Day 13: Characters in the Orphan Energy

Hey there, Igniter! Monica Leonelle from theworldneedsyourbook.com. Today is day 13 of the challenge, and we are talking about the orphan energy. This is day 13 of the challenge, characters in the orphan energy. And so the orphan energy, it is part of this archetypal system, I guess. You know, it's, it's from the book The Hero Within. The Six Archetypes We Live By. It's by Carol Pearson, and there are four of these: the orphan energy, the wanderer energy, the warrior energy, and the martyr energy. Um, so this first one is the orphan energy, and it corresponds to what we talked about in day 12, the setup. So the setup is really looking at your first part of your book, like Act 1 of your book, it's looking at that from a very, um, from like a plot perspective or from the external arc perspective for each character. So this is going to look at the internal arc of that. So the orphan energy, it's really about the emotional resonance or the emotional pieces to the setup section. So, um, orphan energy and the setup, they correspond to the same portion of your novel, the first 25%. Uh, the setup is the external plot. The orphan energy is the internal or emotional journey of your characters. Uh, and you know, it follows along with really with the whole setup piece of it, but, um, it's just— it's really talking about the underlying emotions. And so without doing this work, you could have a pretty amazing setup. Without doing this work, you will struggle to hook the reader. And I do see this frequently when I'm reading, that the emotional piece is not there, because I think what people talk about, especially around story structure, they really tend to talk more about the setup or the external arc, and they don't do this, um, emotional resonance work. So, uh, yeah, so I'll just get right into it. All right, so we're looking at characters in the orphan energy, and we're looking at the emotional arc of your protagonist, your antagonist, or any other important point of view characters that are in your novel. And so this section, or this day, is, you know, again, you'll have— you'll be able to do this per character that you are kind of mapping. So, you know, whoever you've been mapping in the past days, you're going to want to do it for this as well. And for this section, you can basically use your artistic skills. And what you want to do is you want to look at the before and the after of this section. So, you know, who is this character at the beginning of your novel? Who is this character at about the 25% mark of your novel? For some of you, if you're doing a condensed version of the setup, this could be the 10% mark of your novel. But who are, who are they from an emotional standpoint or from a mental standpoint. So this is not what's happening to them on the outside, it's who are they energetically. And so you can think about what emotions they are moving through, um, and on this worksheet you would, um, you can map these onto the body. And so what's the value of doing that? The biggest thing is that you are able to show the reader what's going on rather than tell them. So, you know, like instead of saying like, "She was anxious," you can say, you know, "Her shoulders tensed up," or, you know, you can use this as more of like a map. So that you can express the emotion rather than trying to just tell the emotion. What else? Okay, so you want to consider how the emotions change. It's pretty important for the emotions to change. So some people are writing static characters, and so this may not apply as much, but for most people, you'll be writing a dynamic character, and your character is going to go through essentially a mini transformation just in this setup piece. And so what you wanna, some of the things you might wanna map out, how has the character's schedule changed and how does that feel to them? So in The Hunger Games, for example, Katniss Everdeen, her schedule changes quite a bit. So she, you know, she's trying to have an ordinary day and she has to go to this reaping ceremony. And then the reaping ceremony kind of unfolds in the worst possible way almost for her. And then the aftermath of that also unfolds in unexpected ways. So how she deals with her kind of split-second decision of volunteering for those games unfolds um, somewhat painfully for her as she goes on. Same with the routine, the environment. So how is your character responding to a different environment? Um, what has changed about that character's goals and dreams? What has changed in their relationships? So with Katniss, for example, um, in The Hunger Games, what changes is that she has to leave Gale and Gale is, his goodbye is like kind of brutal to her. It's not the, you know, it's not really the goodbye that we expect. Additionally, she tries, you know, she gets to see her mom and her sister before she leaves and they are essentially like ripped from her, ripped away from her before she's really ready. Uh, what else? Um, you know, how, how does this character's beliefs change? Sometimes there is a clothing change. Clothing is actually like— so it could be clothing, it could be jewelry, it could be hair. Like, some of these things, um, they actually really matter. They're symbolic of something. Uh, and then how do— how does that character's activities change? Like, what