Michael Stanton

@ethryndal Yep; I’m totally with you. That’s what tends to frustrate me the most about much of contemporary fiction. There’s a lot of popular novels out there that are entertaining stories, but not much more than that. =P

@kate-flournoy That’s awesome! And yes–that’s definitely a really important aspect of making a strong theme. We’ll be…[Read more]

@Daeus I love that one. My vote goes for that.

@Daeus I agree. Great points.

Les Miserables. 😀

Theme: justice and mercy.
Focusing question: which one triumphs?
Message: it’s justice that makes mercy necessary.

Hmm… those are slightly different than the format of the others you shared… and now my brain is tickling… I wonder…
Oh yes. This was that idea— I’ve thought about this some already. 😛 It seems to me…[Read more]

@Daeus… LGK? ‘Little Green Kate’??? *hysterical chuckling* I like that. :”D

Excellent font choice, by the way. 😉

@Leumeister I love the title, though it might be a little too metallic to show up well against your background, and as far as I can tell with your experimental models, the actual cover looks like it’ll be well laid out. It does seem a bit too dark though, and besides that maybe a little uniform. There’s nothing really eye-catching about the cover…[Read more]

@Daeus I like it. A lot. I would tend to agree that the silver subtitle does look best.

Oops @Ethryndal *ducks head* But I thought it was good she even had an idea, considering she’d had writer’s block for a long time?

And that’s true what you said about forcing names. I’ve never done that, but I’ve had to change names before, and let me tell you it was not fun. I referred to her as Lily for months after I changed it, just cuz it…[Read more]

@S-G-Dewey hm, I’m best with wayyyy older names, but I shall see what I can think of… Francis. William. Laurence. Alexander. Oliver. Douglas. Richard. Martin. George.
I’ll let you know if I think of anything else…

And congratulations on defeating your writer’s block! *cheers*

Same here. For me, life IS the story, and since life without Christ is not complete, it stands to reason a story without Christ is not complete either. So it’s a matter of learning to see reality through the correct lens and put it down just as it is— death, life, despair, hope, sin, God, and everything! 😀

And I’m currently feeling like all my…[Read more]

@audrey-caylin That’s awesome! Glad to hear that the lesson helped you so much!

One thing you could do with your story’s message is to expand it by offering a reason for hope (e.g. “There’s always a reason to hope because _______________”). It somewhat depends on what type of story you’re trying to write, as a reason isn’t strictly necessary,…[Read more]

@Daeus I’m late, but the gold title definitely works better.

@Daeus *groans* Tell me about it. 😛

if you have a 150,000 word novel, you should split it up into three 50,000 word novels

*stares at quote*
*turns bright green*
*screams*
Yah, we’re just gonna pretend we didn’t see that. 😛

I actually don’t know all that much about trilogies, not having dealt with one myself, but the one piece of advice that’s coming to mind is make the middle…[Read more]

@audrey-caylin Awesome! Glad to hear that the lesson sparked some creative juices! 😀 I haven’t read A Time to Die yet (it is so high on my reading list, but time keeps alluding me…), but that seems like a good analysis of the book. The message doesn’t seem too broad to me (though to be fair I haven’t read the book yet), but it could be a bit…[Read more]

@ethryndal Awesome; those are great goals to have! Explaining how all story aspects can tie into a story’s theme was one of the goals I had in making the course, so it should definitely help you learn how to do that.

@sleepwalkingmk You’re welcome! If we weren’t trying to constantly outdo ourselves, us Jedi masters may be out of a job pretty quickly. 😉

@dragon-snapper Great goal! Like Daeus said, we’ll definitely be answering that and unpacking how to approach a theme from several different angles by using the power of story.

@audrey-caylin That’s great! Writing about things you’ve experienced can create the most powerful themes in storytelling, so that’s a great place to start, and I’ll be talking some in the next video about that aspect of theme development.