Tag: themes

Categories
Romancing Your Story

Make it Personal

One of my favorite movies is You’ve Got Mail. When Joe Fox attempts to apologize to Kathleen Kelly for forcing her out of business, he says, “It wasn’t … personal.”

She replies, “What is that supposed to mean? … All that means is that it wasn’t personal to you. But it was personal to me … Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.”

The same is true of great fiction. It begins by being personal, meaning your story should embrace universal themes that people will relate to.

The Count of Monte Cristo poses the question, does getting even—revenge and retribution—make one happy and satisfied?

Kristan Higgins’ new release, Pack Up the Moon, is about a grieving widower who receives a letter a month from his late wife for the first year after her death. In spite of the downer premise, the theme is that “life’s greatest joys are often hiding in plain sight.”

A Christmas Carol and Les Miserables pose the question, is redemption possible?

I love stories with themes of perseverance, of never giving up, despite terrible odds. This is why I enjoy Susan May Warren’s adventure thrillers, like her Global Search and Rescue, Montana Marshalls, and Montana Rescue series. The stories are full of danger and intrigue and impossible predicaments, but the protagonists survive. I also like movies like Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and R.E.D. The heroes. Never. Give. Up.

Another book with a theme of perseverance would be A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L′Engle.

The theme of You’ve Got Mail is summed up nicely in its tagline: Someone you pass on the street may already be the love of your life.

That’s intriguing. Even if you’re with the love of your life, there are occasions you may wonder what (or who) might be out there. What if you’d walked to work the day you met your significant other, instead of taking the bus?

The movie Sliding Doors shows this “path not taken,” plot with a lot of heart and creativity. Helen is fired from her job and takes a train home in the middle of the day to find her boyfriend with another woman. Or did she miss the train and arrived home after the other woman left, and stayed in a relationship with the cheater?

I think Sliding Doors’ theme is, will true love always find a way?

The heroine of my work in progress is a young widow. I’ve never lost a spouse, but I’ve lost a parent and other close loved ones. I know the stages of grief (anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance). The hero has his own loss that he’s dealing with, so their journeys are each echoed in the other. I’m attempting to show a theme that life and love can be rich again, after loss.

Grief and joy. Regret and eagerness. Doubt and excitement.

Our job is put those emotions on the page in a way the reader relates to and (hopefully) feels them as much as our characters do. Personally.

Carrie Padgett lives in Central California, close to Yosemite, but far from Hollywood, the beach, and the Golden Gate Bridge. She believes in faith, families, fun, and happily ever afters. She writes contemporary fiction with romance. She recently signed a contract with Sunrise Publishing to co-write a romance novel with New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hauck that will be published in 2022. Carrie and her husband live in the country with their high-maintenance cat and laid-back dog, within driving distance of their six grandchildren.

You can find her online at:

Categories
Writing for YA

Writing Diverse Mental Health Themes in YA Fiction

If you’ve queried in the past five years, you’re familiar with the plea for diverse books. Publishers and readers alike are searching for stories that reflect the world in all its colours, orientations, beliefs, and abilities. We are searching for connections. We want to be seen.

But not all diversity will be as obvious to spot on the cover of a book.

Diversity goes deep—down to the core of who we are and how the neurons in our brains allow us to think. But, as a society, we are less likely to recognize or celebrate this deeper neurodiversity.

Each of us process and react to the world differently.  Our life experiences also play a role, leaving unique internal scars and mended pathways. For a growing majority of teens today, this internal milieu feels like a battlefield and it comes out as mental illness.

Right now, more than ever, these differences in neurological wiring and life experiences will affect how teens react to fear, anxiety, grief, and confusion. And if they can’t find themselves in the stories that they’re reading, we risk letting them feel alone in their experiences. Which we all know is false.

As YA Authors, mental health themes need be high in our considerations for diversity. But how can we do this authentically?

  1. Write #OwnVoice – Mental health stories written from lived experiences offers a genuine and raw lens. If you’ve lived it and feel comfortable communicating the everyday struggles, along with the big plot turns of life, do it.
  • Write Deep – Don’t include mental health as an afterthought. A person is more than one aspect of their diversity. Our characters need to be seen this way as well. Ask deep questions of your characters. Know their wounds and back stories. Empathize with them before starting to write.
  • Write Educated – If you haven’t experienced the themes present in your story, spend time researching what they are and how they present. Look to respected resources (i.e. The DSM-V) rather than arbitrary blog posts.
  • Write Relationally – Even with the best research, there is something powerful about speaking with a person who has experienced mental illness first-hand. If you will listen and come with empathy and encouragement, odds are you will find someone who will share. Please be considerate though. Never approach someone who is in crisis and stick with friends and family.

With my novel, FADE TO WHITE, I wrote from both personal experience, research, and over 10 years of relational conversations with teens. Some of those conversations were painful to hear, but there was also mutual healing and hope gained through sharing our stories.

mental health

Mental illness is a hidden disease, despite its ever growing prevalence. By considerately sharing diverse mental health experiences, we are giving young people a chance to be seen. A chance to be recognized as broken but not lost. A chance to be represented within the diverse and unsettling world we now live in.

Tara K. Ross lives with her husband, two daughters, and rescued fur-baby in a field of cookie-cutter homes near Toronto, Canada. She works as a school speech-language pathologist and mentors with local youth programs. When Tara is not writing or reading all things YA, you can find her rock climbing the Ontario escarpment, planning her family’s next jungle trek, or podcasting at www.tarakross.com.