Purple Prose:
theme

Today, I’m continuing from where I left off on Monday’s post with the analysis of the YA novel Forbidden. Hopefully the post will give you something to think about as you write your next project (regardless of the genre).

Here's the short blurb to remind you of the premise:

She is pretty and talented - sweet sixteen and never been kissed. He is seventeen, gorgeous, and on the brink of a bright future. And now they have fallen in love. But... they are brother and sister.

Foreshadowing

Throughout the story, both Maya and Lochan acknowledge that what they are doing is wrong. They struggle to figure out how to make things works without hurting anyone. Their major concern is what it will do to their family. At one point, Lochan does research on the laws surrounding incest, especially consensual incest, which is important for his decision at the climax. It shows you what they are up against.

Theme

Every scene in the book was tightly woven to the themes of sacrifice and family and love. The themes provided the forward momentum to the book and helped remove the Ewww factor. Had they not been there, or only happened randomly, the story wouldn’t have been so powerful. Every decision the two teens made were based on these three themes.

Climax

If you’re planning to read the book, and I highly recommend it, you might want to skip this section due to spoilers [alert].

Source

In the climax, Maya and Lochan decide to go all the way. Until now, they had been fighting it, knowing it’s wrong. They had only been kissing and fooling around. But their mother, who wasn’t supposed to be able to get into the house, comes home after finding out what was going on between them. She naturally freaks out and calls the police.

Knowing that he and Maya could end up in jail for what they did, which means the younger kids would be taken away by social services and separated, Lochan makes it look like he forced his sister to consent to their sexual relationship. He even goes as far as to hit her so that it looks like he was the abuser and she was the victim. He knows he’ll end up going to prison for a long time, but the sacrifice is worth it to save Maya and their siblings.

But then things go horrible wrong, and Maya tells the police it was consensual, so that Lochan’s prison sentence will be reduced. But this means Maya can be charged and would face a two-year prison sentence. Lochan makes one more sacrifice for his family. He commits suicide. With him dead, Maya can’t be charged and the family won’t be destroyed more than it already has been.

Heartbroken, Maya is ready to kill herself since she can’t live without Lochan, but her five-year-old sister says something that makes Maya realize that killing herself would make Lochan’s sacrifice pointless.

End of spoiler alert

Source

As you can see from this analysis, there was not one element that made this story powerful. It was the combination of these five elements, along with a strong plot, that made this a book I couldn’t stop thinking about long after I finished it.

What book has had the same affect on you? What was it about the book that kept you thinking about it long after you read the last page?

(Why the pictures of the cute bunnies? Because every time I think of the book and the urge to cry hits, I chant, “Fuzzy bunny, fuzzy bunny, fuzzy bunny.” It works every time. *grins*)

Two months ago, I swore I wouldn’t buy any more books dealing with the craft of writing fiction. But after reading this and this post on the moral premise, my interest was piqued regarding the book The Moral Premise: Harnessing Virtue & Vice for Box Office Success by Stanley D. Williams.

Did I buy the book right away? Nope. Didn’t need to. The moral premise for my WIP came easily to me, thanks to the blog posts. It wasn’t until I started to figure out my next story that I became stuck. My moral premise was lame. Actually, it went beyond lame. It sucked.

So, I ordered the book and I’m glad I did.

The book goes into what the moral premise really means and why it can benefit your story. As Dr. Williams points out, theme only plays part of it. For example, the moral premise for the James Bond movies would be: The pursuit of power leads to death and defeat; while the pursuit of justice leads to life and success (taken from the book).

The Moral Premise brilliantly explains how to create yours based on vice and virtue, how to use it to create your characters, and how to apply it to your plot and story structure. It gives you a framework for building a strong story that won’t let you and your readers down.

If you want to write a story that will resonate with your readers, I highly recommend the book. It’s both insightful and enjoyable. In all honestly, I couldn’t put the book down (though I did skim through a few of the early chapters). And the best part of all, there are plenty of examples from movies to demonstrate the author’s points. Movies we’re all familiar with.

What is the last writing craft book you’ve read? Do you usually figure out your theme before writing your story?

©Stina Lindenblatt

Story isn’t about plot. It’s about emotion. It’s the element that leaves your body tingling in fear or anticipation for what will happen next, and what readers want from the first page to the end. But how do you bring in emotion to add maximum power to your story?