are they going to be doing differently? How do they feel about that? Um, you know, again, you're trying to show this mini transformation that they're experiencing. So you can map this out onto their body and do this for up to 5 characters. In the last part of the section, you have, um, an extra set of pages. So this is the scene notes for the first 25% of your story. And so if you are doing an abbreviated setup and orphan energy, you can just count this as the first 10%. And so what you're going to do here is you're really just going to, um, combine what you've learned about your story through the orphan energy, um, of day 13 with what you learned about your story through the setup of day 12. And so remember, the setup is pretty much your external arc and the orphan energy is going to be your internal arc. And so it's really helpful to start to put those together, like mesh them together a bit and start to work out the details of your scenes and of this, this part of your book very step by step. You may also want to include some of the other stuff you've learned. So we talked about the fatal flaw from day 7. We talked about false beliefs from day 8. Uh, we talked about motivations from day 9, uh, the goals or external goals from day 10. So you really want to look at, um, the larger picture of your story. So we are on day 13, we are almost halfway through, and this is a good time to just start to lay out kind of scene by scene, or, you know, if you're not, if you're not to scene by scene, maybe it's beat by beat, uh, lay out kind of the order that your story is going to unfold for that setup portion of the book. So, you know, you have the scene number. This is just for you if this is something you want to do. You don't have to do it. The scene description For me, I like to keep it very short. So the scene description could be like, "Ordinary day— going hunting with Gale." So that would be an example of Katniss Everdeen's ordinary day. And then in the scene notes, you can do the external— you know, what's going on externally in the book and then what's going on internally in the character. And you can lay this out. You can also, if you want, you can put— If you have multiple viewpoints, for example, you might want to put the character's viewpoint in the scene description. So just kind of depends on if you are writing from one character's perspective versus multiple characters. So you can kind of play with this. If you don't like these workbook pages, you can also get out a Google spreadsheet or an Excel spreadsheet. And you can create columns like this and you can do, of course, as many as you want. So this is a very basic setup in this workbook. You can also set up your own, you know, Google document or your own, basically your own spreadsheet. And you can create as many columns as you want so that you can go into more detail on what's going on. So you could have the scene number, you could have the point of view character, You could have a short description. You could have what's going on internally, what's going on externally, what happens in the scene, and so on. So, you know, the idea here again is just to try to combine many of the previous days. So you've done a lot of work at this point, and you know a lot about your novel. So trying to combine all of that and make sure you don't forget any of the pieces. So make sure you haven't forgotten the fatal flaw and that sort of thing. And just so you know, we're going to, this is going to continue to unfold and this section is going to grow bigger. So I'm going to keep putting this, this in the workbook so that you have a way to kind of track things as you go. Now, if you are not feeling this right now, it's totally fine. At the end of the challenge, there are several days that focus on cleaning up this. So you can use those days to start to get it on paper or whatever else you want. Um, so just know that what you're doing right now is a rough sketch. Feel— you're gonna feel free to go off book later if you need to. There's gonna be changes that you're gonna make along the way as you start writing. There's gonna be changes. So we, you know, at the end of this challenge, we go back through and we double-check all of this stuff. So we're just really just starting to get this on paper. Thank you so much for watching and listening to day 13 of the challenge, all about the orphan energy. Make sure you check out day 12 because those two days go together really nicely, and so it helps to, to watch one and then watch the other. So definitely check that out if you haven't. If you have any questions about today, make sure you leave your question in the comment section. That way I can get back to you, I can give you whatever support you need during the challenge. And if you haven't signed up for the challenge, then make sure you check out the links in the description because it has all the information you need. You definitely want to sign up for the challenge if you haven't done so yet. And even though we're on day 13, it's totally fine. You can absolutely catch up. It really doesn't take that long to do each day. And if you miss a couple days, it's totally fine as well. So definitely check that out if you're interested. Thank you so much for watching and listening. I hope this has been helpful to you. Have a wonderful day.