Day 17: Characters in the Warrior Energy

Hey there, Igniter!

Monica Leonelle from theworldneedsyourbook.com. Today is day 17 of the challenge and we are talking about the warrior energy.

Wah wah! We're on day 17, characters in the warrior energy. So the warrior energy, it matches the section, same section of your novel as the attack. So it's the 50 to 75% section. So basically your character is a warrior now. They are taking active action. And so the reversal is a, you know, it's like a pretty shocking moment for them. So they may— after the reversal, they may be frustrated, angry, disappointed. They may want blood. They may want revenge. They may want to win. But they're basically going to go and attack the antagonist. And this is you know, everything here is leading up to the final battle or the climax of the book. So in this energy, you can still introduce new mentors, weapons, relationships, challenges, but you want to build off of the Wanderer energy. So the Wanderer energy is really like levels 2 through 5, and this is levels, you know, 6 through 9, basically, of a video game. So you really just want to like crank up the— crank up the heat on some of the challenges that you're offering your characters. This is when a lot of long-term relationships happen. So, you know, two allies become tight and like they're— they like learn to actually like trust each other. And a lot of that is because they've been building this rapport. Throughout this, throughout the book. Um, you know, relationships— like, if you're going to have a romantic, uh, relationship, then it's going to kind of heat up here, um, regardless of whether it's a romance or not. But if there is romance as a part of your story, which it's part of almost every story, then this is where it heats up. Um, you're gonna break free of mentors and allies as well. So, you know, I talked about this in day 16, but so you're going to gain assets, or the character is going to gain assets and knowledge and all this stuff, but they can also lose things, and that's really important. So it's really important to show their loss because that's what amplifies the emotional challenges for them. That's what breaks through their false beliefs. That's what— that, you know, It's kind of like amping up their emotions is a good thing during this section because that is what pushes them to the extremes that they need to be pushed to in order to end up in, end up in the final battle. So you're, you know, you're not like basically, you know, most people are gonna go about their lives they don't want to face a villain. That's just not what they want to do. They want to survive, they want to run away, they don't want to face a villain head-on. So you have to amp up the emotions of the character so that they can face the villain head-on. And this is, you know, this still applies to romance. It applies to like a bunch of, you know, it applies to every genre, but Romance is always the one that I hear that's like, oh, this is totally different. It's like, it's really not. Um, you know, the antagonist is like all the reasons that they don't want to be in a relationship together. So typically this Warrior energy is like they've gone from, you know, this passive, like, I don't want to be with you, to something happened. Maybe they kissed, or maybe, you know, something, something happened. They confess their feelings to each other. And now it's like they're both fighting for the relationship and they, they think they have it handled going into the finale, but then something really challenging happens that threatens to tear them apart. So it's really this, this pattern is really in every genre. And I think the other genres like fantasy is like very easy to see, sci-fi very easy to see, you know, mystery, same thing. But In a mystery, there are villains, but the biggest villain is really the puzzle, I think. It's like, is the character gonna solve the puzzle? I think that's, you know, and there's often a villain like a murderer or something, or, you know, there's like challenges on the way, but to me, the ultimate villain is probably the puzzle and like you know, can the villain outsmart the detective, or what, you know, whatever, whoever's in the mystery. All right, so, um, another thing about this energy is that the Wanderer energy tends to be like more of like a training ground energy. So it's like the characters in school, or the characters like practicing magic, but it's for their lessons. It's not, you know, meant to be used in the field. And I think with the Warrior energy, it tends to be like, um, they're fighting in the real world now. So for example, so if you were going to do this for just a regular character, it'd be like, you know, in the Wanderer energy, they're taking self-defense classes. In the Warrior energy, they're they actually have to defend themselves against somebody. And so it's not— they're not defending themselves against like the main villain, but they are defending themselves in the field, in the real world. So that's something interesting to play with and something you may want to keep in mind, which is that training can never fully prepare you for real dangers that you encounter in the real world. And then this is, yeah, like romance, you're testing, testing the, testing the relationship. If you're writing a mystery, they're testing the problem-solving chops. So this is all, yeah, this is all the transition. All right, so this is going to be really similar to days 15 and day and 13. So we talked about this with the Wanderer energy, we talked about this with the Orphan energy. So you want to look at, uh, what is this character like in the Warrior, uh, or as the Warrior, and then what do they look like as the final battle. And so you can kind of map this out and, um, map out, map out where, you know, map out the flow of energy through this. You can do this for 5 characters, and then at the end we have the scene notes again. So you have scene number, scene description, scene notes. And again, you can use a spreadsheet if you prefer. If you, you know, if you are doing this in the book, you would just write it out. But the, you know, the gist of this is that you want to get your story down for this section scene by scene if you can. And so you're going to be combining, um, day 16, the attack, with this day 17 work. And so you're going to see like, um, how, you know, am I moving the story forward through the external goals? Am I moving the story forward through breaking through a false belief? And so you're just going to really map that out. And hopefully some of your scenes at least are pulling double duty or triple duty on some of the stuff, but if not, that's okay. Like as long as you kind of get it all in there, it's totally fine.

Thank you so much for watching and listening. If you have any questions about Day 17, the Warrior energy, or if you have questions about Day 16, the Attack, uh, just know that these two days go together. And you can leave any questions you have in the comments below. I'm happy to share some resources with you, happy to answer anything, any questions you have, and support you however I can. If you haven't signed up for the challenge, make sure you do so.

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You can definitely still join. You can catch up. You don't even have to catch up.

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Uh, anything you're able to do to prepare for your novel is going to help you in the long run. Hope that this was very helpful to you. Have a wonderful day.