Tag: theme

Categories
Writing for YA

Avoiding Preachy Prose

Much young adult fiction today deals with contemporary issues and is a reflection of the times. Authors have important things to say. But if the writing is preachy, readers may disengage.

What is preachy prose?

Writing can come off as preachy when the author is too heavy handed in their delivery of a message or a story’s theme. Sermonizing isn’t exclusive to religious themes. Social issues, politics, cultural views, anything the writer has an opinion on can be presented in a preachy way.

Not all readers will agree on whether or not a particular book is preachy. One reader may embrace the story while others criticize it. The trick is to be true to your theme without becoming strident.

But I want my book to have a message.

It’s perfectly fine and desirable to have a message in your book, but if it’s fiction, use characters to illustrate the point and trust your reader. The message should feel natural, unforced, and be interwoven into the story. 

How can a writer avoid preachy prose?

Produce well-rounded characters with plenty of realistic opposition and conflict.

Use external conflict. Give characters opposing viewpoints. Through their interaction, allow the story to develop and reveal the theme. 

Use internal conflict. Instead of presenting a single viewpoint as cut and dried, let your character come to conclusions about their beliefs. Let them struggle, grow, and learn.

Use realistic character action and reactions to illustrate the theme. Just like in real life, a guy passing out Bible verses doesn’t have quite the same impact as a character walking through hard places while clinging to his beliefs.

Think about how you react when a person in real life delivers a personalized sermon on your shortcomings. Do you feel grateful?

If you have a preachy character, have the other characters react to them in a realistic way. As a bonus, this could make for some good conflict! If that doesn’t work for your story, rewrite the preachy character to reflect your vision.

There’s no need to avoid prayer or religious language—if it’s true to your characters. Preachiness has less to do with what a character believes, and more to do with how the character’s beliefs are presented.

Use story events interspersed with dialogue to make the point. Don’t restrict the message to a large chunk of dialogue in one scene. The entire story should reflect the theme. Sprinkle it around!

Setting, imagery, and symbolism can all reinforce the theme. It isn’t necessary to use every technique in the book and subtlety is the key. 

Do you have any tips on avoiding preachy prose?

Leave a comment below.

Donna Jo Stone writes YA contemporary novels about tough issues but always ends the stories with a note of hope. She blogs at donnajostone.com.

Categories
Screenwriting

Do You Know What You Mean?

Recently, I uploaded my latest screenplay to a screenwriting website for Hollywood producers and studios to view. I was excited to finally have a completed script on this popular screenwriting website.

What I failed to realize was the specifics of the process of getting a script uploaded. Not only were there numerous categories and subcategories and tags to choose to describe my latest WIP, but there are also some specific questions in regards to my script’s purpose.

  • Genre
  • Setting/locations
  • Theme

At first glance, one might think the first and last questions are the same, but they aren’t. Genre is more of a style of storytelling with its unique aspects. Theme is the ultimate message/beliefs/morals of the story expressed through specific genres.

The site has become popular for helping outsiders break into Hollywood circles, not just for getting completed works before the right people, but helping establish the screenwriter’s platform and area of focus in storytelling.

To some degree writers keep similar themes in all of their stories, because stories are simply a means for us writers to express our beliefs and ideologies in the form of the narrative’s theme—what we mean to say!

What You Mean?

The message of your screenplay is what you hope it means to your audience, so you need to understand your purpose for telling this particular story. Once you understand that, its theme will become clear to the audience.

A literary theme is the main idea or underlying meaning a writer explores in a literary work. The plot of the story is how this theme is expressed. A writer’s theme often reveals the narrative, gives the characters a purpose and helps the audience stay tuned.

Keep in mind the theme has to be clear to more than just you. Make your theme evident to give your story more meaning. Most of us writers want to do more than simply entertain a theater of strangers. We want to use this art form to make an impact on society, to enlighten others. And even simply sway them to our ideology. The following list is reflective of common themes writers express in their narratives:

  1. Beauty of simplicity
  2. Change of power – necessity
  3. Change versus tradition
  4. Chaos and order
  5. Character – destruction, building up
  6. Circle of life
  7. Coming of age
  8. Communication – verbal and nonverbal
  9. Darkness and light
  10. Disillusionment and dreams1

My personal goal as a writer is to inspire change in my audience. I enjoy seeing the spark in the eyes or the excitement when my readers catch on to my story’s theme. (My current screenplay’s theme is humility versus power.)

