On Writing

PART TWO Okay, so now you know how to find the theme of any story, and you’re hopefully not quite so terrified of all this theme bizzo. There’s still one thing I might need to convince you of though: Why does this actually matter? Who, apart from English teachers, actually cares about the theme of […]

CHAPTER SEVEN PART TWO FOR THE PANSTERS* * So called because pantsers write ‘by the seat of their pants’, making it up as they go along, without an outline or a specific plan. Pansters, exploratory writers, writers-into-the-dark: whichever name you call it by, for you, it’s all about journeying into the unknown, letting your subconscious

Chapter Seven Part 1 So you’re a writer, or a student who has to write a story for school or some such, and now you have an understanding of how theme works in other people’s work and why it’s important… but you’re not really sure how to implement it in your own work, or what

Chapter Six Alright, you’ve got your head around the idea of a theme; now it’s time to talk sub-themes. As you’ll have noticed if you’ve been paying attention (which, if you’re not, why are you reading this book right now?! Go sleep, or do something useful to reset your concentration meter!), every time we took

Chapter Five Part 2 The other helpful thing to do is to look for key moments of failure and triumph for the character, and try to figure out why they failed or succeeded. In Harry Potter, the darkest moment of the whole series is the end of book five (or movie five, either way), The

Chapter Five Part 1 So you know now that one way to find the themes of a text is to look for ‘quotable’ bits, and another way is to see if it’s stated in the ending somewhere. But what do you do if the theme isn’t actually ever stated outright? (Hint: sobbing in despair is

Chapter Four Part 2 Okay, so that’s the story,* for those of you who haven’t heard it before or needed a refresher. * I mean sort of. The shape of it is right. I probably might have, um, embellished a few things. But it’s still ‘The Hare and The Tortoise’, okay? So now my question

Chapter Four Part 2 I’m going to give you a quick exercise I use in class to teach this. It involves reading a short fable, and then telling me what the moral of the story is. (In fact, if you grew up on the stereotypical western fable diet, you don’t even need to read it:

Chapter Three Okay, so now that we’ve established the groundwork, we can get down to the nitty-gritty of why you’re actually here: figuring out what theme is I said at the end of chapter one that people often find it easier to divine the point of non-fiction; this is because it’s often stated clearly and

Chapter Two Part 2 If you’re happy enough with this, feel free to move on to chapter three now. But if you’d like to consolidate your understanding even further, have a look at the sample introduction below to see some thesis statements in context. In each instance, you can see that the thesis statement clearly