Theme

I've been thinking a lot lately about theme.

What is it? Some say it's an entire sentence, and it can't be expressed without a sentence, such as:

Revenge leads to self-destruction.

Screenwriting guru Stanley Williams has a more complex formula for theme that he dubs "the moral premise" in his book by that title. To him, no narrative is complete without its moral premise, and the moral premise is like a theme with two parts:

Vice or undesirable quality leads to _____________________
 but virtue or desirable quality leads to ___________________.

Simple as it sounds, it does allow an author to construct highly unified themes.

I wish more genre novels emphasized theme. Many genre novels have strong plots, but the theme just doesn't come together. There's not a lot of symbol, resonance, or imagery to make the novel vibrate on a deeper level.

By contrast, in many contemporary literary novels, there's a ton of theme, and no plot to hang it on. This is a departure from many classic novels now considered 'literary', which were more balanced in plot and theme, especially before 1900.

 A novel's theme works like the moment of personal epiphany we experience when we look back on past events and suddenly spot a theme in our own life's narrative. But in order for theme to work in novels the way it works in our consciousness, there has to be some forward motion, some action to distract us from the theme while it's accumulating, and then BOOM! At the end, we get the big reveal.

How do you get theme into your work?

What on earth do you say if you win a major book award?

I just returned from the conference known as ACFW 2012.

To my shock, I won two Carol Awards there, for my novel Fairer than Morning, one award for Best Debut Novel and one award for Best Long Historical.

As I told a couple of friends, I was sitting at the table at the time of the announcement repeating to myself silently, "It's OK if I don't win. It's OK if I don't win," in full anticipation that my worthy fellow nominees would take home the awards.

The results were sufficiently shocking that I barely made it through some semblance of an acceptance speech.

I was so nervous beforehand, far more nervous than I would ever have imagined. I wandered around my room in a fog, unable to do something even as simple as choosing earrings. Why? Because if I didn't win, I would be so disappointed, but if I did win, I would have to get up in front of 600-plus peers and industry professionals and say something. And I didn't know what to say. And I was too nervous to put anything together or write anything down, because after all, I might very well not win, and then I would feel silly for having prepared a speech.

Being at a loss for words is a highly unusual predicament for me. I am not usually known for my silence and inability to express myself. :-) But when faced with the task of having to articulate my response to the realization of a dream, like winning a Carol Award for my debut novel, I was completely stymied.

1) Should I talk about my faith journey, and how God brought me through such dark years to equip me to write, and how grateful I will always be for those years and that equipping?

2) Should I talk about the books in this series, and how I was called to a mission six years ago that took me through a lot of pain, struggle, and self-doubt, but now seemed to have received a heavenly seal of approval that took my breath away?

3) Should I just thank individual people for two minutes, because I certainly could go on for at least that long thanking all the dear friends and new supporters who had helped me through the difficult parts of the publishing process?

I had no clue, except that a dry two-minute listing of the scores of people who have meant so much to me during my writing journey didn't seem like the right choice. I remembered having been a spectator at these awards. I wanted to be considerate of the listeners and say something that would be in some way valuable, or at least interesting to them, rather than go off on a spiel of names that meant a lot to me but little to anyone else.

So, what I ended up doing, in my dazed state, was a very abbbreviated form of  number 2. I figured all my faithful friends and writer buddies would understand if I could not list thirty or forty people by name in an acceptance speech, and that they would rather I give the credit to God amd try to say something helpful for the audience.

For my second speech, I could hardly summon anything at all except to say how grateful I was to be part of the work of this organization, how I respected the merit of my fellow nominees, and to bless the audience. My brain had finally ground to a complete halt, after the shock of the first award, and I wasn't really thinking. My effort was just to stay coherent!

So, do I wish that I had scripted something?

No.

I'm a writer. I've been scripting things my whole life. I am quite experienced at constructing speeches and using rhetorical technique. I've done it so much that it's all but automatic.

