Kathryn Comstock

@aella I love that! One of the most intimidating things as an author for me is to read a really good book that really moves me and wonder how I’d ever be able to write a book as good as that. Theme definitely helps a lot with that, though, so that’s a great motivation for delving into theme more!

@anne-swiftblade Knowing that Christ may be able…[Read more]

@gideon-sowdon Awesome! The third lesson should help you a lot in recognizing themes both in your story

@aella No problem! Having gone through the wisdom teeth operation myself, I can definitely sympathize! =P We’ll be covering a fair bit on outlining and story planning; let us know at the end of the course how helpful you found the course to be…[Read more]

@ethryndal Awesome! All of that sounds great then. 🙂

@hope Got ya. That does make it more difficult, but it sounds like those physical consequences are exactly the right direction you want to be going in for that. 🙂

@hope Wait, you’re saying that you don’t want me to include a lot more of me rambling in the polished version? Hmmm… Interesting. 😉 Haha, and yes, backstories are great. Random facts are good too, especially as a means of expressing unique characterization.

@ethryndal Good point. The ghosts of our past along with the pain we experience at the present is absolutely important in shaping who someone is.

@hope Nice work. Like I mentioned with Audrey, you will also want to think about the physical consequences of these experiments along with the mental consequences to really display poetic justice powerfully. so you may want to work on that. Other than that, these look great!

@hope Sounds great!

@ethryndal Looks like a good basic setup there. Tying back to the theme, would you say your protagonist’s initial Experiment in Living really has to do with the fact that they superior races have more intrinsic worth to them?

Yes; absolutely! Developing Experiments in Living for other characters is crucial to broadening your story’s theme. We will…[Read more]

@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. 😉