Each time I start the writing process, I try to determine what I want to say to my audience —what change I’m hoping to cause.

Say What!

Not that I am the best, but the best writers know what they want to say before they began writing. The plot usually develops later in the process, even for outliners like me. Sometimes even the characters reveal themselves by what they really want to say.

Thus, knowing your them or message/message beforehand can help you write a better story in the writing process. One of the beauties of screenwriting is we get to utilize multiple senses, so we have more ways to express our store’s theme. We can say what we want without having to spell it out for our audiences. Below are a few of my favorite movies with clear themes we can see.

What message burns inside of your heart and drives you to write? Our job as storytellers is more than just entertaining. We have an opportunity to make an impact on countless lives when we know what we mean.

Martin Johnson survived a severe car accident with a (T.B.I.) Traumatic brain injury which left him legally blind and partially paralyzed on the left side. He is an award-winning Christian screenwriter who has recently finished his first Christian nonfiction book. Martin has spent the last nine years volunteering as an ambassador and promoter for Promise Keepers ministries. While speaking to local men’s ministries he shares his testimony. He explains The Jesus Paradigm and how following Jesus changes what matters most in our lives. Martin lives in a Georgia and connects with readers at Spiritual Perspectives of Da Single Guy and on Twitter at mtjohnson51.

1 https://lah.elearningontario.ca/CMS/public/exported_courses/EWC4U/exported/EWC4UU2/EWC4UU2A1/_teacher/A%20Huge%20List%20of%20Common%20Themes%20-%20Literary%20Devices.pdf

Categories
Platform and Branding

How to Market Your Book in 2020

The difference between filing your carefully edited pages on your computer and readers reading those pages, is marketing.

Books come alive when readers read them, but in order to read them, they must know it exists. It’s the imagination that puts skin on characters and personalities in dialogue. Without readers, your book is a black and white stack of words.

One of my writing friends once said: “The brutal truth is you may have the greatest book ever written, but if you cannot pitch it, no one may ever know.”

Swap the word pitch with market, and you get a similar result.

So, how do you market your book, especially when life looks quite different now than it did a year ago?

Start with your pitch.

Online marketing can help you so much right now. You can do it from home, but still reach hundreds if not thousands of potential readers. However, just as every word counts in writing, every word counts in marketing. For someone to be willing to stop their scroll, it’s important to be succinct and catch their attention.

If you’re on Twitter, try formatting your pitch to target potential readers (and don’t forget to hashtag #WritingCommunity!). This will hopefully pique interest and if you leave it with a question, opens the door for comments.

Market your protagonist’s character arc.

Readers connect with the human side of characters, and often the humanity of characters means they have flaws. You want to keep the ending a surprise, but give enough to engage their desire to find out what happens. What’s your inciting incident, how does your protagonist respond, and what does this say about him? These can be good questions to ask when considering how to portray character arc.

Note: Keep your target audience in mind, because you want to remember not just what you’re pitching, but who you’re pitching to.

Shine a spotlight on your theme

              Your theme is what holds your book together. It’s the current that carries your protagonist, and your readers, from the first page to the last. It’s what makes them pick up your book instead of the one next to it on the shelf, or add your book to the cart instead of one in the customers-also-bought list on Amazon.

Let your passion for your book overflow as you market, but remember readers often purchase not just because of the genre, but because of the story in the genre. Your theme is what sets your story apart and your character arc helps hold up your theme, whatever it is.

Best wishes as you spread the word on your project!

Sarah Rexford is a Marketing Content Creator and writer. She helps authors build their platform through branding and copywriting. With a BA in Strategic Communications, Sarah equips writers to learn how to communicate their message through personal branding. She writes fiction and nonfiction and offers writers behind-the-scenes tips on the publishing industry through her blog itssarahrexford.com. She is represented by the C.Y.L.E Young Agency.

