Anonymous asked:
Do you find your’e drawn to the same colors/visuals/themes when you’re writing? I feel like I overuse the same things in different books. “Oh look a dragon, how original”. Do you think this is a bad thing?
There are a lot of things that keep showing up in my work. I reckon this is because I, um, wrote them, and I am me, and there are things that I resonate with, and I use them.
And then there’s the part where every book I write is about a secret princess. So you know. There’s that.
But I think every writer has one core story that they keep telling in everything they do. Mine happens to be secret princess. Yours has something to do with dragons.
I remember Jennifer Weiner once talked about her work and how all of her stories are basically variations on the same theme: “My parents split up and I’m sad about it.”
If you’re at all familiar with her work, you can see clearly where that comes in. And while her books are all quite similar to one another, it isn’t like she’s writing the same book all the time. They’re their own book, too. They’re just part of the same family. Variations on the same theme.
Even Joss Whedon has recurring themes in his work: strong female characters; mind-control assassins; robot girlfriends; musical episodes. You can see a direct line from the Buffy musical episode to Lorne (the demon karaoke bar host) in Angel to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. It’s not a bad thing.
(OK, so the Buffy musical was kind of cheesy. But that’s beside the point.)
What I’m saying is, only you know why the dragons keep showing up. Do they mean something to you? Is your subconscious using them in your stories to try and sort something out? Is it a cheat, an easy go-to, like a reptilian version of Kraft Easy Mac you keep throwing in to keep from having to think too hard? Or are you just overanalyzing your alleged over-use of dragons?
Think on that for a while and see where it leads you.
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