Welcome to day 30 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:
Your Character Returns to the Known World, now what?
Feel free to share your answer in the comments! I would love to hear your response!
This is it, the final installment of the Preptober Series. And now that we are on the other side of this thing, let’s too at how your main character is fairing.
Many stories have a Return to the Known World. Remember the Known World? It’s your main character’s status quo. And once they do, they will feel out of place. Their known world hasn’t changed, but they have. This is an opportunity to show how much your character has changed.
Your main character was once a part of their Known World, but now that they have returned they understand that they no longer completely belong here, they also belong in the “Unknown World” which has now become known to them through their journey.
In the Hunger Games, Katniss goes back home to District 12 once she and Peeta win the games. But things can’t go back to normal with Gale. She’s home but not really, she lives in the near empty victor’s village with Haymitch and Peeta. She doesn’t enjoy her anonymity any longer, she’s a celebrity in District 12 and all over Panem. And of course, now President Snow is watching her every move.
In this clip, we can see her resisting the Return, she wants to forget what happened to her. Peeta says, “I don’t want to forget.” A reminder that things have indeed changed forever now, and she can’t go back to the way things were.
The Return to the Known World doesn’t always have to be a physical return. In The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo’s journey isn’t over he has to keep on traveling towards Mordor. Returning physically home to the Shire would completely destroy the narrative.
So, instead we have a more symbolic “Return to the Known World” when Sam joins him. Both hobbits, this was Sam and Frodo’s journey from the very beginning, they gained a few Allie’s along the way, but this symbolic return of the “Sam and Frodo” show works well enough to show contrast to the start of the story.
Your Character Returns to the Known World, now what?
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