Instagram: @sarahjrexford
Twitter: @sarahjrexford
Web: itssarahrexford.com

Categories
Courting the Muse

How Academic Articles Can Help You Craft Your Frame Stories

Pilgrims travel to a martyr’s shrine, swapping stories on their journey to pass the time.

The freshly installed tenant of a rundown estate asks his housekeeper about the history of his troubled new home.

A sea captain writes to his sister about a disturbing encounter he had en route to the North Pole.

If you’ve got a taste for classic literature, you might recognize — in broad strokes, at least — the openings to some of English literature’s most notable works: The Canterbury Tales, Wuthering Heights, and Frankenstein. respectively.

All three of these classics show the power of frame stories at work. Also known as frame narratives, these introductory tales enclose another story (or set of stories), supporting and emphasizing them like gilded wood embracing a painting.

As you might have gathered from the examples above, a good frame story isn’t just a throat-clearing before the author begins to speak in earnest — a preamble to the story they really want to write.

For one thing, frame stories help orient the reader. Their protagonists are often as lost as we are, stumbling into astounding situations they don’t yet have the context to parse. The tenant arrives in the aftermath of Heathcliff and Cathy’s ruinous love; the sea captain rescues Dr. Frankenstein from the cold, long after the monster has already escaped his custody. As strangers to the scene, these baffled observers allow us to nestle into their curiosity and bewilderment, giving us a perspective to latch onto as we ease ourselves into the book.

Done right, frame narratives offer a way into the plots and characters they frame. But beyond that, they also offer occasions for storytelling — justification for each word that follows. Why am I reading this? What makes this important? These are the questions a good frame story will answer.

These days, I often find frame narratives in mystery novels and ghost stories, where they depict a naive outsider’s first encounters with the enigma at the heart of the work. But actually, I tend to stumble on my favorite frame narratives in a less intuitive genre: academic articles.

At its core, academic research isn’t unlike the plotting of mystery novels. The scholar-sleuth, encountering an ambiguity, undertakes an investigation. They work methodically through clues, subjecting them to rigorous analyses and synthesizing them through flashes of insight.

In my field of history, researchers don’t tend to present their findings in the form of conventional frame stories — that is, by narrating the discovery of their sources. However, historians often do deploy a rhetorical strategy that reminds me of the frame narrative at its best. In some of my favorite scholarly articles, the researcher begins with a punchy anecdote, a narrative that orients me to the concepts they’re working with and eases me into the analysis to come.

The book historian Susan Cherniack, for example, uses this technique with spare, elegant style in a classic 1994 study of textual transmission in Song China. The 120-page article opens on the striking story of “five [Song] woodblock-engravers who were struck by lightning after changing the texts of prescriptions in a medical book they had been engraving”. This startling one-liner gets right to the center of Cherniack’s inquiry: how texts change as they’re copied and circulated; which changes are “allowed” and which forbidden.

When Cherniack pulls this anecdote and places it at the beginning of her article, she’s crafting a narrative frame for her ideas, much like Mary Shelley opening Frankenstein on a sea captain’s rescue of a scientist. Cherniack doesn’t belabor her point — she moves on from this opening salvo quickly enough. But she does offer us a striking, narratively rich indication of why we should care about her study.

As fiction writers, we use our frame stories to introduce narrative, not argumentation. But examining how historians contextualize their arguments through storytelling can make us better storytellers too, by keeping frame stories compelling and tight.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.

Categories
Writing with a Disability (Different Ability)

Stay Focused

One of the biggest problems most people with brain injuries experience is problems with attention / concentration. Sometimes it seems no matter what precautions or measures I take, I cannot stay focused on what I am trying to do. Regardless of adequate rest and sleep, exercise and setting, focus can elude me.

One time while I was learning to walk again, my neuropsychologist called out my name, distracting me just long enough for me to walk face-first into the doorjamb of the door I was about to walk through. I am the epitome of someone who cannot walk and talk at the same time. My focus is on where I am going.

Even my eyesight is affected by my brain injury, my eyes do not focus as fast as a normal person’s eyes, this is part of the reason I am legally blind. For these reasons, I am an anti-multitasker.