There's something really nice about the memory that on this night, I didn't use any rhetoric, didn't summon the tools at my disposal to create an effect, didn't write a "speech." I just went up there and spoke in the moment. I allowed myself to talk spontaneously to the assembled people, many of whom I know and love.

It wasn't the greatest or most powerful acceptance speech in the world, but what a relief it was to me, to just enjoy the night, to be free of the pressure to be a good speech-writer, to "turn off" the craft and be truly spontaneous, if less eloquent than a prepared speech might have been.

What would you do? Scripted, or spontaneous?

After the Long, Hot Summer

Yesterday brought crisp air and a cooler slant of light across the fields. Fall is coming.

This summer brought great change in our lives, a time of transition from our five years in the Southwest to our new home in the deep South. In a way, it's a homecoming, because both my husband and I have spent years in the South, and our extended family is now only a day's drive away, instead of two or three.

Still, we have again moved to a town in which we have no immediate family or old friends. So this is a period of waiting, of patience, of trusting that our lives will grow into fullness in our new home.

It's not that our lives aren't already full of events: even now, we're juggling priorities and multi-tasking as much as we ever did in NM.

But what makes life full is relationships, and though my long-distance friendships continue, I feel the empty space where my local friendships once tied me to our community.

I've learned from many similar moves, however, that this will change. My experience in NM taught me some important lessons about how to go about making friends. I found that many of my most durable friendships came through shared activities. They weren't the kind of thing you could just go out and find overnight. So, I'm glad to be meeting lots of new people through my daughter's homeschooling co-op. These moms are all dedicated to education, and thus far I've found many of them to be confident, interesting women.

Where have you found your closest friends? Have you ever had to move and start over?

The Truth Is...

So I've been having trouble with my feelings about social media. That may have been obvious by my scarcity recently, or it may have been disguised by the fact that I also made a major interstate move two weeks ago.

Do you ever feel this way? That the demands of all the ways people say authors should be networking are ruining the simple pleasure we should be able to take in online friendship? I know it's different for everyone, but for me, I need to make a short-term change and see if it works better for me.

If I have to choose one online forum (and I think I do, for my own comfort and sense of authenticity right now), my preferred social medium is Facebook. I feel it's more personal and easier to really interact with others--to share real life without worrying so much about whether a post qualifies as personal or professional.

So I'm going to take a summer long hiatus from this blog. Please come befriend me on Facebook if you haven't already! I like to keep up with online friends and see how they are doing, and that is so much easier  for me there. I know status updates are not quite as thought-provoking as blog posts sometimes, and I will miss some of the excellent, well-written thoughts on my friends' blogs. Still, I have a feeling I will enjoy the relief from one extra activity, especially as I work to settle us into our new home.

Happy Summer! See you around Facebook!

The Big Week

Hi friends!

This is moving week, and we're working hard to pack up for our moving deadline. It's hard to believe that next Monday, I will be living in another state!

I look forward to catching up when the dust settles.

Writer-Writer, Romance-Writer, History-Writer?

In bits and pieces wrested from the jaws of deadlines, I exchange emails with another published author friend of mine. One of the things we discuss, as historical fiction-with-romance writers, is the nature of our relationship to history, romance, and writing.

Here are three types of writer. I'll tell you which I am, and then I hope you'll tell me whether you fit one of these types, or whether you're something else.

History-Writer:
This is me. My passion for history drives my writing. I realized this all over again last week as I went to a library and a museum to start research for a new, short-term project (a historical stage play). For the first time in over a year, I felt a true thrill and a passion for my work as a writer.

The study of history reveals the realities beneath today's surfaces. It brings me stories that reveal the interconnectedness of all of our lives, and the greatness of the divine plan throughout time. When I start researching history, my mind comes alive. The combined analytical and creative challenge of turning real history into fictional narrative is my specialty. It's one of the few activities in life that can demand intense work from every neuron I possess--and it's an endeavor important enough to make me want to go to the effort. (Certain strategy board games could challenge me that much too, if I really cared that much about the outcome, but I play board games in a more relaxed way, for fun. :-)

When we History-Writers run amok, the scary result is a novel with pages and pages of real history so dense it makes eyes cross--or historical explanations out of the mouths of characters that sound like the author just stepped in as narrator. 

