep in last night.  I wonder if they know I got an agent yet.”

So I sat down and wrote, just like I’d done every day before.  And I edited, just like I’d done every day before.  Soon, I feel back into a pattern.  Write some.  Edit some.  Critique for my CPs.  Relax and live life.  In the meantime, Pam & Laurie Mclean launched Foreword Literary, aiming to create an agency that kept up with the changing face of publishing.

One morning I woke up to find a spreadsheet shared with me – a submission spreadsheet.

For those of you querying, it often looks like querying is the end of the process. 

This is fundamentally untrue.

Your agent knows the market.  He or she knows the imprint, knows the editors, who is buying what, who has said “I’d like a story like that,” and who has recently passed on similar stories.  From their knowledge of the market, the agent draws up a submission list. 

Think of it like querying on steroids.  If you have a list of agents in query tracker that you want to query, the submission sheet works just like that.

The submissions process is where your agent attempts to sell your work to editors, and it begins with a submission letter, which despite its name has nothing to do with 50 Shades of anything.  In the submission letter, the agent attempts to garner editor interest the same way your query letter worked.

If the editor accepts, the agent send on the manuscript.

And here we hit the truth that sent chills down to my toes:  A “no” at this stage ends the submission of that manuscript, to that editor.  There are no do-overs on submission.  So you can bet I spent the first couple days refreshing that document over and over

When editors agreed to read, I squealed with joy.

When editors passed, I struggled to ignore it.  Just as I didn’t rewrite everything from scratch based on form rejections, I didn’t want to make changes without knowing what to change and why.  So I waited.

I also wrote. 

“Free Agent” was out on sub.  “Special Agent” was with my critique partners, and “Double Agent” was a lump of words on my hard drive, a lump that I continued to work on. 

I was in a meeting when that first mail notification came in: “Editor is going to get back to us next week.”  I somehow managed to avoid cackling and spinning around in my chair, neither of which is accepted in business meetings.

The next mail, that an editor had taken it to acquisitions, also came in during a meeting.  Also required much restraint.

Now, one key of Submission Club is “You do not talk about Submission Club.” 

So I had all this exciting news…but I couldn’t tell anyone.  Sure, I could tell my wife and kids, but that discussion went like “I’m on submission.  No, I don’t mean I’m submitting insurance claims.  No, it doesn’t mean that either.  You know what?  Never mind.”

Telling coworkers wouldn’t help either.  “I’m on submission.  No, that’s not a hash table algorithm.  It’s about my book.  No, it has nothing to do with 50 Shades of Grey.  You know what?  Never mind.” 

Offers, Auctions, and Deals

Then came offers.

This, by the way, was the point at which I became extremely happy to have an agent to partner with.  That’s the key here.  Agents aren’t some magical editing fairy.  I am responsible for the quality of my manuscripts.  They aren’t some surefire ticket to instantaneous riches. 

A good agent is a partner, one you can trust to explain details, rights, how each interaction of rights versus money works.  Jennifer Laughran’s post on the big ball of rubber bands is good reading for this.  I recommend reading it.  Pam explained each offer, who it came from, what that meant, what it entailed. 

And though I trust her, I absolutely believe in “Trust but verify.”  So I reached out to people I knew who had been through this.  I listened to them as well.  I noted with satisfaction that their explanations backed up Pam’s to the hilt.

Then came the big offer, the preempt.  If you are asking yourself “What exactly is a preempt?” fear not.  I asked myself exactly that.  When a book goes out on submission, you really would like to get at least one offer for it.  If not, it’s a book you can’t sell traditionally.

Better than one offer would be two, in which the agent may work to create an auction situation, where different houses offer different things.  This auction situation can go back and forth for a while, rights, dollars and deals all being bandied back and forth.

Again, I’m delighted I didn’t have to do this – my tendency would be to say “YES!” to the very first offer.  Even if the offer was “Print books to be printed on the skin of author, in his own blood.  Author pays for tattoo services, skin grafts, and provides his own blood transfusions.” 

That’s why I’m an author, not an agent.

On Thursday, Pam and I spoke on the phone and agreed that we had an offer in hand we should absolutely accept.  In a pre-empt, the book goes the offering editor, and everyone else gets told “sorry.” 

I took the family out to dinner.  I sat at my computer and ground out my daily word count because the only constant here is that regardless of where I was at in the process, I had to write.  And then I did the hardest thing of all.