It seems like everywhere I turn people are trying to do a hundred things at once. In my opinion, multitasking can hinder performance instead of enhancing it. I want to refer back to the cliché I heard while I was growing up, “Jack of all trades, but masters of none.”

People want to do a little of this and a little of that and in the end do a whole lot of nothing. I don’t care how trendy it is to multitask; quality always suffers in the end. I see people all the time in the gym trying to read while working out. When they finish working out they get none of the benefits of either, because they never get a quality workout and they forget most of what they read.

Before anyone gets up in arms about this, rest assured medical science has proved this already, multitasking is an illusion at best[i]. It does more harm than good.

  • Less Attentiveness.
  • Impedes learning.
  • Limits mindfulness.[ii]

For these reasons, I like to complete one project at a time. I can have other projects on my mind and write notes down about them, but I never begin writing anything until I finish a project I’ve already started.

Although this may seem time-consuming and counterproductive to some reading this, for me it’s the best way to get the quality writing I strive to produce. I’m determined to stay focused.

Focus?

When I first began blogging over a decade ago, I wanted to create content that was deep and meaningful; I wanted to make an impact on my audiences. So I spent a lot of time writing in an attempt to add depth to my words.

Soon my posts were 4,000 words in length. In my mind, I equated length with depth, but after years of studying, I’ve learned the opposite is true. Because the human attention span is so short, more words can take away from our message.

When we lose our audiences’ attention, we lose our purpose for writing, all because we’ve lost the focus of our message. After my writing mentor read my blog, she pointed out that I had two or three different blogs combined into one.

She advised me to write shorter more focused blogs. Which meant I needed to stay focused on my message and weed out excess.

Like most writers and creatives I like using certain literary devices to emphasize my point, such as the ones below:

  1. Analogies.
  2. Popular quotes.
  3. Clichés.

The problem is when these devices begin taking away from our theme instead of adding to it, often sending our readers down unwanted tangents. The wordiness distracts or bores our audience. Pretty soon, like the hungry cow grazing in a pasture without paying attention to its surroundings, we end up out in the middle of nowhere.

This is why author Jerry B Jenkins teaches that less is more. The best writers are economical writers; they make the most by using the least amount of words. This is laser-focused writing.

Concentrated?

Lasers work by concentrating light or energy onto a specific point which magnifies its power. Focused writing is much more powerful than lengthy writing. When we concentrate on our theme, our writing is more focused which benefits both us and our audiences.

  • Brevity: Fewer words take less time to write and helps keep our audiences’ attention.
  • Intelligible: Focused writing is straightforward and easier to learn.
  • Clarity: Focused writing is less confusing because we know its purpose; there is no unnecessary information or clutter.

Personally, when I cannot concentrate, I tend to make more errors. Living with my brain injury has forced me to try to concentrate more and hopefully stay focused.

Martin Johnson survived a severe car accident with a (T.B.I.) Traumatic brain injury which left him legally blind and partially paralyzed on the left side. He is an award-winning Christian screenwriter who has recently finished his first Christian nonfiction book. Martin has spent the last nine years volunteering as an ambassador and promoter for Promise Keepers ministries. While speaking to local men’s ministries he shares his testimony. He explains The Jesus Paradigm and how following Jesus changes what matters most in our lives. Martin lives in a Georgia and connects with readers at Spiritual Perspectives of Da Single Guy and on Twitter at mtjohnson51.

[i] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/science-clear-multitasking-doesnt-work/

[ii] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/science-clear-multitasking-doesnt-work/

Categories
Magazine and Freelance

Are You Using A Magazine’s Theme List?

Last week I was at a Christian writers conference. It’s one of the key places where you can build relationships with editors and learn how to send the editor what he wants. If you write what an editor needs, then you are much more likely to get published than randomly writing something and sending it into the publication. If a writers’ conference is not in your plans, make plans to get to one soon. As editors, we publish people that we know, like and trust and you can build these relationships at a conference.

During an editor’s panel at this conference, I heard an editor’s cry for help. I’m not going to give the specific magazine but use this incident as a way to help you be more successful and on target with your magazine submissions.

