It's that time again! My newest "Ask the Coach" article is live on ScriptMag. I've written this month about a subject that has always intrigued me: Theme. I have found thinking about theme in my own work to be both utterly confounding and quite simple, depending on the day, week, month, or state of my draft.
Debates About Theme?
My writing friends and colleagues run the gamut too, from thinking theme is important to completely ridiculous.
Personally, I think of theme as a tool I can use or not use, as I see fit, especially because my clarity about theme varies with each story I write, though I do have common writer-centric themes I tend to explore.
The Question
Long story short, I was happy to see a question come in about theme, so I'd have the chance to explore it further. The article is called "How Do I Find the Theme For My Script?" and in it, I respond to the following reader question:
“How can I find the theme for my story? It feels complicated and confusing to identify. Maybe even above my pay grade. ;) I know the story I’m writing… but the theme isn’t obvious to me.”
Using Theme
In the article, I talk about ways to discover your theme and about ways to use it as a tool. Most importantly, I believe you can use theme to enhance your story, as well as using your story to discover your theme. (It works both ways.)
Here's an excerpt explaining more about what I mean:
"Stories should be about something, obviously. Examining theme — our underlying intention — can take us into the deeper meaning of a story. Once identified, theme can serve as a guidepost and decision-making tool for key story elements like the title, opening, climax, and resolution, the main character’s arc, and more. And while we can clarify and enhance these elements with our theme (once/if we know it), these story elements can also be used to help us identify our theme."
Finding Theme
If you’re wanting to find the theme in a story, take a deeper look at some of the following aspects of your writing. (You can click through to the article to read the details.)
Who are you as a writer?
Why are you writing this story?
What’s the main character’s journey?
What does your title reveal about your theme?
What do your opening, climax, and world building point to?
Check out the full article by clicking here ⇣
Plus, here are three fun things:
It's nearly my birthday. My formula for a happy birthday is simple: A meal out at a favorite place, a movie in a theater, and a trip to a bookstore. If it's a weekday and my family members are at school and work, I go by myself (and we go out for a separate family birthday dinner later). If my birthday falls on a weekend day, they come with me for the full day of delights. ◡̈ This year, we'll probably see two movies, one on Thanksgiving and one on my birthday, since we're celebrating T-day early. I'm looking forward to seeing the new Knives Out movie (Wake Up Dead Man) and Wicked For Good.
I'm still (still!) reading! I finished reading nearly all of Michael Connelly's Bosch-universe books other than his non-fiction Crime Beat* and his newest Mickey Haller book, The Proving Ground, which I'm waiting for from the library or Libby. Now I'm diving into theOld Man's War series, by John Scalzi. I had intended to read The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey (two writers writing as one, fun!) but I seem to be rejecting physical books (we have the whole series in print) in favor of ebooks — which are easier on my wrists and work better with my current love of reading in the dark with the screen dimmed — and Leviathan Wakeswas on hold on Libby 4-ever. I'm now up to 57 books since my June 6 counting streak, which is pretty fun but also weird. It feels like a reunion of sorts.
I had some adventures in binge watching, too. I had a small reading hiccup between October 24 and November 15 or so whilst waiting for Libby to liberate ebooks for me and banging up against the end of the Bosch universe. I instead got swept up into a little binge-watching. In addition to watching the Bosch and Bosch-related TV series with my husband, and the newest season of the Great British Baking Show with our younger kiddo, I watched the newest season of The Diplomat on Netflix... and then for good measure rewatched the whole series, ha. I also watched the newest season of Upload (didn't rewatch the whole series) and The Peripheral on Amazon Prime Video (I haven't canceled Prime, I know, I know...). The Peripheral is pretty darn cool, I have to say. I'll get around to reading that sometime soon, I'm sure.
Thank you for reading, and happy writing!