Not saying a word, until now.

That part is over.  I have a book deal for all three books of the Agency series, telling the story of a young woman, the Fairy Godfather, and her quest to find that mythical happily ever after.

Free Agent (and friends!) will be coming as mass market paperback from Ace books.  You can read the press release here - JC Nelson lands three book deal with penguin-ace.

Hug and Learn Time

While I don’t usually hug, I do make an effort to learn.  Here’s a list of things I learned from this, hoping that I can save you some time if you don’t already know:

1. This is a business.  You are saying to an agent “You and I can make money together.”  Bring the best manuscript you can bring and be professional.
2. This is a subjective business.  I have rejections from several agents, a few who said “Sorry, this is great but I can't sell it.”  Were they wrong?  Not if they couldn’t get 100% behind my book and love it the way I do.
3. An agent is a partner, not a Fairy Godfather.  When you go looking for one, look at it like that.  I read posts from people talking about querying their dream agent.  Your dream agent is the one who believes in your book and has the skills, experience, and contacts to give it the best shot possible.
4. Be respectful to everyone.  Publishing is a small business.  People talk.  Be the one they talk about saying “I’d love to work with them,” not the “You’ll never guess which freak I got mail from” person.
5. Keep your mouth shut when necessary.
6. There’s more to get from a contest than the #1 spot.  I connected with other writers, sharpened my opening, and made friends with people, people I listen to and learn from.
7. Write the book you love.  I did.  To this day I like reading my story, which is good, since I’m betting there are big changes and hard work ahead.
8. “Have a good day, goodbye” or “It was a pleasure speaking with you, goodbye” are both acceptable ways to end a call.

Stewsters

It began with an innocent question, one my daughter didn't mean the way I took it. 

 

"Daddy, how do chickens lay chicken meat?" asked my middle daughter.

 

Oh, I love that girl but the question was like asking ‘how a bull lays a hamburger?’ or ‘How a pig lays a pork chop?’   I realized just how disconnected my kids were from their food chain. That was something I could fix.  All I needed was a stump, a hatchet, and a volunteer.

 

When I said I needed a volunteer, my youngest daughter immediately held up her hand.  I explained to her that only a chicken could volunteer, so she immediately went and brought me our largest, loudest, spunkiest buff orpington. 

 

Now the thing about orps is that they are about as spunky as a depressed teenager, so Alpha (as of course she was named) just sort of hung under my daughter's arm like a stump sized clump of golden feathers. Chickens can't stare with both eyes but the one she could fix me with said "Not this again."

 

"Not that one," I said to my daughter, and then explained that the chicken volunteer wouldn't be able to lay any more eggs for us.  Ever.  That meant no more pointy alpha eggs with maroon speckles all over them.

She headed back into the yard.  "I'll go get Tiny.  I don't like her eggs."

 

I had a different plan.  I've always said of my chickens, they could make me breakfast, or they could make me dinner.  Roosters have about half the options in that plan, and that’s fine by me.  Your average roo has only a couple of purposes in life anyway.  One is with the ladies, and the other is between them and something hungry.

 

A rooster is basically a walking chicken sandwich who offers himself up in hopes that the predator will be too full to snack on his girls.  Also, I've heard that you shouldn't feed animals chicken bones, so I'd guess that at least one roo has succeeded in gaining revenge from beyond the grave by choking his killer to death. 

 

That is what we call persistence.

 

My plan involved a knife, some boiling water, craigslist, and some unwanted chicken-sandwiches-with-feet.  Not exactly in that order.  Nature seems to split the pot 50/50 in every batch of chicks, meaning that every little boy chick can dream of having a hen to dance with at the prom, and cluck sweet nothings into her ear until they roost under the moon.  The reality is that there's going to be a few things standing in the way of that romantic trist down by the coop. 

 

Roosters originated the term "Cock-block", because any time a cockerel would like to get friendly with a hen, he has to get past every other male in the batch.  Turns out, just like in humans, not every woman needs (or wants) a man.  Also like humans, chicken men will kill each other over their women.  Note: That's where the human/chicken analogies in this end because if I behaved like a rooster with every woman I passed on the way to work, I'd wind up in a small cell, with an big man named Carl who has anger issues.  I will note that if hens carried mace, roosters would learn to be more polite.