Universal Theme

Universal theme will help your readers connect to the characters and emotions in the story. These are themes that everyone can relate to, even if they can’t relate to the specific circumstances of the story. For example, how many of you know what it feels like to have the mob kill your family? None of you, I hope. Now, what if you wrote a story about how your protagonist’s best friend tells her uncle, who happens to be the Godfather of the local crime family, that she suspects the friend is the estranged daughter of the family he’s been salivating to kill, after her father turned state evidence on his former boss? Depending on how you set up the story, you can choose to focus on the universal theme of betrayal. At one point in our lives, we’ve all experienced the feeling of being betrayed. Now we can relate to the character and the emotion of the story, even though we have never, thankfully, gone through the same experience.

Character Wounds

Another word for character wound is backstory. This is where you create the most painful past possible for your character, and let it guide your character’s actions. The type and depth of wound will be dependent on genre. The wound then plays a part in determining your character’s fears, and it is the wound and fears that make the character vulnerable. Since he doesn’t want people to know his vulnerability (especially the antagonist), he creates a persona that protects him from being hurt. For example, you could have a character who lost his parents due to an accident and is bounced around the foster care system. He ends up in the worst of homes, where the foster parents only care about the money. He’s neglected and abused. He learns not to trust adults, and because he’s bounced around so much, he learns not to develop attachments to other people. He becomes the bad-boy loner, complete with tattoos. Inside, he’s still the caring individual he was before his parents died, but he refuses to let people get close enough to discover this. That is, until he finds the right girl.

Naturally, you would not dump this information on the first page. Write the backstory down in a separate file, and fit slivers of it into your story. Start with the small stuff, hinting of the possible wound, and as the story progresses, hit your reader with the most emotional, gut wrenching parts of your protagonist’s past. Your reader will keep turning the page, because she wants to find out what really happened X number of years ago. It’s a great way to build emotional suspense.

Have you considered universal theme and character backstory when creating the emotion behind your stories?

Part two will be posted on Wednesday.

Weak writing fails to make an impact. Powerful writing grabs your reader’s attention and keeps them reading.

You don’t have to be a super hero to write power words. You just need to know a few tricks.

1. Never use two words when one word is better. Typically, the two-word issue arises when you abuse adverbs. Dash, bolt, sprint are power-loaded words. ‘Runs quickly’ is for wimps.

2. Use words in an unexpected way to add power to the sentence. These are typically your theme words or scene-related words. (e.g. if your scene deals with death, your power words would be related to death).

Example: . . . he watched the light bleedslowly out of day . . . . (Whispersby Dean Koontz)

3. Use words to show a shift in the emotion and mood of the scene.

Example: skip, sunshine, rose-scented, trudge, stench of rotting corpses, spiraling down

4. For the most impact, put your power words at the end of the sentence or paragraph. It’s not always possible, but sometimes all you need to do is rework the sentence.

Before: I’m the one who came home to witness the body bag being wheeled out of the front door, Nate covered in blood, and the flashing of emergency lights lighting up the afternoon sky.
After: I’m the one who came home to witness the flashing of emergency lights lighting up the afternoon sky, the body bag being wheeled out the front door, and Nate covered in blood. (WIP)
Noticed the difference in how I ordered the phrases between the two sentences. In the second one, they go from least important to the one with most impact (Nate covered in blood).

This is also a great trick for emphasising something or hiding information. If you want to emphasize it, place it at the end of the paragraph. If you want the reader to find out about the information, but not realize it’s important, then bury it in the middle of the paragraph. It’s foreshadowing without screaming foreshadowing. Cool, huh?

Do you use consciously use power words in your writing? Do you have any other suggestions?

One way to create a richer story is by weaving in symbolic subtext. This is also a great way to reveal the story’s theme.

Subtext works both at a conscious and unconscious level. When we read a book or watch a movie, some symbols will jump out at us, especially if the creators have done a good job drawing your attention to it. With other symbols, you won’t stop to analyze it. For example, if the scene takes place in a room with green walls, you won’t be thinking that the director wanted to reveal the subtext of life. But you can guarantee someone behind the scenes purposely picked that color because of what it symbolized and not because it was her favorite color.