In other news:
If you're looking for support making writing happen day in and day out — including regular writing sprints — check out my Called to Write Community, now available at a new lower rate: https://calledtowrite.mn.co
If you're looking for developmental editing support, I'm booked through mid-March, approximately. If you'd like to get onto my editorial calendar, let me know. https://jennaavery.com/for-writers
* All book links herein are affiliate links for Bookshop, which means I earn a small referral fee if you purchase from them, and which helps me keep my writing ship afloat. Thank you!
• “I'd ruminate less and just get down to writing more.” • “I’d stay focused even with family distractions and self-doubt.” • “I’d be less dithery.” • “I’d stop second-guessing myself.”
My response ranged from tackling second-guessing directly to working around it to taking a more spiritual approach. You can click through to the article to read the details.
Here's a summaryof the points I wrote about:
Examine the doubts for their veracity and usefulness.
Ignore the fears and focus on structure and habit.
Trust the path, trust the writing, do the work.
Check out the full article by clicking here ⇣
Plus, here are three happy things:
It's almost Halloween!! We've stalled on putting up our decorations because of pending rain (by the time you read this the threat of rain will have hopefully passed), but this is a favorite holiday for me. We get tons of kids trick-or-treating in our neighborhood (like 300-400, which means the candy funding is intense) and go all-out on decorating, so I'm both a little in dread of the work ahead but also excited for a fun night. I've been building a fun steampunk costume over the last couple of years which makes me happy too.
My sister came over again (yay!) and we tidied my writing space. It had become the dumping ground for various "to do" items and it was really getting neglected and out of control. (Picture me writing with blinders on, surrounded by clutter, and NOT BEING HAPPY ABOUT IT but doing it anyway). Now, I'm no longer overwhelmed by stacks of paperwork and warranty registrations and kid artwork to scan and yada yada yada and IT FEELS SO GOOD! I'm massively relieved and it feels like a major Clear the Decks success. (There's a free course on this — Clear the Decks For Writing — in my Called to Write community if you want a little inspiration in this department too. I've done a lot of that work already but having my sister here helped me push into the physical clutter that had built up.)
I'm still reading! I finished reading The Martian* by Andy Weir to my younger child and we moved on to All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, which was the underlying IP for the movie EDGE OF TOMORROW starting Tom Cruise. I'm doing a LOT of on-the-fly verbal editing with that one, sheesh. I thought The Martian needed a lot. I was wrong, haha. On my own, I'm STILL reading Michael Connelly's Bosch-universe books and my book count is now up to 50 since June 6.
If you're looking for support making writing happen day in and day out — including regular writing sprints — check out my Called to Write Community, now available at a new lower rate: https://calledtowrite.mn.co
If you're looking for developmental editing support, I have space coming up in my editorial calendar for manuscript critiques and script notes in mid-October. https://jennaavery.com/for-writers
* All book links herein are affiliate links for Bookshop, which means I earn a small referral fee if you purchase from them, and which helps me keep my writing ship afloat. Thank you!
Back a bunch of years ago, I sat through a visualization connecting with my writing self in the future, and asking for her guidance. The message that came through very strongly was, "write like your life depends on it."
It was strong, resonant, and clear.
I thought I knew what it meant: "Write like there's nothing else to live for. Write like a maniac. Push, push, push. Write as much as you can and as fast as you can. Write to the exclusion of all else, no matter what."
I've felt pretty guilty that I haven't been doing that.
Instead, since then, I got married (and planned the wedding, essentially a part time job), had two amazing kids, moved three times, navigated home purchases (more part time jobs), and figured out new school systems. I've had many writing clients and run a year-round online writer's community for 14 years, developed my editing skills, and more.
I've also written multiple screenplays, hundreds of articles and blog posts (though, ha, I've killed some of them along the way), drafted two works of non-fiction (they're on the chopping block, but who knows), written some short scripts and short stories, started adaptations of two scripts, and more.
But I had still not — to my mind — lived up to "write like your life depends on it."
The other night, though, it occurred to me that perhaps I was interpreting the message incorrectly, through the lens of hustle culture, particularly here in the U.S. and the SF Bay Area.
What if, I thought, ...what if this message is actually about my entire well-being?
What if my "life depends on it" means I rely on writing to know myself.
