Themes
One of my New Year's resolutions is to post journal entries for my readership more often. That being the case, I figured the following point warranted more than just a casual remark on Twitter.
Today, I finally nailed down (in a succint form, no less) what the main theme of Summerhill is.
Moreover, I've figured out how the two main characters' story arcs reinforce this theme.
Now, it might seem weird to think that I've been working on a story for over a year and only just now figured out what the theme was. To be fair, I had ideas on what the theme could have been, earlier, but they never felt right, always more just like 'placeholder' than real themes.
It's perfectly possible to write a story or even a novel without having a theme in mind. This is especially true with first drafts, where the main goal is just to get the story down in a form where you're able to better analyze it (contrary to popular belief, most people are NOT better at just sorting things out in their head first, myself included; the moving parts of a story are all very hard to keep track of, and the more complex the story gets, the harder it gets to hold it all inside just your imagination).
It's really in the rewriting and the revising that maintaining a theme in a story really becomes doable. Heck, when you're still just starting as a writer, it may not be something you really try to do at all (and that's fine! --at least to a point). In fact, trying to write for a theme on a first draft, at least for a longer work, might even be detrimental, because you risk losing sight of putting together a coherent story, first and foremost (and nine times out of ten, you want the coherent story to come first and foremost; as with all things, there are exceptions).
But yes, since I'm currently working on telling this story for the third or fourth time (it's hard to keep track), it's quite a relief to know that I have the theme that I'm needing to weave through the story, and that I have a story that already reinforces that. Hopefully, this means that my new draft will come along more readily and be of a higher quality than my previous attempts to tell the same story.
Today, I finally nailed down (in a succint form, no less) what the main theme of Summerhill is.
Moreover, I've figured out how the two main characters' story arcs reinforce this theme.
Now, it might seem weird to think that I've been working on a story for over a year and only just now figured out what the theme was. To be fair, I had ideas on what the theme could have been, earlier, but they never felt right, always more just like 'placeholder' than real themes.
It's perfectly possible to write a story or even a novel without having a theme in mind. This is especially true with first drafts, where the main goal is just to get the story down in a form where you're able to better analyze it (contrary to popular belief, most people are NOT better at just sorting things out in their head first, myself included; the moving parts of a story are all very hard to keep track of, and the more complex the story gets, the harder it gets to hold it all inside just your imagination).
It's really in the rewriting and the revising that maintaining a theme in a story really becomes doable. Heck, when you're still just starting as a writer, it may not be something you really try to do at all (and that's fine! --at least to a point). In fact, trying to write for a theme on a first draft, at least for a longer work, might even be detrimental, because you risk losing sight of putting together a coherent story, first and foremost (and nine times out of ten, you want the coherent story to come first and foremost; as with all things, there are exceptions).
But yes, since I'm currently working on telling this story for the third or fourth time (it's hard to keep track), it's quite a relief to know that I have the theme that I'm needing to weave through the story, and that I have a story that already reinforces that. Hopefully, this means that my new draft will come along more readily and be of a higher quality than my previous attempts to tell the same story.