What are you actually trying to say?
Hey ya’ll happy new year, hope yours was fun and safe. I spent my new year at home with my hubby, it was low key and perfect. We spent the night playing board games and having what I’m beginning to call creative conversations. We have a lot of talks where we look at our favorite media, video games, books, movies etc, and we build a world and story within our favorite setting., I know it’s basically fan fiction, but don’t call me on it. It’s great way to get my creative juices flowing, and Grant (my man) is always challenging me to be a better more creative writer. This week we started something new, a new story, media unknown. I was going on and on about the different magical races our world could have, and the different conflicts between those races, I was riding high on the world building train, when I was completely deflated, by one singular question.
“What are you trying to say” I went quiet. How dare he get this real. We were just supposed to be having fun, not doing things that I haven’t even done for my own manuscript. It was just last week that I stated to dabble with character motivation, now all I could think about was the point of my book, and the fact that I might have been missing it. Was I writing a story with no a point? Was I a writer without a voice, with a book without a theme. That was my fear, it sent me into a not-so-quit panic. So I went back to a paragraph I had written long before this phase of editing. A paragraph about why my book mattered. I’ve talk about this paragraph before, and I will talk about it again.
It important for you to know why your work matters. Why it matters to the world and why it matters to you. It’s so easy to get loss and forgot why you started out on this in the first place. My theme was here buried in between the lines of this paragraph, in my manuscript, and in my main character’s journey.
So instead of links, I’m sharing some writing exercise and questions to help youy get into some of the themes of your work. Starting off, and you probably saw this coming
- Write out a paragraph on why your novel matters.
- From that paragraph find a thematic question you manuscript is trying to ask? Answer that question
- What seems to be driving your plot/story forward
- Are they’re any universal truths in your work?
- Do you feel like there’s a moral to your story, could be your theme.
So that’s it for this Friday. What do you think the themes are in your novel? Do you figure out theme first or as you go along? Meeting with my crit partner later this week to flesh out mine theme some more and get her help on creating a writing schedule that actually works for me. Till next week create, hustle, and love yourself.
