It’s Fri-YAY! I hope you’re ready for a little chat on craft before you head off to celebrate a week well-lived.
Last Friday, we talked about how I organize the things I’ve learned about my story during my early discovery writing sessions, and then we moved on to how I write a synopsis just for me so that I can use it as an outline.
Now that I’ve written a working synopsis, it’s time to get back to the business of first-drafting. But before I do that, I want to scour my synopsis for clues to point me in the right thematic direction.
Together with setting, character (point of view), plot, and style, theme is considered one of the key elements of fiction writing. It can be defined this way:
Sometimes a work has more than one theme. Sometimes a work has one major theme and several minor themes. Sometimes a work’s theme is clear and sometimes it’s harder to dig out.
My debut novel, Angel Eyes, was basically the result of an idea that took the shape of a theme very early on. When this happens, it’s a gift. It can direct your storytelling from beginning to end.
Sometimes a theme comes to you as you draft: Worship is warfare
The second book in my trilogy, Broken Wings, was harder. I had several guiding ideas, but the theme of worship is warfare didn’t come to me until I’d first-drafted the final few scenes. At that point, a light flickered on in my tired brain and I knew how I wanted to rebuild one of my newer ranks of angel and how I wanted to restructure some of my character arcs. It was a fantastic moment, but one that took a lot of faith to get to. Until that moment I couldn’t adequately answer the question, “What are you writing about?”
Sometimes, especially in series writing, the theme of a book is inevitable: Choosing not to see comes with its own bondage
By the time I got to Dark Halo, I knew what I needed to tackle. The conversation about seeing the invisible–the conversation that I’d started in book one–was still missing an important element. It was time to introduce a new question: What happens if you choose to close your eyes to everything you’ve seen?
But, sometimes, especially when you’re early on in your career, figuring out if you have larger themes to explore can be difficult. You may have to dig a bit. Some questions to ask yourself:
Does your main character believe a lie? What is it?
Is there a task only your hero can accomplish?
What are YOU, the author, trying to say?
-No one is beyond redemption
-Life is frail
-Comfort keeps us from our destiny
-We need others
-War makes monsters of us all
-Even a small light shatters the darkness
-Power corrupts
-Love is worth fighting for