During the entire month of April, I’m participating in the A to Z Blogging Challenge. The alphabet will be my motivation, though the content of the posts will be very similar to what regular readers are used to. Check out the link for more amazing bloggers, and enjoy April!

(This post will be kind of long, my apologies >.Persistence drew such a fantastic array of responses, that I had to change gears. I always read every single comment on my blog, even though I’m not great at responding. I love hearing what you all have to say. No, really. I don’t usually respond because ‘good point’ get’s kind of old after a while ^_^

But yesterday…

First of all, to Stephanie Scott – very best of luck finishing your book and then editing and taking the next steps. Rock that story! To Pam Harris – Keep pushing and you’ll find your way ^_^ Dawn Embers best of luck with the move and everything else. I’m so excited (and mildly envious) for where you get to go :-D. (Love all these ladies’ blogs. Go read them. They’re all fantastic fun)

Next, and just as important, to Stu, Kate, Eric, and Lexa (All of whom are amazing bloggers and writers, even though Stu and Eric may not realize their blogs always fall at the top of my ‘to read’ list, Kate and Lexa and familiar with my various manias), you inspired this.

All that out of the way, my point. The quest. I’m going to draw a real-life to writing correlation. Weird, right?

Say you’re writing a story. There are certain elements you need as a foundation. For instance, your characters need goals and motivation. Or in other words, a quest and what drives them to persist through until the end.

The awesome thing about the quest is it may not end up being what it started out as.

For instance. An orphaned boy dreams of having a family who loves him and doesn’t lock him in the closet under the stairs on a regular basis. By the end of his quest, he’s become a cultural icon and killed one of the most powerful wizards in history. But that’s not what he set out to do.

A homely girl is forced to move to a backwoods town where it rains all the time. All she wants is to go back to the sun she’s familiar with. By the end of her quest, she’s gained immortality and an eternal soulmate. But that’s not what she was looking for when she moved.

An intelligent girl living in a war devastated nation, in a mining town eveloped in poverty, is only concerned with how to feed her mother and sister, even if it means surrendering her own life. She never wanted to be the mascot of a rebellion and bring down two competing but disturbingly similar governments.

I use these three examples because they’re fairly well known (and let’s face it, for many of us authors, achieving that level of popularity wouldn’t exactly make us weep with sorrow). But so many plots work the same way. What the main character wants in the beginning of the book isn’t what their quest is about.

It works the same way for us. When I graduated high school, I was going to be…I don’t even remember. Probably like a professional photographer or a lawyer or something. As I pursued those goals, I grew to realize I’m actually really good at what it is I do now.

Same thing when you start to write, whether you’re a plotter or a pantser. Maybe you start off with a story idea about twins born into a magical family and kidnapped at birth, and a story about big black blobs attacking peole at the mall. When you’re done, it’s a story about an angel with the power to destroy any god she wants, and no desire to use it, joining forces with a Greek hero who just wants the gods to leave him alone for a couple of centuries.

Persistence doesn’t mean you push your quest past the point of practicality. And it also doesn’t mean you can never redefine the quest goals.

Say your quest is to write the most amazing, dark, urban fantasy ever in the history of anything, with prose that rivals Neil Gaiman, and contract it with the literary agent of your dreams, and sell it to Penguin, even if it’s just for a pittance. You pour your heart and soul onto the page. Everyone who reads it loves it. And you query it. And no one ‘professional’ cares.

You’ve got several options at that point, including quitting. But redefining the quest doesn’t neccesarily mean quitting. Maybe you revise and it’s awesome and you meet that original goal. Then AWESOME!

Maybe you realize that for as much as you enjoy reading it, you don’t enjoy writing in that genre. You go back to romance, which has always called your name and you only quit writing because you got tired of hearing people say ‘romance novels aren’t *real* novels’. And you knock it out of the park with requests and offers.

Maybe you realize your books are amazing, but not as mainstream as the larger publishing professionals are looking for, and you decide to go with a small press, or self-publish, or serialize it on your blog, or start your own e-publisher to help other writers and to learn and grow yourself.

Or maybe you realize you just want to tell the stories and don’t care who reads them, and you only write for yourself. Or that writing gives you mental hives and you’d rather paint your imagination.

It doesn’t matter if the quest changes along the way. Never be afraid to take a step back and re-evaluate your goals. Just make sure you’re doing it for the right reason. Quitting because ‘it’s just too hard’ is still quitting (unless it’s actually causing you real physical problems). Taking a left instead of going straight at an intersection doesn’t mean you’ve given up.

Use the various stages of the quest to motivate you, but never let it propel you down a course you’re not comfortable with. We’re allowed to change our minds.

Have you ever found yourself shifting directions after you realized your original goal wasn’t quite what you wanted it to be?