This magazine editor leads a 200,000 circulation Christian publication which publishes a theme list with their guidelines. With each monthly magazine, they publish articles outside of their theme but in particular they need articles tied to their theme. In front of the entire conference, this editor mentioned several of his projected themes did not have a single article ready for publication.

magazine theme list

As I listened to this editor’s cry for help, I recalled my work at Decision, the publication of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. As Associate Editor, I was looking for theme related articles. For example, I needed articles about love for a February magazine (Valentine’s Day). It was not easy to get these articles even for a large circulation magazine like Decision whose circulation at that time was 1.8 million. To gather these needed theme-related articles, I would call or email some of my author friends and ask them for submissions.

If you want to be published in magazines, in general there are two options. You can write whatever you want (inspiration) and then try to find a publication for it. Or you can look at the themes an editor has created for their magazine (their needs) and write an article to meet those needs. The second approach of writing for a particular theme is more likely to be published from my experience.

The 2018 Christian Writers Market Guide includes over 150 magazine listings. Many of these listings include the location of their guidelines and theme list. Another way to find these publications is to use Google with the search words “Christian editorial theme lists.” I instantly found several pages of Christian publications with their theme lists.

As you meet needs of the editor (their theme list) you will be published in magazines and become a dependable resource for your editor. Don’t overlook this important resource for your magazine articles.

W. Terry Whalin, a writer and acquisitions editor at Morgan James Publishing, lives in Colorado. A former magazine editor, Whalin has written for more than 50 publications including Christianity Today and Writer’s Digest. Terry is the author of How to Succeed As An Article Writer which you can get at: http://writeamagazinearticle.com/. He has written more than 60 nonfiction books including Jumpstart Your Publishing Dreams. His latest book is Billy Graham, A Biography of America’s Greatest Evangelist and the book website is at: http://BillyGrahamBio.com Watch the short book trailer for Billy Graham at: http://bit.ly/BillyGrahamBT His website is located at: www.terrywhalin.com. Follow him on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/terrywhalin

Categories
Songwriting

Understanding Songwriting Structure

If you have been following my articles on songwriting, perhaps you’re ready to write your first song. There are a few guidelines I would like to show you to get you started. Much like a haiku or even a piece of flash or hint fiction, there’s a definite pattern to successful songwriting, and your verbiage is limited. One of the biggest amateur mistakes is to write a song over five minutes, especially if that song contains little structure or design. Sure, it has happened, but rarely since the 1800’s.

Let’s start with the premise of the song. What is your song about? What is it you are trying to say? What is your point? Without a premise, you lose focus of what you are writing or why you are writing it. Think about it, you only have a few lines of chorus to truly say what you want to say, and then a few stanzas of poetry to support that chorus. Your words have to be carefully chosen: much like a haiku: much like a twenty-five word hint fiction.

Our premise becomes our song’s logline. It’s a song about what? It’s a song about a sinner who finds Jesus?  It’s a song about a man who lost his wife? It’s a song about a father having a hard time seeing his little princess grow up and get married? Once you have your logline of a song, you can develop your chorus idea. You don’t have to perfect your chorus at this point. You just want the chorus idea down.

There are literally 3 parts to a great song. There’s the verse, the chorus, and the bridge. We’ve talked about the chorus. The chorus supports the premise or the theme of your song.  The verse is what gives us the story. The verse paints different pictures that give the chorus credibility. Most songs on the radio have one or two verses then a chorus, followed by another verse or two, then the chorus. Let’s take a look at one of my recent, favorite songs called All My Hope, by David Crowder.

Studying the structure of a song

As we can see in the first verse, David gives us an introduction to our lead character, in first person.

I’ve been held by the savior / I’ve felt fire from above / I’ve been down to the river / I ain’t the same—a prodigal returned

In four simple lines (most verses are four lines), we learn who he is. But we still don’t know the premise or theme of the song. These four lines lead to that, which is found in the chorus. So what is our song about? Let’s see what David wrote for the chorus:

All my hope is in Jesus / Thank God my yesterday’s gone / All my sins are forgiven / I’ve been washed by the blood

Ah! Now we understand what the song is about! It’s about being forgiven! It’s about erasing the past through the blood of Jesus! It’s about the hope in Jesus that makes it all possible! That’s the premise! Jesus washes away our sins so we can be forgiven!