In the first season of Criminal Minds, there was one episode (Compulsion) in which fire and the number three were important elements. Among other things, fire represents anger and divinity (Symbols, Images, Codes: The Secret Language of Meaning in Film, TV, Games, and Visual Media by Pamela Jaye Smith). It was eventually determined that the unsub was starting fires based on the need to test her victims. If they survived the fire, they were free of the wrath of God. The number three (or rather the triad of the number three) would set off the unsub. The creators could have randomly selected any number, but three (like other numbers) has a symbolic meaning. In Christianity, it represents the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. As the unsub lined up the three bottles of flammable liquid, before dousing her three victims with them, she made reference to the bottles as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

In the book Where the Heart Is, author Billie Letts used a tree to represent life and growth. Pregnant seventeen-year-old Novalee is abandoned by her boyfriend at a Wal-Mart store. With nowhere to go (since her mother ran away with a guy many years ago), she secretly moves into the store. A woman mistakes her for a young girl she once knew and gives Novalee a Welcome Wagon gift of a buckeye tree. As can be expected, the tree starts to die. Novalee tries to return it to the woman, who suggests they plant it in her garden, but only if Novalee comes by regularly to take care of it. This is the turning point in Novalee’s life. These are the first acts of kindness she has experienced in a while, and under the guidance of Ruth Ann, Novalee turns her life around. This is only one example of what the tree symbolized in the story.
In the second example, the meaning behind the symbolism was obvious from near the beginning of the book, and was woven throughout. In the first example, it was only obvious at the end of the show, when the Behavioral Analysis Unit solved the crimes.

The two resources on symbolism for writers I recommend are Symbols, Images, Codes: The Secret Language of Meaning in Film, TV, Games, and Visual Media by Pamela Jaye Smith (I’ll be reviewing it on Wednesday) and the blog The Bookshelf Muse.

Have you woven symbolism into your story to highlight theme and to be use as subtext?

Theme and internal conflict are important for all genres. But have you dug as deep as you can go with your WIP?
Until recently, I thought I’d figured out my WIP’s theme and the internal conflict of my main character. But when I sent it out to my beta readers, one kept asking me questions about these two elements. Fortunately, I had put a lot of thought into it so I could answer them.
But as my awesome beta reader kept asking more questions, because she wanted to figure out the universal feeling I was going after, we both realized (okay, she realized it first), my theme and internal conflict weren’t quite what I’d originally planned. Yes, my story was still about how revenge is never as clear cut as it seems, but when I dug deeper, that wasn’t the true inner conflict or universal feeling I was apparently going after (wow, who knew?). The one my story dealt with had to do with control, or rather, the feeling of lack of control, something many teens can relate to.
So, what is universal feeling (okay, I’m not sure if this is the real term, but since this is my blog, I can call it whatever my beta reader wants)?
Think of Percy Jackson from The Lightning Thief. Percy’s inner arc is that he has to come to terms with being a demigod and that his father is Poseidon. This isn't your typical inner conflict for a teen. But what is typical is that teens have to figure out who they are and embrace their strengths. That’s the universal feeling of the book.
So my challenge to you is to dig deep. Ask yourself if you’ve really captured your character’s inner conflict, and see if you can identify the universal feeling you’re after (or do you need to dig deeper?).
Warning: digging might cause your story to unravel to the point it’s no longer workable. This is why it’s important to dig BEFORE to plot your novel. Unfortunately, no matter how many times I tried adding two and two together, I kept getting five. Now I’m no mathematical genius, but even I know that’s a big #mathfail. Lucky for me, while having a shower yesterday, the answer finally hit me on how I could rework the story. *does happy dance*

(A huge thanks goes out to my CP extraordinaire, Christina Lee, for all her brilliant suggestions and cheerleading while I banged my head against the wall. And to Laura Pauling (the beta reader) for asking all the painful throught proking questions. You two rock!)

©Stina Lindenblatt

When you write a story or take a photo, the theme should be humming at the back of your mind. Sometimes the theme is obvious; sometimes it’s subtle. Sometimes there’s more than one.

But it should always be there.

In writing, the theme guides your story. You might not even realize what your theme is until you’ve finished your first draft. But once you’ve figured out what it is, your theme should always be in the back of your mind, guiding your edits.

In photography, having a theme in mind before you start shooting will help you make the most of the moment. For example, I wanted to show my love for writing. When I saw the roses my husband gave me for Valentine’s Day, I knew instantly how I could use them to reveal my theme.

When you write or take pictures, do you have a theme in mind before you start, or does it come to you once you’ve finished (the first draft)?