Work in Progress: May 18

Lot’s of deep editing today. I only worked on short stories and concentrated on ensuring my central idea of the story, theme, if you will, was present and focused throughout the story. As Jeanne Cavelos recently pointed out, theme usually comes after a few drafts. To help me find a story’s theme I’ve started writing a ‘why this story’ paragraph and put it on a separate page at the end. This does a few things. One, it forces me to state the theme in a sentence or two so I can go back and make sure I’m representing it and that it’s unifying the story. Second, it’s a note to my future self about where the story came from and why I thought it was important enough to write. Third, sometimes a market will ask why you wrote a story, and this is a head start on that answer.