Day 6
Word count: 11,446 words
Word count goal: 12,000 words
Mapping the Hero’s Journey: Refusal
Save The Cat: Point of No Return

Plotting with Tarot

I did a reading a bit off the book. Today, I focused on The Inciting Incident:

The Inciting Incident: The Empress Upside-down – the emotional world, the sensual world, and the possibility of new life. A tremendous potential to take an idea and turn it into a finished product; in reverse.

What is going on when The Inciting Incident happens: Ten Of Wands – Carrying a burden

How the Inciting Incident forces my MC to act: Four Of Cups Upside-down – ignoring potential, inspiration in the reverse.

My interpretation – My character’s inciting incident is a reversal of his idea that his quest was finished. He feels burdened by the knowledge that he has found. The inciting incident forces him to stop ignoring the information that has dropped in his lap.

Ask Your Character

• How would you describe a perfect day when you were young?
• What did you think your life would be like when you were older?
• Do you have any favorite stories from your childhood?

Word Of The Day

quixotic: adj. extravagantly chivalrous or romantic; visionary, impractical, or impracticable. 2. impulsive and often rashly unpredictable.

8 Action Verbs:

activated          calculated          contracted          edited

guided               lobbied              promoted            shared

Poem prompt

Theme: The point of no return

The point of not return
Return to my regimen
Regimen of daily responsibilities
Responsibilities give my life meaning
Meaning guided by principals
Principals shared through relationships
Relationships I must protect
Protect from outside forces
Forces that wish us harm
Harm guided by evil intent
Intent calculated by selfish will
Will lobbied to tear me from safety
Safety the promise of my daily prayers
Prayers of thanks with wants folded in
In hopes that I would never reach
Reach the point of no return

Note: I’ve wanted to try one of these poems since I saw one of the other poets in #OctPoWriMo write one. I think it’s a non-rhyming form of Loop poetry. It was fun and flowed well. I think the themes and motives of my MC are becoming very clear and his motives are clear in this poem. Using some of today’s Action Verbs helped guide me along.

Awesome Sentence Challenge

Explore connotations: Choose a word (may I suggest one of the active verbs or the word of the day) and look it up in your thesaurus (thesaurus.com). Pick one synonym that has positive connotations and choose one that has negative connotations and write a sentence for each one. Read the sentences aloud. Do the particular connotations of your chosen word influence how you write the rest of the sentence?

Today’s Simple Task

Show your Main Character’s greatest weakness. Put him or her in a moral dilemma.

Warm-up Exercise

Set your timer for 10 minutes. Write about the last thing your character would ever want to do. Then write a scene forcing your character to do the last thing they would ever want to do. – inspired by prompt from Josie (NaNo poster)

Recommended Word Crawl

The Nightmare Before Christmas Crawl

I tried this crawl last year and enjoyed it. Like they mention in the crawl, the movie Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas is great for watching anytime between Halloween and Christmas.

And Don’t Forget To Read!

A great writer reads and reads and reads. It may be harder to feel like you have time to read during NaNoWriMo, but it’s still important. Yesterday, I finished reading A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park, based on the true story of Salva Dut. It is the story of his young life fleeing the war in Sudan and his efforts as an adult to bring water to the people of his home country. The book is well written and a good read. I enjoyed it in little bites during the commercials of the Seahawks game.

Happy Reading and Writing!