Welcome to day 13 of PREPTOBER! This is a series of daily questions and prompts to help you prepare for this year’s upcoming NaNoWriMo!
How does your Setting impact story and character?
Feel free to share your answer in the comments! I would love to hear your response!
Last time, we created a list of words that describe your novel and setting as a whole. Today, we are going to take that list and turn it into story fodder for your novel.
We are going to simply evaluate the list that you made yesterday and you are going to rewrite each word as a verb. Feel free to take liberties and be creative if there isn’t a direct verb equivalent to your phrase.
Example: Yesterday, we create a word web for The Hunger Games:
survival, starvation, running, cat and mouse, maze, challenge, puzzle, obstacle, hunting, weapons, skill, fight or flight, animals, hiding, terrain, fear, hungry, thirsty, shelter, deprivation, kill or be killed, and survival of the fittest.
Now let’s transform our list so that they are all verbs:
Survive, Starve, Run, Chase, Challenge, Solve (puzzle), Overcome, Avoid (obstacle), hunt, weaponize, develop skill, fight, fly (run), hide, traverse (terrain), be afraid, hunger, thirst, find shelter, deprive, kill.
Now that we have our verbs, we can use these as actions, decisions, and plot points in our story.
We can see as we look at our example above that many of the verbs that we created are things that either Katniss does or they are done to her. We have a scene where Katniss has to run, where she is being chased, she has to overcome the obstacles in the forest, she has to hunt, she weaponizes her surroundings to protect herself, she displays her skills, she fights, she hides, and she finds shelter. All of these verbs become the frame work for scenes in your novel.
This helps us create a framework for plot points throughout the story, and the best part— they are based off of your setting.
Now you finally prepared to answer today’s question.
How does your Setting impact story and character?
Hint: List out your verbs/scenes to answer today’s question.
Share this post with a friend so that we can all write together!