NaNoWriMo Day 26
We're really in the home stretch now!
With just five days left of National Novel Writing Month, I’m betting it’s going to be a sprint to the finish for many of us. Whether your goal is 50,000 words, a completed first draft, or a well-established daily writing routine, I wish you a joyful final week of the challenge.
This Thursday is Thanksgiving here in the US, and I’m particularly grateful to everyone who has participated in my NaNoWriMo workshops at the Morse Institute Library and the Groton Public Library. Thank you for your energy, enthusiasm, and generosity. You’ve inspired me to rejuvenate my own writing routine, which had been languishing a bit in the past year. I’ve written more in the past 25 days than I have all year-to-date, and it’s no small part due to the camaraderie and solidarity I felt in our workshops.
Okay, let’s get to our final set of writing prompts. If you need some inspiration to push through the end of the challenge, these are for you! Our final prompts are geared toward creating an exciting finale for your story. If you haven’t gotten that far yet, go ahead and save these for later, or write yourself some plot notes for the murky middle and skip ahead in your writing process to the final chapters. There’s something very powerful about reaching the words “The End.” You may even find uncovering the story’s ending will help you shape the confusing middle parts better.
My first time completing NaNo, that’s exactly what I did. I hadn’t written everything I knew I needed yet, but I wanted to feel a sense of closure for the challenge, so I wrote a list of scenes I needed to write and then moved on to focus on the final chapters. Later, in my rewriting and revising, much of what I wrote changed, but having a sense of where my story needed to go and what my character needed to experience made tackling my second draft less daunting!
I’ll be back on Saturday this week instead of Friday to celebrate the final day with you. Good luck, my friends!
Writing Prompts
If you’re a fan of Save the Cat Beat Sheets, you are probably familiar with the concept that around 3/4 of the way through your novel, your character faces their greatest challenge, their dark night of the soul, where they must reckon with their inner demons and overcome, once and for all, the flaw that’s been holding them back throughout the story. Write a scene in which your character experiences a major setback in pursuit of their goals, something that sends them spiraling to rock bottom. Focus on their inner monologue of the character. How can they move past this moment? How can they learn that success or failure is a matter of where the story ends. If their story ends here, they fail, so how do they find a way to keep going?
Sticking with the Save the Cat outline for the final portion of a story, once the protagonist comes through his or her dark night of the soul, they are ready to pursue their goal with renewed energy and a new approach. Part of what they will need to succeed is to assemble their team. Write a scene in which the protagonist’s allies and mentors are all gathered in one place. It could be a party, a holiday, a funeral—any sort of event that would bring a group together. Allow your main character to realize how important these different people are to their life.
One of the final things that happens in many stories before all is resolved is a big dramatic twist that gives your protagonist a chance to show how fully he or she has transformed over the course of the story. Save the Cat called this the high tower surprise. This obstacle will require the protagonist to call on the support of their team and draw on all their strength. It won’t be easy, but the protagonist is finally ready. What is your protagonist’s final challenge? Write that scene!
Having conquered their final challenge, your protagonist now returns to their ordinary world, but they are changed, and therefore their ordinary world is also changed, at least in their view of it. As you write your way toward the words “The End,” show us your protagonist in their new normal. Your plot is now complete, so by way of resolution, you can focus on imagery and sensory details that paint a picture of life as the protagonist experiences it after all he or she has been through. You may wish to write in the form of an epilogue, leaping ahead in time several weeks, months, even years.
Now, with an ending written, go back to Chapter 1. Can you write an opening scene that shows your main character in their ordinary world, focusing on all the details that are the opposite of where they are in the ending you’ve just written? In other words, can you reverse engineer an opening that will set up the transformation your character is about to experience?
Show your work!
I’d love to hear what you’re working on this week. Share a few sentences in the comments to tell us how it’s going!
About the Writing Prompts
Throughout my prompts, I am often going to suggest that you write a scene. By a scene, I mean a continuous sequence of events that occur in a limited timeframe. I intend each prompt to be a 15-minute word sprint. Set a timer for 15 minutes and just keep writing until the timer goes off. You’ll be amazed by what you can achieve in 15 minutes. These first few prompts are designed to help you know your main character more fully. You do them one after the other right now, pick and choose, do one a day—whatever works for you!
For the first four prompts in this NaNoWriMo series, click here.
For prompts six to eight, click here.
For prompts eight to eleven, click here.
For prompts twelve to fourteen, click here.
For prompts fifteen to eighteen, click here.
For prompts nineteen to twenty-one, click here.
For prompts twenty-two or twenty-five, click here.