Hello, again! This will like be my last dispatch from the Barbados Wayward Wormhole writing retreat; it’s Thursday evening and I’ll be on my way home Saturday afternoon. There’s been a fair amount of socializing among our cohort of writers, with a pool party on Tuesday afternoon and beachy vibes at Deia Beach this afternoon. Betwixt and between, folks have been doing one-on-one conferences with both Cat Rambo and Premee Mohamed and learning about story theme in didactic session.
Book Theme
I confused the Mind Map Story Core material from last week with theme: not the same thing. It’s unlikely that a writer can effectively start out a new piece with the theme in mind before writing the book. More likely, understanding of theme emerges when the book draft is complete, and the characters have completed their story arcs.
Theme is a universal statement the art makes about the human condition. Adjacent to theme, but not the same, is the message. The story message is a more overtly value-based statement that connects directly to the plot but is not universal. (The writer is probably going to need to figure this out for the blurb on the back of the book.) And core idea is something else, as well.
Our Pod’s Novellas’ Themes
Conveniently enough, we had all completed early draft novellas before coming to the retreat, so we followed up the presentation on theme with a discussion of our books’ themes. Finding theme was surprisingly difficult.
I’m going to have to sit with these ideas for a good long while but am looking forward to processing all this material into craft blogs for the next few months.
Meanwhile, enjoy yourself with my latest novel, The Talking Cure.
“The Talking Cure is a marvelous story—an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery infused with a strong sense of the Weird… and a hearty dose of magic on the side. It’s ideal for all fans of the sinister, the surprising, and the strange.”—Cherie Priest, award-winning author of Boneshaker
Find The Talking Cure at these fine locations:
Left Bank Books in St. Louis
Have you ever gotten lots of new material very scrambled in your mind? How did you sort it out? Comment on the blog.
If you enjoyed this blog about critiques, you might like to read about Writers Workshops.
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Wolfhearted is also available as an Audible audiobook, here.
Earlier this year, St. Louis Writers Guild published Weird STL, an anthology celebrate the strange, spooky, and just plain wonderful stories of our hometown. This volume of short stories, poems, a play, and essays includes a Sean Joye universe short story, “Big Magick.” Joseph Arwald, one of the baddies from The Big Cinch, tells us what really happened to the Ferris Wheel from the St. Louis 1904 World’s Fair.
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