What's the Message?

[J. T. SHEA]

Polymath, perhaps theme or message is something best aimed at by aiming at something else. Likewise happiness! Risk beginning the story and let the theme emerge, as if by itself? Don't try to fully answer the questions of theme and message at the start. Let the story answer them.

If the resulting message is mixed, so what? Analytical Polymath trusting intuitive Polymath? Not that I see those two facets as necessarily opposed in anyone.

You do say you are unsatisfied with all but one of a plethora of stories you have written. Has anyone else read any of them? We all have blind spots and need the extra insights a second pair of eyes can give.

[polymath]

J. T. Shea,

I wrote aimlessly for decades, accomplished self-indulgent anecdotes and vignettes that only a mother could love, though my mother isn't much of a reader. About ten years ago, my writing started to have a purpose. Several years later, I enjoyed an approving audience of regular readers numbering in the high ten figures. Several years later, my writing had become oriented around themes that matter to me privately and have potentially high public interest.

A theme for planning or prewriting purposes doesn't have to be specifically consciously nailed down. War is a simple thematic topic, but far too broad and complicated. The Powhatan-Anglo war of 1622 is more specific, but still comparatively broad in time and scope and complexity. That war from the perspecitve of Chanco is a sufficiently narrow scope for a long narrative. Due to his relationship with Anglos and Powhatans, his Native American heritage, his adopted heritage, his conflicted values, and his identity and personality issues, the specified theme becomes a plot driving engine. What does he need to resolve that the war compels him to resolve? His conflicted self-identity. Torn between his Native heritage and his devotion to his adopted heritage, he strives to accommodate the conflict between the rightness and wrongness of the war as he sees it.

He changed history. Snapshots of Chanco's story have been recounted, but not yet fully told. In one perspective, he's a villain, in another a hero, in another an everyman who rose above his own self-serving needs, in another a self-sacrificing everyman who nobly took his place in the larger scheme of things.

All of my current narratives have been through the audience testing mangle in many sorts of venues. I've had one goal all along, resolving my blindspots, my tunnel vision, my foreshortened perspectives, my peripheral views, my wide-angle views into one harmonious creative vision.

[Aimée]

Polymath,
I recently had an epiphany, too, and when I looked back through my ideas and my stories, I found that in each one, a little bit of this idea had been leaking through. So I guess I'd known it all along. I've expanded on the idea a lot and have started a new project trying to express this idea. You see, I have a problem just writing about a plot. I have to write about complex ideas and messages. This why my stories take forever to write and they never have a plot, and are perhaps extremely boring, which is probably why I am not published. Also I have never actually finished writing a novel, which could also be a problem. I definitely over think them. Also I am easily distracted.
What you have said here has made me curious about your writing. What are your themes? What have you written about?
And I correct peoples' grammar all the time. Not to say I'm perfect, however...

[polymath]

Aimée,

My nonfiction revolves around self-reliance, my fiction around the oppressions of might makes right and the oppressing tyrranies of majority rules and groupthink popularity pageantry, which boil down to the same thing in differing guises.

[J. T. SHEA]

Impressive, Polymath. None of us has all the answers, but you do seem to have your questions, at least, more clearly worked out than most people.