This Week's Topic:
What themes, settings, motifs, scenes, or other elements do you find recurring in your work?
Dark Family Secrets.
It's kind of hilarious actually. My current WIP is the first novel-length story I've written that doesn't have a dark family secret at the heart of it.
Book 1: Girl finds out her father's a sorcerer who summons demons (and is planning on feeding her english teacher to them!)
Book 2: Girl finds out her family is all part of the criminal underworld of Central California.
Book 3: Boy finds out his mother was seriously injured in a feud between her two sisters, one of whom is only half human.
That's a lot of books to be about the same topic. And honestly, the whole 'secrets of the past' storyline is really, really hard to write effectively. Finding stuff out really isn't 'doing things' and doing things is sort of important. Thank god my current one isn't about that!
(Also, awkwardly, in Book 3 I kept having long descriptions of whatever they were eating. I really enjoyed making up meals that really felt exotic enough to be fantasy food (you need fantastic food to go along with your fantastic castles!). Sadly, most of my delicious scenes ended up on the cutting room floor.)
That's funny about the food--I kept all the food, and dumped a bunch of historical references! That shows where my priorities are.
ReplyDeleteI'm also dealing with the "finding stuff out isn't action" issue. *sigh*
ReplyDelete@ Kate - It totally sucks, doesn't it?
ReplyDelete@ Angelica - I'm thinking about going back and picking up all those awesome meals and doing a fantasy story about cooking. I've made some of the things I invented, and they are too tasty to waste!