DEATH
Set up to write. No point in reading through this. Write through it.
5 Minutes each node. Several nodes in each section. Go!
Death
Your character is profoundly shaken by the conflict and sometimes in that shakeup is an opportunity. An opportunity to be reborn. First there is a crucial step to be taken: to be born again they have to first die. Death comes a knockin’ in a variety of guises.
The obvious:
from the muzzle of a smoking gun
front tire blowout on a curvy mountain roads
getting fired from your dream job
fired from a company you founded
the house was burgled and your cat ran off to never return
burglar took your dad’s ashes
Deep Change
Let’s get back to the upside of the downside of dying: compost the old habits to create fertile soil for growth. Have you ever tended a garden? Some plants, say tomatoes, are not going to weather the winter no matter how mild. If you try to keep that tomato plant alive with various elixirs and strategies you’ll arrive at the same place. Plant has got to do what a plant has got to do. We can look at death, or the opportunity of death, as another version of “the call.” We know how to respond: register our resistance, and honor the call.
The first time I died I…
She walks out of the room and all the air…
Just as he turns to me the place…
When the bridge fell, everyone…
One by one all my friends…
The screen with the timer shows my my parents and the sign says, “Choose one” so I…
The children stopped crying so abruptly I…
He says he is embarrassed when his friends ask…
On the Bright Side
See the people around you, everyone is dying. Either they are doing it in slow motion without being aware or they are in denial. So like glacier melt, all characters will be absorbed into the earth and air. Almost 108 billion people have taken a breath in the air you now breathe. Fewer than 8 billion of these folks are still alive.
Things Looking Like Death
I struggled with the word “death”
But most stories that will this will most likely be spiritual
Five from the project you found it
The price too big to pay
-Personal cost
-Death of family/friend/significant other
-Emotional destruction of say
A hole so deep it seems impossible to dig ourselves out from
Did you write? I hope so. It is how books get written.
Great thing about these exercises is you can do them over and/or you can do them for 10, 15, 30 minutes.
Do them in a way that works for you.
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