Romance-Writer:
Well-known historical romance author Julie Lessman wrote this blog post. She discussed her dislike of research--the same research that makes me glow and gives me all my motivation to write. Yet, Julie and I write in the same genre. What gives?

Julie is a Romance-Writer, as she recalls saying to her agent in this post (and her fans will tell you she is very good at writing romance). Historical research doesn't float her boat: telling love stories does.

Now, I can't speak for Julie, but I'll tell you some more subvarieties within this type. Some Romance-Writers find they like the trimmings and fringe benefits of historicals (pretty dresses, behavioral conventions, true gentlemen!), but they don't like all the research and the feeling of "constriction" that results from the need for a writer to avoid anachronisms. Other Romance-Writers *kind of* enjoy writing the history, just as I can *kind of* enjoy writing romance when necessary. But that doesn't change the nature of the true driving force behind an author's work.

Romance-Writers have their weaknesses too, of course, and one of the key signs of an untamed Romance-Writer in historicals is those vocabulary errors and other historical inconsistences that a good editor should catch. An untamed Romance-Writer in contemporary fiction may stretch the bounds of credibility too far in order to give us an interesting twist on the boy-girl story.

Writer-Writers:
I know a few writers who are not very motivated by content. They're passionate about the writing itself. These writers tend to gravitate toward literary fiction or toward the looser genres, such as women's fiction, so they can 'play' more without having to adhere so tightly to the conventions of a genre. That looseness can have advantages and disadvantages. Playing outside conventions can produce brilliance--or it can produce a story that doesn't cohere and satisfy the reader. Sometimes, this kind of authorial playing by Writer-Writers can create a fantastic novel that is nonetheless very hard to sell because publishers are scared of the unknown. But other times, if Writer-Writers aren't disciplined, their writing can become self-indulgent and overdone. This happens most often in literary fiction, but I've seen it happen in the less lofty genres too. But more on that next week.

These three Writer categories aren't mutually exclusive, but I hope you will join in and tell me: what is your driving passion? Do you fit into one of these three types?

Why You Want Clean Galleys for Your Book

If you're familiar with the usual steps of the traditional publishing process, you know that novels go through several rounds of edits, and then they are typeset into galleys.

Galleys look like the actual pages that will appear in a bound novel. When you get the author copies of the galleys, you have your last chance to proofread your novel and make minor changes before it goes to print.

 My second novel, Sweeter than Birdsong, ended up needing a very quick turnaround in line edits (the stage right before galleys), an unusually grueling, fast turnaround for both me and my editor. As a result, the galleys were not as clean as I would have liked. There were some errors, and there were a number of stylistic things that needed to be cleaned up. This was only natural because of the time pressure, and I managed to get everything shipshape for publication by some judicious work with the galleys (and with the help of my excellent copy editor and proofreaders).

Still, in an ideal situation, I would like to produce much cleaner galleys, and I think I have done that for my third novel, Lovelier than Daylight.

Why does it matter? Because galleys turn into what are called the ARCs, or Advance Reader Copies.

I was chagrined to realize that the readers for my second novel's blog tour had received ARCs, because I did not want my dear readers to read the flawed copies made from my galleys. I wanted them to read the real thing, the cleaned up version! But that's the way it often works in publishing. Reviews, both formal and informal, require advance copies.

So, when it's your turn, keep in mind that your galleys will go to Publishers Weekly. They will go to Library Journal and RT Book Reviews and every other advance reviewer.

My advice: get your manuscript as close to perfect as you can during line edits. Sometimes, circumstances will really make that close to impossible, as with our editing time frame for Sweeter than Birdsong. But when you have the time, go over your manuscript with a fine-toothed comb during line edits! Get rid of every word repetition, every slightly cloudy phrasing, every metaphor that has even a *whisper* of overwriting about it.

You'll be glad you did when you find out a hundred reviewers are reading your galleys. :-)