What Does It All Mean?

I started this post like two weeks ago. Sorry it took me so long to finish. I've been busy.

So last time I mentioned Theme as part of the Holy Trinity of storytelling, along with Plot and Character. (This wasn't my idea, I got it from K.M. Weiland.)

Since the past two posts revolved around plot, and then character, it seems appropriate to tackle theme today. Trouble is, I don't really understand theme.

It's one of those things that make high schoolers hate English class. You can't just read a book. You have to deconstruct it, figure out all the symbolic subtext, and then write an essay on the underlying theme. It's this nebulous thing that seems pretty subjective, but your English teacher assures you that there is a right answer.

The Name Maketh the Man

I'm working on stuff, I swear. I'm just not making a ton of progress that would be exciting to hear about.

I've done a little bit on plot stuff since last time, mostly I've been figuring out character stuff. Like giving them names. And faces.

So in my rough draft of Cold Blooded, I gave the serial killer a name, but it only mentioned once, kind of after the fact, and I kept forgetting what it was. So I've given him a new name and started to figure out his place in the story.

The vampire hunter never got a name at all. Until now. And just by giving him a name, I've started to understand his background, and where he's coming from. It's like a jigsaw puzzle. It's all a big mess of pieces, but once you snap a couple into place, you start to see where the others go around it.

Screaming Fruit at Water

Right now I'm trying to lay out all of my scenes for Cold Blooded. I'm going to need a lot of them, judging by how long my scenes tend to be, and how long this book needs to end up. I'm talking like 80 scenes, which, frankly, seems like a shit ton. I'm basing this off of what I learned from this blog post. I tend to write very short scenes, probably because I refuse to describe anything that doesn't look like a crime scene. But that means I need about 10 scenes before I even get to the inciting incident. Or less, longer scenes. Either way, this is all just setup. For an 80,000 word book, I need about 10,000 words of setup. Does that sound boring? I think that sounds boring. But what do I know.

My system right now is just figuring out the basic progression of events. So I have three things to determine for each scene:

• What needs to happen? How is the plot going to be progressed in this scene? What characters and elements need introduced?
• Who needs to be there? Technically, this is who else needs to be there. As the novel is in 1st Person POV, the main character is there by default.
• What could go wrong? Not necessarily what will go wrong. Just because things could go sideways at a given moment doesn't mean they will. But I want to keep my options open.