Nanowrimo: The Thanksgiving Coma
Screenwriting Tricks for Authors
We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving here in the UK, and I was never a fan of that problematic holiday to begin with. (In fact, I’m so not a fan that my first novel, The Harrowing, set in a spooky college dorm over the long Thanksgiving weekend, is a horror story!)
But even an ocean away, even before the day begins in the US, I can still feel that familiar inertia of this long weekend descending over me like a tryptophan-induced fog.
Marat Assassiné, by Jacques-Louis David
And I know some of you are going into fraught situations, with politically divided families and lots of potential triggers.
So… how to work through this if you’re doing Nanowrimo?
Do you tell the family you have an infectious disease and can’t come to (or cook) dinner this year? Do you cut your Wi-Fi cables to avoid the news and the Black Friday madness?
How the hell do you keep writing?
Well, maybe this will help.
1. Remember that even 15 minutes of writing a day will advance your book or script farther than you think.
Okay, the trick to this is—if you write five minutes a day, or fifteen, you will write more than five or fifteen minutes a day, sometimes a whole hell of a lot more per day most days. But it’s the first five minutes that are the hardest. If you can just start, and commit to just that fifteen minutes, or even five, those five minutes will turn into ten, and those ten minutes will turn into pages, and just one page a day for a year is a book.
2. This is your personal All is Lost Moment. In a good way!
If you are really writing a full book in a month —and that’s not something I really encourage, but for the sake of argument!— then the perilous Thanksgiving weekend falls about at that pivotal All is Lost Scene. Otherwise known as The Black Moment; or as the ancient Greek dramatists called it, The Long Dark Night of the Soul.
This is where the Hero/ine becomes so overwhelmed that they basically surrender. And then get that final clue, that incredible insight, that new way of looking at things that will re-energize them and send them into the Final Battle with a New Plan.
(Speaking of family—VERY often this insight only comes once the Hero/ine has taken a deep look at their past!)
Do you kind of see the parallel I’m making here? Could you maybe use it?
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3. Practice Story
If you really can’t avoid family time, can you slyly suggest watching a movie that will actually help you with the next section of your book? Maybe one of the ones from your Master List? You can keep conversation from becoming homicidal and watch it looking for the essential Story Elements of each Act? (I always recommend enlisting the kids for this—they are very, very good at it!)
It doesn’t even have to be a movie from your Master List. You can learn from the bad ones, too!
Because let’s face it, we end up watching a lot of bad ones. Because the spouse wants to, because the kids want to, because we’re just looking to space out and not think about… everything.
But realistically, any movie that actually made it through the labyrinth of the Hollywood development system and got released is going to have most of its story elements in place, ridiculous though they may be. So look for them—and use them!
Story Elements lists and examples, Act by Act:
And in the workbooks: Chapters 7, 12-16 and throughout the books.
All material © Alexandra Sokoloff, Screenwriting Tricks for Authors
Find me on BlueSky!
Like everyone else I know, I’m moving off the cesspit that is now Xitter and onto Bluesky.
(I know, more social media, but it’s really SO much better there…)
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Hope everyone finds something to celebrate.
—Alex
And in case you’re looking for a spooky weekend read -
My Thanksgiving-set dark academia horror novel is free on Kindle Unlimited —audiobook 99c on Audible.
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