Category: Tips and Inspiration

Ideas on writing better or fire your imagination.

Thematic Significance

From the Plot Whisperer blog, Plot Your Story’s Theme, comes a homework assignment: Make a list of recurring themes in your work.

From the Plot Whisperer blog, Plot Your Story’s Theme, comes a homework assignment: Make a list of recurring themes in your work.

Hmm. Well I don’t know if I can connect my stories with a theme per se. I have noticed I enjoy writing about absurd situations or points of view that are off-beat. I suppose one theme might be ordinary people grappling with something outside their everyday experience. I think what I am trying to do is show something we see all the time, but in a way that is for the first time. Maybe the themes are wonder and awe and apprehension.

My novel though is consciously thematic. The themes are love, faith and identity. Plot Whisperer promises a follow-up post for taking our theme list and building ideas from them.

Do you start your writings with a theme in mind and tailor the story to them, or do your themes emerge from the writing process?

Topics for Your Blog

I came across this article from Get in Front Blogging: 101 Topics to Write About in Your Articles, Newsletters and Blogs.

I came across this article from Get in Front Blogging: 101 Topics to Write About in Your Articles, Newsletters and Blogs. The site is aimed at small businesses, but the list is certainly applicable for just about any type of blog. I will add it to my links on the right.

To Outline or Not to Outline: That isn’t the Question

Larry Brooks at Write to Done posted an article, Solved: The Outlining versus Organic Writing Debate. Writers for and against outlining their novels are missing the point, Brooks contends.

Larry Brooks at Write to Done posted an article, Solved: The Outlining versus Organic Writing Debate. Writers for and against outlining their novels are missing the point, Brooks contends. Structure is what matters. Be sure to give it a read.

For myself, I am in the organic camp. I have an aversion to outlining because I procrastinate well enough and outlining is another distraction. Brooks’s point on structure is well taken and recently I have been warming to the idea of outlining afterall. I so enjoy writing without preconceived ideas of where to take the story moment to moment. I discover more about characters and feel free to let them take me down alleyways. They may lead nowhere or somewhere.

Of course there is underlying direction in my head and I have to get there if there is ever to be an end to the writing. Outlining would help with ensuring that themes, plots and revelations unfold at the right time. Also, my understanding is that outlines have utility for more than just the writer. Literary agents and/or editors have need of outlines for the novels they are representing. They aren’t reading the manuscripts as readers, but as professionals with deadlines and way too much on their desks.

I just want to finish up the current and next chapters before I re-examine the novel’s structure.

What do you think of outlining and Brooks’s article?

Epitaphs

Reading Ad Infinitvm by Nicholas Ostler, he mentions a Latin epitaph commonly found on grave markers in twelfth century Europe.

Reading Ad Infinitvm by Nicholas Ostler, he mentions a Latin epitaph commonly found on grave markers in twelfth century Europe. I find the English translation haunting:

Whoever you will be who has crossed,
stand, read, weep.
I am what you will be, I had been what
you are. I beg you, pray for me.

What are some memorable epitaphs you have come across?