Welcome to day 24 of PREPTOBER! This is a series of daily questions and prompts to help you prepare for this year’s upcoming NaNoWriMo!
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Today’s question is:
What choice does your character make?
Feel free to share your answer in the comments! I would love to hear your response!
At this point, you may think this question gets repetitive. And to be honest, that is the nature of storytelling— to create narrative loops that align and build on each other.
It is also important to give your character tons of choices! We are just going over the big ones. Building in these choices literally build character.
You as the author already know where the character is going, try experimenting with other options, things your character could do instead. What would be the easy way out? What does your character want to do? What should they do?
For Choice #3, there’s an easy choice. They can let themselves be destroyed by their Devastating Setback. They could give up, go home. Start over. But then they realize, no— they have to keep going.
This is the moment when Katniss signals to the cameras is her declaration. She mourned Rue and now she’s going to continue to fight so that Rue’s sacrifice wasn’t in vain.
For The Hunger Games, the Devastating Setback, The Void, and Choice #3 all happen in fairly quick order. For a fast paced novel like this, where tension runs high and practically she can’t spend too much more time lingering with Rue, a quick succession of scenes like this makes sense.
However, in The Lord of the Rings, which is much slower paced, the story looks more like this:
Devastating Setback: Gandalf dies
The Void: The Fellowship travel from Moria to the woods of Lothlorien, They are taken captive by the elves there, they are interrogated by the head warrior, they are denied further entry, they are met by Lord Celebron and Lady Galadriel, who likes to poke around in everyone’s head, then the crew all finds a good place to sleep, but Frodo can’t so he goes for a walk and runs into Galadriel again. She offers him the chance to look in her mirror to get a vision of the future, he sees the Shire burning, then offers the ring to Galadriel who almost takes it from him before finally choosing otherwise.
Choice #3: Then Frodo realizes that he must take the Ring to Mordor alone and makes the choice to leave the Fellowship as soon as he is able to.
As you can see, The Void takes up way more space in The Lord of Rings than The Hunger Games.
No matter how you would like to play with the pacing in your plot, you should note that The Void is typically a series of scenes. (There are 5 stages of grief after all). While the choices we’ve discussed this month are single scenes or moments, same with the Devastating Setback.
Here are a few more examples of Choice #3:
Elizabeth tells Captain Norrington that she will marry him if he looks for Will Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean
Harry and Hermione decide to use the time turner to alter the past in Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban
Luke decides to become a pilot for the resistance to take down the Death Star in Star Wars
What choice does your character make?
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