Isaiah, 2YN Week Three: Theme

This one was easy for me. I love working with theme, and that's often one of the first things, after character, that comes to me. It's the touchstone I use throughout the writing process, and it's just naturally the way I think about what I write.

I didn't already have a theme for Isaiah, but it didn't take more than a few hours of brainstorming to come up with one I like, and that I think works with the plot elements, tone and characters I already have. Which is good - I really don't want this to actually take the whole two years!

So, my theme, in one word, is Faith.
Expanded: Faith is the gateway to the extraordinary.

Edit: Before anyone thinks I'm writing a scary religious book, by "faith" I don't mean religion but the basis of religion - a combination of belief and trust. You can have faith in anything.

I'm Not Dead, but My Muse May Be

Well, NaNoEdMo was a spectacular failure. :D I have a new job and new livestock and all of that seemed to throw my life into enough chaos to keep me from writing for awhile. Now that I'm settling into my new routines and trying to write again, I can't seem to find the words. Even my fun writing seems to be fighting me, though I am managing some role-playing.

I am exploring one aspect of writing, though, and that's theme. Holly Lisle has been including a series of articles on theme in her newsletter, lately, and they got me thinking. Now, there all sorts of definitions and explorations of theme out there, especially among the literary crowd, and even more theories on whether and how to include them in your work as a writer. To me, though, theme is just a fancy way of answering the question, "Why do I care enough about this story to write it?" From there it can be used for a whole lot of things, from character development to tying subplots together to generating motifs, but at its essential core it's just there for me, to keep me focused on what the story means to me. I do it without even realising it - even my fun writing and my role-playing characters tend to have themes when I stop to think about them.

I'm thinking about starting to make myself daily exercises, or possibly daily stories. If I do, I may post them on my LiveJournal as locked posts, since I don't see any way to restrict access to my Blogspot posts. It's remotely possible that I may end up using bits of those exercises in works I'd like to publish, and I don't want any issues with rights.

So here's hoping I start writing again soon, and then make some real progress on my projects.