 

In fact, most of the time, the Highlander rule is in effect:  There can be only one.  People tend to take care of this by getting rid of the extra roosters, so not every little boy rooster grows up to be an astronaut or president.  Just like some graduates get their degree to be able to ask "Would you like some fries with that" some roosters grow their combs and tails just to be the nuggets that go along with the fries. 

 

This was the case with the three I picked up off of craigslist.  #1 was a leghorn ,and you could tell he was not to be trifled with - he was halfway covered in blood, having killed another rooster that morning.  He looked like Mel Gibson in Braveheart, except that the chicken didn't get drunk and start ranting about jews, and the chicken could act.  The second was a polish, and he looked like a poodle had sex with a chicken.  The last was a tiny cochin rooster with iridescent black sheen and a long (well, for a cochin) red beard.

 

I brought them home in cages, and just like boys, they got into a fight on the way home.  Through the bars.  By the time we got there, they were both bleeding from a dozen places, and made the worst noise you've ever heard when I interupted their little spat.  See, they were ticked that I had intervened in their little death duel.

 

Then, one of the Orps wandered over.  Chickens cannot pole dance, but this one was molting, and I swear it worked like a strip tease for the three roos.  They fell silent as she clucked her way past, and then immediately set up crowing so loud you could hear them inside the house.  After I’d put them back in the van.

 

"Are they always this loud?" asked my wife.

 

I shrugged.  “The ones in the freezer never make a peep."

 

"I meant can they be de-crowed?"  My wife peered out the front window at the van.

 

"Absolutely."

 

My wife looked at the grin on my face and frowned. "Without cutting off their heads?"

 

"Why you always have to make things difficult?"  When she’d gone back to laundry, I got down to chores of my own.  My middle daughter watched as I worked.  "See these boys?  All they need is a shave, a hot bath, a cold shower and I'll show you how a chicken lays chicken meat." 

 

My eldest came out to see them, and pointed.  "It's disgusting!"

 

"Just blood.  It'll wash off."

 

"What is wrong with it?"

 

"It pecked --oh, that one.  It's a polish.  Don't worry.  Roosters are like men.  They all look the same undressed." 

 

She went back inside.

 

Now I had an eager audience at the back door, watching as I slipped the leghorn into the cone.  It had been years since I killed a chicken, but apparently it's like falling off a bike - you never forget how.  I had just finished bleeding the leghorn when a blood curdling scream erupted from inside the house.

 

My middle daughter stood at the door, her mouth open, tongue half way out as if she were attempting to gag and scream at the same time. "YOU..."

 

"Yes, honey?"

 

"YOU..."

 

"Yes?"

 

"You didn't say the roosters died!" She made the same face the cat does when it's going to spit out a hairball.

 

I checked the body and confirmed that it was really done dripping.  "Oh.  Well, the roosters die."

 

"No!" She stepped out and threw the holding cage open.

 

The polish made a run for it, the cochin calmly sat down and began to preen itself.  I finished up the leghorn with help from my son.  He was fascinated by the process, and about the time I took the feet off he piped up.  "It's a chicken!"

 

"Yes, it was and is."

 

"No, it's a store chicken!" His face glowed with pride.

 

I took the feet and walked them over to the door, tapping the claws on the window. "And see, this is what was on the end of the drumsticks you love so much."

 

His face turned the same shade of green as the legs. 

 

I don't eat the organs.  You can have your gizards and your livers and your hearts.  I stick them in a can on the barbecue, and my orps believe that fresh cooked chicken innards are the best treat ever.  That's wrong in so many ways.  So the leghorn was down, the cochin was now napping in the heat of the day, and my daughter was trying to make peace with a polish rooster that turned out to be Satan with feathers.

 

It pecked the orps.  It pecked the dog.  It attacked the bee hive (and honeybees are not known for their sense of humor). Finally, it ran at my daughter and chased her clean on back to the house.  She went inside, while I hefted an oblivious cochin and confirmed what I already knew - there were more feathers on that bird than meat.  I put him down and he hopped into my sun hat and dozed off. 

 

My daughter re-appeared at the door, heavy winter coat on, butterfly net in hand.  "Stay there," she said in a voice like steel, "I'll bring him to you."

 

She did.

 

My eldest peeked out once during the operation.

 

"This is how you deal with a man who isn't respectful."  I'm never one to miss a teachable moment.

 

"That's so disgusting," she said.

