Monica Leonelle teaches how to find your novel's theme by asking what you wish you could say to the world, then showing it through symbols. In The Hunger Games, Katniss represents hope, the Capitol represents oppression, and the Games represent the battlefield of war and rebellion.
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Hey there, Igniter! Monica Leonelle from theworldneedsyourbook.com. Welcome to the second day of the challenge. We are going to be talking about theme. All right, today is day 2. We're talking about theme, and the best way to describe this is we're really taking what we did yesterday, day 1 concept, and we're trying to figure out what do these 3 elements that we've identified, what do they represent in terms of a theme? So many themes are good versus evil, love versus fear, that sort of thing. Your theme can really be anything. There can be multiple themes as well. So what we're going to do here is we're going to try to just go deeper into theme. The reason theme is important is because it's really— it's basically a big part of the emotional resonance of your story. So You know, the first several days of this challenge, maybe even the first like week and a half or so, are focused on the skeleton that is underneath the skin of your, of your story. So we're really trying to build a structure here, and the reader will not see the skeleton. So they're not going to see a lot of the work that we're doing, explicitly, but these, these elements are foundational for, you know, the other pieces that we're going to put in, like the organs, the blood, the skin, all of that stuff that the reader is going to see more explicitly. This piece is very important to create that emotion that we desire. The reader to feel and that we desire to feel as we write it. So let's dive deeper into this. Um, once again, we're going to talk about exploring your book theme. I again recommend a mind map. Uh, so I've given, you know, a mind map again, same or same— or not the same prompts, but, um, similar prompts around it, though you can create your own prompts. So some of the prompts are: what do I wish I could say to the world? You Who do I wish I could help in the world? What makes me frustrated or angry about the world? What matters to me? What is important in the world? And you can do this from your protagonist's perspective, or you can do it from your own as the author. So it doesn't matter either way. What you're really trying to get at is what you're passionate about, like, and that really is going to inform what the book is about. At the heart of it. So the theme to me is, you know, basically like kind of the heartbeat of the book as you continue to build it up. So we're also going to, you know, theme is really, it's all about symbolism. Um, so it's really the idea here is that we're going to be looking for the symbolism that's already in your book's concept that we did in day 1. So you can look at your protagonist, your antagonist, and the situation, what each of them represents, how what they represent ties them into the theme of the book. So an example would be, um, let's take The Hunger Games, another young adult book. Uh, the protagonist Katniss Everdeen, she represents hope, she represents revolution. How does this tie into the theme of the book? Well, the theme— the, the books The whole series is about war. It's about rebellion. It's about— it's really about fighting for yourself. So the antagonist in that book or that series, it represents corporate or control or dictatorship. So it represents a government that is controlling its citizens in a very harsh way. Again, how does this tie into the book? Well, that's pretty obvious. The situation is the Hunger Games. So this is where the game makers and the players interact. And this, again, it's, it's, it really ultimately is symbolic of a battlefield, even though it's billed as a reality TV show and it's billed as games. It's actually symbolic of war. And so, you know, the players are literally killing each other in order to win the game. And the stakes are very high. So it's the same as war where the players, soldiers on the field, are literally trying to take each other's lives in order to survive for themselves and in order to declare victory. For one country or another. So all of these, all of these pieces of the concept are very symbolic of the ultimate theme of the series. Thank you so much for watching and listening. I hope this content has been helpful to you. If you have any questions, make sure you leave a comment below. And if you haven't signed up for the challenge yet, there are links below in the description Just follow those links and it will give you all the information you need to sign up and participate in the challenge. That's all for me. Hope you have a wonderful day.
