Thursday's Links to Writing & Marketing Blog Posts

WRITE A TIGHT STORY: STREAMLINE YOUR SYMBOLISM

By: K.M. Weiland

Theme can be a bit of a tricky thing to understand how to pull off in a story. The main theme will always be central to the protagonist’s character arc. It will center around the story’s moral premise, as set forth in the Lie the Character Believes versus the Truth He Will Come to Believe.

But there are many other aspects to theme. You can have a story with a primary theme of mercy vs. justice, but it may also deal with such disparate topics as love, independence, change.

That’s awesome. The more interesting themes you can pack into a story, the richer it has the potential to be. But the more themes you pack in, the bigger chance you run of creating a fragmented story that’s all over the place. So how do you present deep and varied themes without letting them turn your story into a three-ring circus?

The primary answer to that is to make sure you’re choosing themes that are all tying together in some way. A coming-of-age story can very easily offer opportunities to explore love, independence, and change, while still being a tight story, because all these topics are facets of the same forward progress in the character’s arc. So your first task is to make sure all your mini themes tie back into your main theme.

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Read the full article HERE!

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If you missed my writing & marketing tweets and retweets yesterday, here they are again:

1. Fiction University: Learning to be an Unapologetic “Planster” http://ow.ly/ALJZS
2. 5 Guidelines for Approaching Book Review Bloggers http://ow.ly/ALK5H
3. Karen Woodward: Descriptivism and Word Lists http://ow.ly/ALKgZ
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5. Writability: On Writing Practice Novels http://ow.ly/ALKqt
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21. Write a Tight Story: Streamline Your Symbolism - Helping Writers Become Authors http://ow.ly/ANwMg
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25. The Noob Guide to Online Marketing (With Giant INFOGRAPHIC) - Moz http://ow.ly/ANxiU

Happy writing and running, Kathy