Authors brains are so helpfully… unhelpful sometimes. *huffs and proceeds to shove my article at you*

Okay, so, let's start out with what started the decision which is what I'm gonna say in just a minute… well.. No, it’d be what I'm about to write in just a minute…— anyway, basically the thing that led to my consideration of the decision I mentioned above.

Theme.​
​

Okay, theme is… theme is… alot. I’ve been struggling to wrap my brain around how it works and how to implement it ever since i first started seriously writing in 2023 and kinda have come up short, but knowing that I’m still learning the writing technique I’ve just pushed it aside and plowed ahead in my drafting and such and been gaining decent skill with plot and character and… maybe prose? Idk.. prose is um, not my best area of expertise, i can confuse people with my sentence structures quite often, but anyways, that's not what I’m discussing, um, theme, yes, so, basically I’ve just been ignoring theme because while I want to implement it, i just haven’t been able to figure out how, and I’ll probably end up writing an actual article on theme in the future because i’ve nowhere near done enough research and practice with it to be able to write something up now, but, since its relevant to my aforementioned decision you’re gonna get a random theme progression snippet that I wrote the other day when I finally discovered what my theme was, because y’all, i’ve seriously been struggling to figure this out and now that I have… my biggest problem is actually writing it into my work and anyways, here is the little theme progression snippet vvvvv

My theme progression:

I started like a lot of beginner writers start; with no theme, which absolutely isn’t bad, a lot of times theme just comes out in your story at some point, and you don’t even have to intentionally work it in, or so I’ve heard, but idk, i always felt like i didn’t have a theme. Like… at all. I mean, I did, but that was only because I forced one in just so I had it because I felt like I should. I wrote my book without a thought to anything but the story and the awesomeness of it and blah blah blah all that stuff that is totally fine but for my goals it just doesn’t work. That was in my first like.. Three years of writing because I hand wrote off an on for the first two years then seriously got into writing in the third year.

Okay, fast forward to the first round of revisions/waytoounpreparedpublication of that book I started during my third year and is kinda like my “heart project” as many people call it. I need to find a theme because I feel like I want my story to actually… idk… speak to people and what it was at just… didn’t do that. It was a random, cringy, maybe slightly engaging story. So I set out to find my theme based on the few things I’d been told about how sometimes your theme just emerges, as I mentioned a bit ago, in your writing without you realizing it… so I read my manuscript during revisions to figure out what it was and expound on it because I couldn’t tell right off the bat. Okay, I’m moving in the right direction. ‘What could I add/work in better in my book to make a theme that people notice?’ …. Mm… lets just say that, although it did make a semblance of sense, my choice was forced in and wasn’t portrayed very well and honestly just isn’t what I was passionate about exploring. Revenge, or rather, how revenge isn’t good. okay thats actually not a terrible theme to write about but the way i handled it, plus the fact that it wasn’t something I did intentionally, more because i just felt like i should have a theme… eh… it didn’t work and like, i’m a believe and i want to honor Christ in my work, but idk, once I wrote the revenge theme in there it felt cheesy to me and I started to feel like there just wasn’t room for God in my manuscript without making it sound super cheesy and cringy. I was kinda convicted about that cause like, I want to honor God and be a light for Him in my writing but I was just at a loss as to how. I left it though cause again, i knew my book was terrible and i’m probably end up rewriting and that I was still learning.

fast forward like… two novels later, one being completely unconnected to the series, also themeless, and then the second book in the series… again, also themeless and i’m back to rewrite this first one and i know my theme is just like… garbage, honestly tho, the entire book was garbage, but anyways, yeah, anyways, back to theme, so i still didn’t know how to find a theme, ofc at this point i now have ydubs and i’d watched some stuff on theme, asked a few questions on it but i still couldn’t figure out how to get theme into my book, like, anything i tried it would just seem forced or cheesy so i continued to ignore it and just like, instead focused on plot and character building and motivations of characters etc, though still feeling convicted almost about involving Christ in my writing more, and at last I came to a less forced much smoother version of my ‘revenge isn’t good’ theme. I know I progressed so wonderfully well. Even knowing that it wasn’t something I was passionate about I was still trying to make it fit cause I just didn’t know how to write an actual theme, and still don’t tbh, I was just trying to find my theme at this point.

Anyways, my smoother version of my revenge theme i could totally work with, and it’d be perfectly fine and I would probably still be working with it if not for the other day when i ended up reworking a character playlist for my main character and was reviewing why each song makes sense for him and i came across one that i’d put in, kinda on a whim cause it sounded a tad like something that fit him when I’d heard it once, and keep in mind i still have been feeling like i want God more involved in this story I'm writing, like I said, still feeling convicted about it, and i came across a song that fits my mc so well in multiple ways actually. Judas by Josiah Queen anyone? I'm not a big Josiah Queen listener, I've heard a few of his songs but I've never listened consistently to him. This song, though, hit me in several ways, and I won't go into all of them, but one was that it fits my mc. Or rather, it fits the theme, the goal, the drive behind my mc’s actions. His character. And bam.

Just like that my theme was developed, oh not perfectly but the pieces came together while i was listening to that song, the last lines specifically

Maybe I’m like Judas

Maybe I’m that thief

Maybe i’m that sinner, who put You on that tree

For thirty pieces of silver, and i still can’t believe

that God in all his mercy, went and purchased me

Like, no joke, as soon as those words finished playing, me being immersed in my mc’s head at this point, the theme was just… there. I couldn’t believe it. Like how had I not seen it before? And it's something that I’ve been realizing more and more the past few months that genuinely speaks to my heart. It's something I’m actually finding I’m kinda passionate about.

‘You can never be so broken that God won’t love you and be able to repair your shattered mess.’

Redemption.

It's something we all need, but we all struggle with accepting, in different ways and different degrees of struggle, but we all do nonetheless.

​
​

So, that was how my theme came into existence, but, as I mentioned, I've begun rewriting this book and I'm nearly at the lowest moment.

And I didn’t discover what my theme was, what I wanted to have my story portray until a few days ago.

Which means…

I will be doing another rewrite of my rewrite.

…

…

Yeah.

Two povs.

As an overwriter.

…

…

That's bound to be fun. *cocks head to eye my draft*

Honestly though, I’m rather excited for that, just because I’ve finally found the reason for the story, the why, the lesson… but it's also a little daunting to consider because I’ve already nearly gone through an entire rewrite and its taken me almost five months, way longer than the last novel I wrote, and that's partly because of a busy life, but also because I’ve been struggling to figure out why I was writing this book in the first place.

All that to say, this article was basically just explaining that an author's life is constantly randomized and changing and an organizedish mess and hopefully I didn’t bore y’all with it, XD.

Anyways, thats all I’ve got now, so don’t die and farewell!

*bows and dramatically exits, leaving behind a few meme quotes*

“I’m not in danger I am the danger.” -random pinterest quote I found

~Megan 🖋️🎶💣😇