Losing Focus

Themes are incredible things in stories. They can help bind a story together. But have you ever found a theme overtaking your work? Yeah, me too.

My writing can sometimes be painfully slow and difficult to start. I can end up spending up to two weeks on one chapter for no good reason. Words normally flow from my fingers. But within the last week, something clicked. I went through all the reasons my writing productivity might be down. One was me being a little distractable due to current home conditions and upcoming events. Those issues are slowly finding solutions.

The other is that I was letting the grand theme dominate the story, at the expense of characters and narrative. In an earlier WordPress post, I outlined an Ancient Greece alternate story. That was being stopped dead because I was trying to kind some grand theme for the narrative. I know, it's terrible of me. I was also trying to open it in a style foreign to my sensibilities of character writing. On top of that, restarting a project from scratch can be a little demoralising for someone based on the amount of work put in. In my case, this was my third attempt.

Here's hoping my current works, including the above story, will push forward now I've remembered what pushed me to write ten months ago. Before my father died, and I had to reassess my world. It's a miracle I completed anything at all.