 

"It's a polish."

 

"It looks so much better now that it doesn't have a head."

 

I cooked the "It's a chickens" in the crock pot, brothed the spare bits and made noodles.  It wasn't until evening that it occurred to me I was short a rooster.  I went outside to find my youngest on the swing, the cochin in her lap.

 

"I promise I will not ever eat you," she said to it as I approached. 

 

I knew I was licked.

 

Lucky (I insisted on the name) found a new home with six frizzled friends with hen-ifits.  You haven't seen strut until you've seen a cochin the size of a volleyball putting it out there for some new ladies.  He looked like a balloon with black feathers, and every single breath seemed to swell him that much further.  Leghorn and polish made a tasty soup, and my kids don't ask where chicken comes from, so that worked out well. 

 

In the new batch of chicks, I got two barred rocks.  One is beautiful black with tiny white stripes. 

The other....white with black stripes and a comb like a pink sawblade already.  I figure it's as close as I'm ever going to get to finding out what zebra tastes like.  Maybe I'll get to it young enough that it doesn't have the consistency of shoe laces.  If not, the crock pot is patient, and in this house there is always room for a stewster.

Character Motivations, Conflict, and Plot

If I had my life to do over again, I would be an evil emperor.  It's not just the power, the money, the women at my command.  It's not even the ability to obliterate the jerk who parked in the handicapped parking spot, then sprinted into the store.  It's the plotting.  If there's anything I enjoy, it's coming up with a truly wicked plot.

And plot, the thread that binds the loose-leaf scenes of a story together, isn't spun by leprechauns from straw.  You can't pay a frog to retrieve your plot from the bottom of a pond with a kiss.  Plot is a byproduct of something else, and should arrive naturally in a story as you understand your character's desires.

Everybody wants something.  Most of the time, they want several somethings.

From the brooding billionaire in his bat cave, to the sultry sex-tress in her latex allergy activating skin suit, everyone wants something.  That billionaire wants his parents back.  If he can't have that, breaking the noses of every two-bit punk in the city will have to suffice.  The sex-tress wants a nice cotton outfit with elastic, and some comfortable running shoes.  A bra won't hurt, either. 

The characters in your story want something too. 
Then they go after it.

When two characters want opposing things, we have conflict.  Conflict is the driver for the scene, producing the tension you need to keep a reader asking "What comes next?" and yielding logical outcomes.

Repeat after me:  My characters want something, and they are going to go after it.

Now, for the refinement.  Your characters are probably lazy.  They will go about it in the easiest way possible, taking the shortest path to their goal, unless other conflicts drive them in an alternate direction.  That villain in your story?  If he could get his billion dollars, would he want more, or accept it and go home? 

Plot is the series of actions that characters take to reach their goals.  The side arcs are where conflict forces the characters to pursue other things to allow them to return to pursing the main goal. 

Your characters should always act in keeping with their desires.  Note that they may have many different desires, competing.  This builds internal conflict and drives external conflict, because your character may take longer, or different routes to his main goal in order to fulfill different desires. 

While I'm ranting, for the love of $deity, remember this applies to every single character in your book.  All of them have something they want.  Now, admittedly, some characters are little more than cardboard stormtroopers, but if a character has lines or interactions, it helps to know what they want. 

Love interests aren't there to provide a convenient place to hang a pair of boobs or a dong.  They are people with their own set of desires.  Much like people in real life, your love interests will be a lot less annoying if they have goals beyond "Find someone of the opposite sex to complete me." 

A few days ago, I sat with another writer, read through a chapter, and asked "Why?  Why would the MC do that?" 

His answer: "I've always wanted to write a scene where that happens." 

That's not a horrible answer, but you get there by having someone whose desires drive them to act in that manner, not by writing the scene and bolting existing characters onto either end, then doing a find/replace to patch up names.

Desire leads to actions.
Opposing actions lead to conflict.
Conflict yields tension.
Tension keeps the reader turning the page.
Plot is the action and reaction as people act to fulfill their desires, receive or are denied them, and then formulate new ways to reach their desire.

The end result of character motivation driving their actions is that your characters are believable.  "Yes, Character X would do that, because he really, really wants [McGuffin].  But he won't get it that way, because he wants to be seen as [attribute].  So obviously, the wild scheme that involves more parts than a Ford truck makes sense, because it's the only way to satisfy the character's desires.

End of rant.