Continuing our series of prompts to help novelists as well as short story writers, today I encourage you to move forward a little in your protagonist’s timeline, but still stay before the main story.
The Prompt
Write a story about the days leading up to the beginning of your novel, or your story’s big incident. Alternatively, write a journal of those days from your protagonist’s point of view.
Tips
- Use this story to ‘brain dump’ all the stuff that your reader doesn’t want to wade through before they get to the jumping-off-point for your story.
- You can use this knowledge to season the story later, with a light hand.
- Remember, you can recycle these stories are freebies and giveaways to help you promote your novel and build your audience.
Don’t forget to leave a comment to let us know how you got on.
Well, neither of these journal entries went the way I thought they would – and I’m very happy about that. =D
Yes, I’m ten days behind with posting, but not with writing, and I’ve got high hopes of getting caught up today.
Here’s my May 17 planning post:
http://shanjeniahslovelychaos.com/lovely-chaos-blog/2017/5/27/protagonists-journal-for-stad-may-day-seventeen
The link does not open.
What will you recommend that I do:
1. My Y7s are studying Chinese Cinderella at the moment
2. Their final learning review is about the protagonist’s journal.
Please advise if there are any suitable resources that can help me to prepare my students.
Thank you.
What preparation do you think they need?
This prompt made me happy. Meaning, I really did figure out something about the protagonist of my novel-in-progress. And this cheers me up no end.
This makes me SO HAPPY!!!
Here’s my response, as well as a piece of Juniper’s past that she never discussed: https://storiesin5minutes.wordpress.com/2017/05/17/junipers-journal/