What do you want to say?
Have you thought about that? About the lessons people will learn from reading your story?
Some morals are written out plainly. Maybe the writer wrote the whole story about forgiveness. Or friendship. Or God's mercy. From beginning to end, the story winds its way through the highlights of it's theme.
Some morals are more subtle. What choices are rewarded in your story? What choices gets the characters into trouble? Who wins in the end? Maybe not even the author knows what she is saying until it is all written. That happens for me sometimes.
I don't see a lot of inspiring lessons in the original Sleeping Beauty tales (do you?), but I think it provides an easy base for whatever you want to say.
Which brings me back to my original question:
what do you want to say?
I tend to pray a lot about my stories, and when I focus on writing them with as much deep truth as I can find, I have discovered that the morals pretty much take care of themselves. I have, at times, written stories with symbols and themes that I could not even recognize until after the thing was accomplished. This makes me smile and say, 'Thanks, God!'
ReplyDeleteI have to say, after reading SPINDLE, I'm a little tempted to jump on the Sleeping Beauty bandwagon, myself. But I really don't think I have the time.
I love it when God works something in a story that was far beyond the writer!
ReplyDeleteJanie, you would have fun on these retellings, and I would love to see what story God wrote through you.
But I understand if you don't have time, and I doubly appreciate the time you took in reading mine.
On the flip side...the deadline isn't until December... ;)
ooh...somehow I'd missed that you were going to enter this...[I missed so many things happening in the world of blogging this past year...oy...] fun! :D I am toying with the idea, but basically I'd have to be inspiration-struck and write it all out in a flash...I don't know how likely that is to happen before December. XD
ReplyDeleteUsually I don't chose a lessen or a moral for my stories. (Out of everything I've written I may have only done that once...) As I write, I start noticing themes showing through, and the characters' lives strangely seem to end up dealing with issues I've had to face recently or things I've been learning in my own life. XD Especially when I am writing for maximum emotional impact...what I believe spills over into the story, and I'm usually surprised to see what I ended up writing about. :D
Me, too!
ReplyDeleteSPINDLE especially worked out that way. Halfway into it, I realized that this story came because one of my friends (who I hang out with a lot) had just received a very bad report from a doctor. This was somehow a subconscious response to that.
But, even at the halfway point - knowing that this story was connected to my real life, I still didn't know what all was in that story. That's why it was so cool to sit back and read it afterward.