101 TIWIK #43: Examining Themes in My Own Work

As I said yesterday, theme is my Achilles heel in writing. So today I’m going to take Jesikah Sundin’s advice to heart and try to examine some of the themes in DVBC, using her method of turning a subject into a question then answering the question.

 Here are three that I managed to come up with. It was hard but worthwhile!

Subject: The tragedy of war

Question: What makes war so tragic?

Answer: War is tragic because it wipes away your identity as a person. Your home, your former role, most of your friends and family are gone. All of the things that made you who you were before the war are gone; you are forced to become a different person.

Theme: War wipes away one’s identity by stripping them of everything they know, leaving a different person in their place.

Subject: Taking on a leadership role unwillingly

Question: How does one accept a role as a leader that they don’t want?

Answer: One accepts a role as a leader by making it their own. By its nature, no one can tell you how to lead. If they could, they would lead. A leader must do what no one else is willing to do or what no one else can conceive of doing.

Theme: Leadership means taking the action that no one else is willing to take, or seeing the path that no one else can see.

Subject: Choosing between conflicting duties

Question: How does one choose the right action when two duties conflict?

One chooses the right action between two conflicting duties when they realize which of the duties matters most to them. In a sense, then, their action is no longer just a duty but something they genuinely believe to be right.

Answer: When faced with conflicting duty people will choose the path that they genuinely believe to be right.

What themes can you find in your own work? Is theme easy for you to spot, or is it a struggle? 

Tomorrow: Why go to all this trouble? To what end? revealed in 101 TIWIK #44: Why Identify Theme?

This post is part of a series of 101 Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My First Book. Start reading the series at the beginning. 

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