"From Where You Dream"

After reading two posts about this book, I picked it up at Borders on my lunch break today, and though I'm only a bit into chapter three, it's already made the hampster in my head spin his little ball into a hurricane. In the past 2 months, I've moved and had a number of family issues arise that drained me and put me into such a mental funk that I couldn't concentrate on anything, let alone write anything decent. I started to worry that I'd lost my story, that it had died in its third draft, and I was going to have to scrap it and work up the nerve to start something new and just stash this one under the bed to be opened and laughed at in the years to come. Then I came to chapter three of Butler's book, and it was on yearning. A page and a half into this chapter, I suddenly knew what my story needed. Three of my four main characters knew exactly what they wanted, but the fourth was eluding me, and her loss of direction was tied intrinsically to, and thus crippling, the needs and goals of the antagonist. But Butler's chapter got me seriously thinking about what she yearned for, what she needed more than anything, the one thing, that if she got it, she could die a happy old woman, and then I realized what it was, and how the antagonist is going to use that.
So after doing a little happy dance, I started going back through her scenes and peppering them. I'm not saying the battle is over; there's still plenty more work that needs to be done, but I found her internal motivator, and that makes me a very happy writer-gal. So thanks for those posts about this book. It made my hampster get back to work.