To feel whole.
To feel expressed.
It doesn't have mean hustle, strive, push. Not at all.
It might just mean: Write because you love it.
Write because it makes you happy.
Write because it's essential to your vitality and well-being.
What a relief.
That's where the joy and love is, not the hustle-strive culture.
I can save that for the marketing part, if even there.
(Wouldn't it fun to approach marketing with joy and love too?)
Perfectly, the morning after my epiphany, I listened to Lauren Sapala describe the difference between "achievement-oriented practices" and "relationship-oriented practices."
She pointed out how achievement practices focus on striving, goals, measurement, etc., whereas relationship practices focus on the richness and depth of the relationship we have with our writing and with our characters.
In other words, a relationship-based practice comes from love.
She also pointed out how the tools of achievement practices can still be useful (goal settings, measurement, counts, tracking, etc.), but — especially for those of us who are HSPs, INF types, empaths, etc. — we don't want them to take over.
Instead, we want to create from feeling, intuition, inner guidance, relationship, intimacy, wonder, play, joy, and love.
Spot on.
And all the more valuable to me because it reinforced my own insight from the night before (gotta love a little synchronicity).
While I wish I had seen this sooner, I'm so happy to have found it now.
“How can I cultivate and step into my writer’s identity more fully, or better design and live a ‘curated’ writing lifestyle? I want to engage in the routines and rituals of my writing lifestyle with aplomb, no matter the storyline or plot twists of daily life, and let them serve to enhance my writer’s identity.”
Here's the TL;DR of my response (+ you can click through to the article to read the details):
The desire to live a writer’s life is real.
Writing is also a job, not only an identity or lifestyle.
Do claim your identity as a writer.
Writing is about taking action.
Close your writer’s life gap in specific ways.
Build routines and structures.
Trust you’ll get through the plot twists.
Check out the full article with more reflection by clicking here ⇣
Plus, here are three cool things this week (in spite of it all):
Holy smokes, batman, I got to see Annalee Newitz and a bunch of new-to-me folks speaking on a "Public Transit Visions in Speculative Fiction" panel the other night. I couldn't make it to San Francisco around parenting and personal obligations and needs, so I watched the live stream but sheesh-wow it was so fun and exciting — at least to me. The combo of geeking out about speculative fiction AND urban design AND transit? I was pretty much over the moon. And given the many dark moments this week and last, it was a delicious experience to have a moment of inspiration and joy.
My 'lil sis came over and we worked on purging and decorating our house. We moved here 2019 and sort of unpacked stuff and shoved it onto shelves and then covid hit and everything sort of stayed where it was? But we don't really need all those things? And there's too much stuff in our house? Anyway, she's been working on similar things at her place so it's a massive help to have fresh eyes and a good accountability partner.
If you're looking for support making writing happen day in and day out — including regular writing sprints — check out my Called to Write Community, now available at a new lower rate: https://calledtowrite.mn.co
If you're looking for developmental editing support, I have space coming up in my editorial calendar for manuscript critiques and script notes in mid-October. https://jennaavery.com/for-writers
* All book links herein are affiliate links for Bookshop, which means I earn a small referral fee if you purchase from them, and which helps me keep my writing ship afloat. Thank you!
I can't totally recall how and when I lost my reading groove.
Seems like it happened gradually.
In my 20s, between the assigned reading in grad school and the dangers to my student loans of the lovely Pegasus Books near my apartment building, reading regularly (and reading fiction) fell by the wayside. Then came a ridiculously busy early career, followed not too long thereafter by parenthood and the accompanying sleep deprivation, none of which helped my reading life.
Then came that wave of short-attention-span-fostering social media and many notifications from various software and devices that began in the 'oughts. Later the 2016 election. And the rise of binge-watching.
It's not that I haven't been reading, it's that I haven't been reading consistently. Certainly not the way I did when I was a kid (I pretty much just devoured books). My adult reading life has been characterized by random, distracted, intermittent reading, mostly while on vacation.
Despite this, I've managed to keep up with Blake Crouch* and Matt Haig and other favorite authors.