But then he moves on to the second verse to give us a little bit more into the story and description. The first verse was an introduction to who he is. The chorus told us the premise. The second verse now tells us a little more about who he is. No more need for introductions, this is him, wide open.

I’m no stranger to the prison / I’ve worn shackles and chains / But I’ve been freed and forgiven / I’m not going back—I’ll never be the same

This poetic verse makes you want to clap for him, doesn’t it? It’s a proclamation. The first two lines tell us a little deeper about his sin, the second two lines reminds us of the premise, supporting the chorus! Now we jump back into the chorus, with even more gusto!

If we lay out our structure, we have an ABAB pattern. It’s simple. A is the verses, B is the chorus. David adds another B for emphasis. This song reads, ABABB. The total length of this song is just over three minutes. For playability on radio, songs must be at least 3 minutes, but under five minutes. The target is between three to four minutes. However, if you listen to praise and worship, that’s often not going to happen, unless they make a radio friendly version of the song. There have been album versions of worship songs that are over 10 minutes long, albeit, the actual lyrical portion was under five.

Next month, we’ll talk about a little more advanced songwriting—adding the bridge and the purpose of it. Is there a songwriting topic you would like to discuss? Please feel free to write me at matthewhawkeldridge@gmail.com

 

Matthew Hawk Eldridge is a sleepless, coffee addicted, Renaissance man currently working in the film industry while attending grad school for creative writing. His latest novel, The Pan: Experiencing Neverland, can be found on Amazon. His album, Overcome, releases June 1st.

Categories
Talking Character

How Selfish Is Your Protagonist?

We writers love our protagonists. We give them a few flaws and quirks, but we know that underneath their mistakes and faulty thinking beats a heart that is kind and good. The kind of heart that will ultimately lead them to Do The Right Thing.

We want our hero to show his noble heart by getting involved with the local homeless shelter and our heroine to display her fine character by fundraising to provide wells to villagers who need fresh water. Those are excellent goals, so long as you show the reader why your character cares.

Authors must not only figure out what goals our character strives for, but also why those goals matter to that particular character. And the reasons must be specific and selfish.

Yes, selfish. As in, what’s in it for him?

Because your hero does not volunteer at the shelter once a week just because it’s a nice thing to do. He does it because:

  • He can no longer ignore God’s urging to serve in this area (despite the fact he hates talking to strangers.)
  • The cute girl from World History class works there those same days.
  • He thinks it will atone for the hit and run accident he caused.
  • He discovered one of guys he plays pick-up basketball games with spent most of last year living in a shelter.

Each one of these options will lead to a very different story, won’t it?

The specific and selfish reasons you give your character must also serve to deepen his character arc and illustrate the underlying theme of your story. If the story is about stepping out in faith despite our fears then option one or four might make sense, while option three would suit a theme like understanding God’s mercy or learning to own up to our mistakes. And that cute girl from history class? She has all kinds of thematic options, depending on her motivations for working at the shelter.

Because every character needs specific and selfish reasons for their actions. Even cute girls.

So…

If your answer to the question, “Why does your protagonist care about his story goal?” isn’t specific, personal, and driven by some need or desire the character has, maybe it’s time to dig deeper.

You readers will be glad you did.

Categories
Dear Young Scribes

How to Choose, Develop, & Research a Setting: Part 1

Setting is far more than the backdrop of a novel. It’s the environment that breathes life into a story. It can paint hues of emotion, provide necessary backstory, enhance characterization, and serve as a tool to unfold significant plot elements.

When a writer prepares to write a book, they should spend just as much time researching and developing a setting as they do with their characters. In fact, setting should be treated with much attention as if it were a character in itself.

Think of your favorite book. How would the plot differ if it were set in the snow-capped mountains of Colorado? Or in a dry desert of New Mexico?

When a writer accurately portrays a believable setting for their novel, the reader becomes sucked into the story. This should be done in a way so that the story would not be the same if it were set in another location.

For example: The setting is a crucial element in the movie The Titanic. It would be impossible to set that story in another location; the entire plot would unravel.

