Monica Leonelle explains martyr energy: how protagonists sacrifice to protect others, and how to resolve character relationships at your story's climax. In The Hunger Games, Katniss must face the truth with Peeta in a transformed world. Map emotional arcs for five key characters and tie them to your plot resolution.
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Hey there, Igniter!
Monica Leonelle from theworldneedsyourbook.com. Today is day 19 of the challenge and we are talking about the martyr energy. We are on day 19, characters in the martyr energy.
So the martyr energy corresponds with the revolution— the resolution of your novel, and it's basically your character is going to go into this final battle and they are sacrificing themselves either physically or it could be emotionally. They're sacrificing themselves in order to save the world, save the relationship, save the team, save their lives, save their loved ones' lives, whatever the stakes are for that ending. So there's the possibility of death. There's, you know, for romance, it's usually not death, though sometimes it is like a thriller romance.
It's at least a heartbreak for some, you know, for some other types of stories.
So a heartbreak or like a bumping up against their core values or even like just sacrificing their happiness. So like a historic, historic novel, it might be, you know, the character decides to give up her life and like, you know, marry the king to save the country as opposed to, you know, following her love. So that's the type of thing that it would be. So it's really this energy of like they are sacrificing themselves and it's for the greater good. And so this is, you know, this is an important part of it is like Well, I guess it doesn't have to be for the greater good, but if you can make it for the greater good, then that will really set them up to be more of a hero. If you can't, that's okay because it doesn't always work out that way where it is for the greater good in that sense. It could also just be like they have to, you know, save their own life. But typically you want the stakes to be something outside of themselves. So they're gonna put their, put their own life on the line to save someone else, or, or, you know, the equivalent of that if your story is not, you know, that it doesn't have that high of stakes. So like if it's a romance, you know, they're gonna, they're going to put the relationship on the line in order to, yeah, in order, in order to like protect somebody or whatever it is. So I hope that makes sense. Um, so the fatal flaw is transformed in this section. We've talked about that a lot in past days, so definitely check out day 18. And then this section is also just tying up loose ends. And for this particular day, we're gonna look at some emotional loose ends, and these typically have to do with the character's relationships. So So you want to tie up all of the protagonist's relationships and how they've changed throughout the book. And it doesn't, you know, it doesn't have to be every single one, but the example is like The Hunger Games. You know, the ending is Katniss has to come clean to Peeta that the, you know, that she was kind of faking the relationship to save his life, and of course that's you know, he— I think he understands that, but he's still devastated by it because he really believed that that emotion was real. And so she has to like kind of burst his bubble around that. Um, all right, so, you know, this— these sections, um, kind of the same as what has been in past days. Consider how the character's emotions change. You can map it out onto the body. So the character is going from an extraordinary world or situation, and then they're going back to their ordinary world, but that ordinary world has changed for them, and it's changed because they have changed. Because they can't— the journey isn't, you know, there's no emotional resonance to the journey unless the, the world has changed, um, for them, and unless the character has changed. So you were able to show that in their ordinary world. And the phrase that comes to mind is like, you can't go back home. So a lot of times the character— this is kind of the cliché way of how this works— is the character goes back to the home that they left in the beginning of the story. Now that's kind of the classic hero's journey. They go back and they are looking at this ordinary world that they— they're just looking at it completely differently now. So they've just had a change of perspective and things are very different for them. And so you see this in The Hunger Games. You really see it in the next book of The Hunger Games where, you know, basically she goes back and she's technically a hero, but now she has this complicated relationship with Peeta. And now her relationship with her friend Gail has also changed because Gail, who was also pretty much in love with her, just watched her like pretend to love this other guy on TV, which is, you know, sad for him, I'm sure, and difficult for him. And then her family is no longer poor. They have a lot of money now and they live in, they live in like these Victors, so they're considered Victors, so they, they have like a Victor's house. So they're— and they have, you know, help. They have maids. Like, they don't have to worry about food or anything anymore. And it's, it's just different. So, so her whole, her whole world has really changed, in part because of the Games, but also because um, because she has changed. So you can map this out for 5 characters. And then the end of this is there are scene notes for the last section. So this is a good place where you can combine some of the emotional elements that we're figuring out today with the resolution that was on day 18. So you can pull all of that data into the, the couple pages of this, um, so that you're kind of— you kind of have like scene by scene, beat by beat what you're going to do at the end of the story.
Thank you so much for watching and listening. If you have any questions, make sure you drop a comment below and I'm happy to get back to you.
I'm happy to support you however I can during the challenge.
If you haven't signed up for the challenge, then make sure you do so. Even though we're day 19, it doesn't matter. There's still plenty of time. We're not even two-thirds of the way through. So make sure you sign up. There are links in the description.