(Coincidentally, I may have scared myself into believing I cursed us all by reading three pandemic books in late 2019 and early 2020 — Wanderers, the Oryx & Crake / Maddadam series, and A Beginning at the End — right before COVID kicked off. Either that or my intuition was operating in high gear with a prescient warning...)
Bottom line, I haven't been reading the way I want to be reading (and which I believe is important to do as a writer).
In any case, this summer I regrouped. Finally.
And it was sort of a strange recipe for getting there.
Here's what happened:
We were (mostly) unplugged for 22 days. My immediate family and I were in the High Sierra working on fixing sinking piers under our extended-family's cabin, built in the 1920s. Though we could drive down a pothole-riddled road to the one restaurant with WiFi, it was a bumpy, stressful trip, and thus not appealing. So, unplugged, mostly.
I needed for-real stress relief from the cabin work. (I wasn't the one under the cabin doing the work, but I was sort of our extended family's representative, project manager, chef, kid-minder, and pioneer-style laundress so I needed to chill the fuck out somehow. Plus we were living in a construction zone. So yeah, stressful.)
We've always read a lot at the cabin. The bliss of lying outside on the porch beds, reading books, is a built-in, default for me. So I was primed to read. Plus I had my dad's fully loaded kindle with me, and some print and library books that unintentionally made the journey with us, oops.
Once I started reading, I didn't stop. When I finished a book, I started the next one, quickly. I read the three print books (Lost & Found, A War of Gifts, and Staircase in the Woods) first, and nearly faltered, but opened the kindle and dove in.
I shifted into full-on binge-reading. Thanks to my dad, I had a massive collection of detective stories at my immediate disposal. That's when the true binge-reading commenced. I started with Michael Connelly's Bosch series (and haven't stopped). It turned out to be a hugely handy way to retrain my social-media-shortened attention span. (It also helped that my kids were reading oodles of books too.)
I'm determined not to let myself stop reading. Since we've been back from our trip, my pace has slowed from one book every two days to one book every four to seven days, but I'm happy with that. My intent is to always have a book I'm reading, and to know what the next book is going to be.
Turns out reading a massive series is not unlike binge-watching a long show with multiple seasons. So having the Bosch books to binge-read kind of fit my earlier binge-watching pattern, but is much better for my brain (other than all the murder stuff). I had another hiccup when I finished the main Bosch series and I had to wait for library copies of the Ballard/Bosch books to be available, but entertained myself with the fantastic Siege of Burning Grass in the meantime.
In any case, all this to say, I've gotten my reading groove back and I could not be happier.
I've read 32, going on 33 (::checks log:: no, make that) 35 books since June 6, when we left on our work trip (also, note to future self, a work trip is NOT a vacation). Considering that I think I read THREE books this year prior to that? Pretty epic. I know for sure I read All Systems Red, Upgrade, and The Life Impossible.
I want to stick with this pace and hope to have recorded double this number by the end of the year. While I didn't exactly mean to ensconce myself into the detective world, I'm also having fun reading "with" my dad, knowing he would have enjoyed sharing the experience with me (he passed away in 2018).
The best part of all this: my brain feels far less scattered and less hooked by social media and news.
It's a highly welcome and much-needed escape, in times like these. And, it's helped me stretch out my ability to focus on writing for longer stretches, which I dearly love.
If you're in a similarly distracted place, join me. Even if you can't unplug, binge-reading a long, addictive series is a terrific way to break the cycle and come home to your reader-self.
How's reading going for you right now? I'd love to read your thoughts in the comments. 👇
If you're looking for support making writing happen day in and day out — including regular writing sprints — check out my Called to Write Community, now available at a new lower rate: https://calledtowrite.mn.co
If you're looking for developmental editing support, I have space coming up in my editorial calendar for manuscript critiques and script notes in October. https://jennaavery.com/for-writers
* All book links herein are affiliate links for Bookshop, which means I earn a small referral fee if you purchase from them, and which helps me keep my writing ship afloat. Thank you!
