Josiah DeGraaf

@ethryndal Writing parts of yourself into your characters is one of the best ways to do that! I really like that alternate method though of using one of your friends as a means of portraying the character. Hadn’t thought of that before, but I may have to try that now!

@ethryndal Nice work! I particularly like 3 and 5 since they’re wrong answers that can seem rather sympathetic at first. Sounds like a great backbone for poetic justice there as well.

@hope Ahh; got ya. Sounds like you may have two different themes going on here. Success would work well as a theme. Another way you could take it if you wanted to stick with the finite ability of man, would be to have a focusing question like this: “Given the finite ability of man, how can man succeed in life?” The answers would then just need to…[Read more]

@hope Good choice! There definitely are a number of themes in LotR (the lust for power is another central one), and that theme is certainly one of them.

@hope Those are great possible answers to the focusing question; I really like how many of those answers are pretty sympathetic answers that many people would choose, and not just obviously wrong answers like fame or power. That has the potential to make your theme a lot more compelling as readers can see themselves drifting to those wrong…[Read more]

@hope Great analogy! I like it. And I definitely agree with you on how great it is to find books with great themes. Nothing hooks me to a story as much as a strong theme does.

@hope That’s great. Haha, I can definitely sympathize with the struggle of moving a theme from the concept-level into the actual story! Keep that goal in mind while working through the course and I’d love to hear your thoughts on the other end of the course on how much the course helped you with that goal.

@anne-swiftblade That’s great! We’ll be…[Read more]

@kate-flournoy Plays are great! And that sounds like a great example of catharsis. I haven’t read those plays before, but I’ll need to put those on my reading list now…

@audrey-caylin Good question; sounds like I didn’t make it clear enough. The idea is to share something like a plot outline where you briefly sketch out each of the major five character arc scenes with a couple sentences and explain how you plan on sketching out the big-picture view of your character arc.

@ethryndal Basically what Daeus said. The Experiments in Living should be looking pretty similar to the answers you came up with before; the only difference is that this time they should be a bit more “embodied” so-to-speak in a lifestyle, and a bit less abstract. 🙂

@audrey-caylin Ha; that makes sense. There is a fair bit of overlap between these two questions. And that’s awesome. The more you as an author see your characters as real people and write like that, the more your readers will see them as real people as well. Glad to know I’m making people excited about homework. 😉

@ethryndal That looks great! Haven’t read the book myself, but you seem to have analyzed its theme well.

@dragon-snapper Cool; I may have to read that myself sometime. The focusing question may be stronger as just “through means of revenge or forgiveness,” but not having read the short story itself, I couldn’t say for sure.

Ha; I’m sure you are…[Read more]

25,400 words.

Apparently I’m average. =P

To get a good publisher, generally you need to first get a good literary agent, which means learning how to write a great query letter, along with a great book. Generally-speaking, if you’re a skilled writer, publishers and literary agents will want to publish/represent you, but there is an element of luck to it. If you’re looking for good blogs…[Read more]

@audrey-caylin Great thoughts! I absolutely agree–bad experiences are absolutely motivational in forcing us to change. It reminds me a lot of what Peter says in his first epistle about how God uses suffering to refine us.

And that’s a great example of a “real life character arc” so to speak. Honestly, I’ve found that understanding experiments in…[Read more]

@kate-flournoy That looks great! I could see the transitory Experiments being either full-fledged Experiments, or just part of the middle Venn diagram section of the two opposing Experiments in Living. Kind of depends on how marked his change is. But yeah, that looks like a great way of handling the disillusionment arc.

@audrey-caylin Oh,…[Read more]

@aella Haha! We’ve certainly had pretty much everything thrown out there at this point so that’s definitely fine! Is there any answer in particular that rings particularly true for you?

Great question @dragon-snapper! Looks like you’ve already got a bounty of information on this, but I’ll just throw in there that if you want to read more about this topic, my best recommendation would be to read up on what K.M. Weiland has written about the topic. You can read her original 21-part series here, or read her expanded book on it here.