Readers fall in love with books that present well-developed settings and story worlds. What would The Chronicles of Narnia be without Narnia? Or Anne of Green Gables without Green Gables?

When choosing a setting, ask yourself:

  •  What is the mood and theme of this story? What kind of location—a small town, big city, etc.—would best portray this?
  •  How will the setting affect the plot of the story?
  •  Will I use a real town or invent one?
  •  What cities—including my hometown— am I familiar with? Out of those, which one am I most passionate about?
  •  How can I weave symbolism into this setting?
  •  How does the setting influence my protagonist? What is his/her attitude toward this location? 
(This is a great way to unravel backstory — through showing the memories tied to her surroundings.)

blue ridge mountains

I chose Lake Lure, NC for the setting of Purple Moon for the following reasons:

  1.  I realized I had yet to read a YA novel that was set in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina.
  2.  I knew I wanted to set the story in the south since I am from SC.
  3.  I came across a photograph of the mountains outlining a lake. This inspired me to do a Google search of lakes in North Carolina.
  4.  After I found a list, I chose Lake Lure because the name reflected a theme in the novel.
  5.  Since my protagonist is an artist, the mountains tucked into the lake keeps her inspired and reflects her personality.

If you want your readers to become swept away in your story, it’s crucial that you spend necessary time researching your setting before you begin to write.

It’s important to research your setting for the following reasons:

  • Believability
  •  Accuracy
  •  So your readers can feel as if they have stepped into 
the pages of your book. You want to give them the sense 
that they are living in the story.
  •  To prevent your story from unfolding in front of a “closed 
curtain”.

In the next post, we’ll discuss how to go about researching your setting and how to filter it through the eyes of your protagonist.

[bctt tweet=”How to Choose, Develop, & Research a Setting: Part 1 via @TessaEmilyHall #write” username=””]

What is your favorite story setting? How does it enhance the plot, theme, mood, and protagonist of the novel?

Categories
A Pinch of Poetry

Poet Snapshot: Langston Hughes

I fell in love with Langston Hughes’ poetry when only a teenager in high school. Still today, I enjoy reading and re-reading his beautiful word pictures. This talented African-American poet’s work contributed greatly to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s.

One thing I admire about his work is that he wrote in simple, everyday language. Yet his poetry exhibits creativity and beauty that examines the struggles of everyday life, especially of black Americans. Although his poems are usually easy to understand (and some are quite short) the complexity is between the layers of figurative language he uses.

I connect with his poetry personally because the themes touch on our common experiences: disappointments, love, sorrow, hopes, etc…

As you read through five of my favorite poems below, note his simple, elegant style and the depth of his messages. We can learn from this poet that powerful imagery, figurative language and themes are more important than word count.

[bctt tweet=”Powerful imagery, figurative language and themes are more important than word count. #poetry #poets”]

“Dreams,” probably one his shortest poems, examines the effect of disappointment. Take a look at the metaphors and the imagery. Did you also notice the sound devices of alliteration and rhyme?

“Theme for English B” addresses the issue of race on the surface. Underneath it reveals the power of poetry to break the barriers between people and find common ground. Yet even with the complex theme, he still uses simple language and imagery to communicate his message.

“Mother to Son” is a brilliant poem in which he takes on the persona of a mother encouraging her son. He reveals the darkness we encounter in life but leaves us with encouragement to press on. The extended metaphor of the broken down staircase paints a detailed picture of the speaker’s struggles. Each attribute of the staircase can symbolize a different kind of difficulty.

“Dream Deferred” is another short poem that paints a distinct image of disappointment through the use of metaphor. The message poignantly comes through his use of rather disgusting images. His technique shows that it’s not the number of words you use for the effect, but it’s how you use them.

“Dream Keeper” is probably my top favorite Langston Hughes poem. In a succinct way, the poet describes the delicate nature of dreams. His metaphors of “heart melodies” and “blue cloud-cloth” are such unique, amazing images that leave a deep impression on the reader.

Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed reading just a few of the many poems Langston Hughes penned. If you want to read more poetry by this poet, click here.

Did any of these poems resonate with you? Tell me below.