And week three of the #LoveWritingChallenge by Katie Kling. For more information see the introduction post.
Week 3
This weeks theme is Themes and as I would just be repeating myself with the sub-themes, I’ve decided to put them all into one post again.
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Loving and losing your family and friends
For some reason do I always end up creating families in my longer projects. I can’t figure out why that is. Part of me thinks it’s far too cheesy to give everyone a more or less happy end or at least someone that cares deeply for them, but another feels like it’s important for those characters, that it fits for them and their story to have someone in their lives. They just wouldn’t be the same without their families. I mean, Andrew would barely survive on his own…
Though that doesn’t mean all my families are the same. As I have mentioned in the character-week posts does not everyone of my characters fall into the usual sexual spectrum, so their love-lives are equally different from the norm. It feels like I have several kinds of couples on various levels, even if the majority is still the „traditional“ female/male relationship. Apart from that, does, even if they have kids, barely anyone get married in my stories…
There is one couple from The Unnamed One that’s had an on-and-off relationship for over twenty years, including kids and different partners in the meantime, before they finally tie the knot (twice if you count human and wolf wedding 😉 ).
Another couple has a very unhealthy, kind of co-dependant, relationship that’s mostly based on lust and the thrill of being with something that is able to kill you and of course the outdated thought of having to make it work with the father of your child/ren.
But love isn’t only between couples, it’s between parent and child, siblings and friends. It’s about caring for one another, about being with someone if they need you and about kicking their butts if they’re being stupid. In short terms. 😉
With friends and families comes tragedies and the more I think about it, the more I’m certain my subconscious wanted to prepare me for losing my own Mum. There is no other reason I could use to explain why so many of my characters have lost their mothers (at a young age). Though, I could blame Disney…
Just like in real life, do I try to keep the reactions realistic and differing from character to character. As I said does, e.g., Andrew not deal well with loss. He sinks into a very deep hole that he can’t get out of by himself. Others have it a bit easier to move on.
Dying isn’t the only way you can lose someone, so obviously I also have a few characters just drifting apart, breaking up or just losing sight of each other.
Describing this part of the human condition is fun for me, but I’m never sure if it’s too much, too detailed or just enough to get invested in the characters…
Curiously: In my short stories the characters rarely talk about their families and only occasionally have friends (mentioned). 😀
Tempting Courage and Fear
Temptation in the meaning of forbidden love is something I certainly use as a theme in variations (age-/status-gap, existing relationships, species), even if I don’t like the term. Love isn’t something a law can dictate it just happens, even if it’s sometimes creepy and/or weird – or biologically questionable/unhealthy, if you want to go down that road.
Besides with werwolves and vampires there is a different kind of temptation at play. 😉
But there is also the temptation of power that a few characters have to face (I wrote a short story a couple of years ago about the Tree of Knowledge that I feel I should link here: Knowledge is Power (German), be warned: It’s old!). My antagonists usually succumb to this, but at least one main character dips into it pretty badly until he realizes what he’d become.
I couldn’t say if any of them is particularly brave or frightened in a situation, but there are of course different ways to be either. It’s part of a person to succumb to/overcome fear, but overcoming fear isn’t necessarily courage, just as not being brave doesn’t mean you’re afraid. It’s a thin line between all these things and I think it’s interesting to play with it and „throw“ the characters into uncomfortable situations. 😉
Though there are short stories where I intentionally played with fear, which was fun:
Just to name a few.
Courage on the other hand doesn’t seem to be one of the themes I focus on. The Christmas Light is pretty much the only thing I can think of, where a character displays some kind of courage (the moving on-kind).
My own theme
In short stories a reoccurring theme is running (away) or flying from something. In the longer ones it’s „life“ and what troubles it and the setting in general throws your way. Other than that is I think „being different“ one of the main topics in my writings.
Sometimes I include stuff to discuss it or work through it myself (like a death-scene in the 2015 Advent Calendar), at other times I just write something without much thought behind it and someone else interprets it completely different and pretty deeply (happened with Blind Date (German), though Evanesca has yet to tell me about all the layers she discovered. 😀 Though I can’t find where we talked about it… =/).
Well, it’s not much and I didn’t really go into that much detail, but I’ve already covered some of it in the first week and other things would give too much away, soo….let’s just say: I try to keep an open mind to how my characters would react in a given theme, even if I have to push it onto them at times. 😉
See you with the next theme next week (or hopefully on Sunday with the update of Neubrandenwolf)!
PoiSonPaiNter