Welcome to day 25 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 is the climax of your story?
Feel free to share your answer in the comments! I would love to hear your response!
We are in the home stretch now! The climax aka the finale aka Act III is the last 20-25% of your novel and it brings the entire story into focus.
You are going to want to tap into your main character’s dreams and fears again, because the climatic moment is what we are building towards. And this is going to be a perfect intersection of you character facing their fear while also getting what they want at the same time.
Have you ever wondered how to create a climactic moment? This is your formula. The problem is that you need to figure out a way for your character to face their fear, while also fulfilling some of the dreams that they had. This is the “answer” to the novel. Win or lose, this moment is about them experiencing a slice of life moment that is completely their choice.
For example, the thing that Katniss fears the most is dying, because that would mean her family would starve without her. But over the course of the novel, she questions the morality of killing in the name of saving her family. Are these other people’s lives more important than her own? Than Prim and her mother’s lives?
That question gets answered when Rue dies. No. None of these deaths are worth it. So she is completely unwilling to sacrifice Peeta when they are the last two standing. Think about it, beginning of the novel Katniss might’ve just killed him to win and save her family. But over the course of the novel, experiencing the horrors of the Games, she learns this valuable lesson and it transforms her.
When it comes down to it, she cannot kill him to save her family. She completely rejects her entire motivation and drive to win the games and opts to eat poisoned berries along side Peeta (Remember how this imagery came up in our sensory/setting exercise?) so that they both die. Thus denying the games their true victor.
With this single act Katniss both rejects her dream and embraces her fear.
But then what happens? The Game Commissioner gets panicky and begs them to stop. So Katniss gets to have her cake and eat it too. The important thing is that she was *willing* to die even though it went against everything she stood for in order to not kill Peeta. And in the end she wins the games, which is what she set out to do in the first place. This feels like a nice twist because she didn’t win in a way that we (or she) would expect.
This also happens in Star Wars. When Luke is flying his X-wing fighter, one by one his comrades are shot down and he is the only hope to save the galaxy. But his targeting controls get blown up and so he has no way of aiming his lasers to shoot the vulnerable spot on the Death Star. So what does he do? He embraces the Force, which he once feared/rejected and he saves the day.
With one choice he faces the thing he’s been running away from and as a bonus he actually becomes a fighter pilot hero that saves the galaxy, which was his biggest dream.
In the Lord of the Rings, Frodo decides that he is going to take the ring to Mordor all by himself. And he nearly does too. Except Samwise Gamgee insists that he comes too, even though the road is dangerous.
In the end, Frodo faces his fear of not being big enough, strong enough, or worldly enough to fulfill this task on his own. But then he gets to go with a companion in the end. His *willingness* to face his fear is what makes this moment the climax.
The are several elements to a good climax that we will go over in the next few days, but this was a good overview of how the final installment of your novel should flow.
What is the climax of your story?
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