Education Writing A Novel Find Your Subject Matter

If you are stalled with your novel writing plans, forgive yourself and start moving upward and onward with your writing. Some of you are working on a novel in progress. Just pick up where you left off and begin writing. If the novel is finished and you want to reshape it, then instead of writing, take a red pen and sit down with a print out of the book. And begin to read it. Make notes in the margin as you go. Side note: If you began with your hero or heroine waking up in the morning and getting out of bed, preparing for the day in which his or her life changes, thus setting the stage for the novel, throw out that scene. It's the kiss of death to begin a novel with that scene. Ideas for novels are everywhere. Once you get the idea, you have to focus on the principal subject matter of the idea. Even more, you have to understand your own attitude toward the subject matter and your attitude should be strong and clear. Example: I want to write a novel about Elvis. The principal subject matter is an ordinary country boy who captures the imagination of millions of people. My attitude is that people need heroes for very personal reasons. The next step is to come up with the approach you want to take. Why do you want to write this book? You need a statement of purpose to clarify your approach. Example: My purpose in writing about Elvis is to prove that people need heroes so badly they will refuse to acknowledge the reality of the heroes they chose. My theme is fame. My approach to fame is that people in our society need fame so badly they create people to carry fame for them without any regard for how those people really feel. The first important step is to focus yourself on your theme. If you are writing a romance novel, the theme most likely will be love. Your approach to love should be positive. Otherwise, you will be writing fiction that you don't believe in. At this stage, where you begin in your first appointment is just thinking and perhaps jotting down notes. There is no right or wrong answer about theme. It's your story...make it what you want. But look into yourself and your feelings and attitudes so that you know how you feel about the meaning of your novel. Example: "But I just want to write about how I met the love of my life." "Why?' "Because it was so unusual." "Why?" "Well, there I was in New York City and I met this guy and it turned out that his roommate was from my home town so we met and I was thinking how odd that I had come all this way to the big city and there I was, meeting the guy from down the block." "It's a coincidence. What makes it unusual?" "Well I fell in love with the first guy I met, not the guy from down the street in my hometown." "And what's unusual about that?" "Oh - the thing is, I don't believe in romantic love. I think it's just a scam dreamed up by advertisers to sell perfume and flowers and things like that. I was just caught up in the coincidence of meeting this guy from my home town and because we knew each other we started hanging around together and I kept meeting his roommate and then he moved out and suddenly I realized I missed him and that I was in love with him and it was very unusual. And then I discovered that he moved out because he was falling for me but didn't think I cared so he wanted to get away from me before he got too attached to me." That's how it goes - you keep talking to yourself about the novel you want to write until you chase down the core of it. This example above seems to have this theme: love is more powerful than reason. That's the theme as I see it. You may see it in another way entirely. But how we see it depends on our life experience and attitudes. There is no right and wrong. What we take from something is a reflection of our personality. plagiarism checker