think that everyone has their own personal theme in life
every nolan film is about time. it winds its way through his filmography; it is fractured in memento, distorted in inception, expanded in interstellar, reversed in tenet.
every hopper painting is about stillness. it is found in every brushstroke; at dusk in automat, at dawn in morning sun, at noon in office in a small city, at night in nighthawks.
i have a friend who orbits ideas of power, another who delights in the prosaic and the plain. one weaves around systems and structures, another returns always to wonder at the sea.
there are other elements of course - our lives cannot be measured by single concepts no matter how large they may be - but time and again i think we return to the things that fascinate, the things that intrigue, the things we cannot quite tear ourselves away from. the themes of our lives.
I read Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees once years ago and have been carrying this idea she has about writers, form, and subject/themes around in my head ever since (bolding mine):
Finding your form is like finding a mate. You really have to search, and you can’t compromise—unless you can compromise, in which case your misery will be of a different variety. But just as there are probably only one or two people to whom you could commit yourself, there are probably only a few things you can write about, and only one genre, or maybe two, in which you might excel. It’s no coincidence that most authors’ bodies of work hover over two or three basic themes or take a single basic shape. Think of the novels of Trollope, Austen, Dickens, or Hardy; think of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. They each revisited the same themes, settings, and conflicts over the course of their writing lives. The James Joyces of the world, those who can move from short story to novel to epic, are rare, but then again, few writers master each form the first time out of the gate.
Even though most writers have a limited literary arsenal, readers find infinite pleasure in watching those gestures change and deepen over time. But if you aren’t yet sure what your themes are or what category you should be writing in, you need to take a full accounting of all the reading and all thewriting you have ever done or wanted to do. If you are one of the many people who dream of writing but have never successfully finished or, perhaps, even started a piece, I suggest you compile a list of everything you’ve read over the past six months or year and try to determine if there is a pattern or common denominator. If you read only literary novels, that should tell you something. If you’ve always kept a diary noting the natural world in all its variety, you might want to try writing nature essays.
It never fails to surprise me, in conversations with writers who seek my advice as to what they should write, how many fail to see before their very eyes the hay that might be gold. Instead of honoring the subjects and forms that invade their dreams and diaries, they concoct some ideas about what’s selling or what agents and editors are looking for as they try to fit their odd-shaped pegs into someone else’s hole. There is nothing more refreshing for an editor than to meet a writer or read a query letter that takes him completely by surprise, that brings him into a world he didn’t know existed or awakens him to a notion that had been there all along but that he had nevermuch noticed.
Some of the most striking and successful books in recent history were clearly born of a writer’s obsession and complete disregard for what, supposedly, sells. Few editors would have gone for a queer book about a little-known murder in Savannah that took its sweet time describing every other quirkof the city and its inhabitants before addressing the crime.Whatever John Berendt was thinking when he set out to write Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, it couldn’t have been the bestseller list, because almost anyone in the publishing industry would have told him that nobody would care about the story of a gay antiques dealer who languished in jail after shooting a cheap hustler. The book does, however, draw on what most certainly are Berendt’s strengths as a reporter, as a travel writer, and as a southerner with a gothic sensibility and taste for the macabre. Clearly, he was born to write this book, and he worked through whatever ambivalence and uncertainty he might have felt within himself or encountered from others.
Most writers have very little choice in what they write about. Think of any writer’s body of work, and you will see the thematic pattern incorporating voice, structure, and intent. What is in evidence over and over is a certain set of obsessions, a certain vocabulary, a way of approaching the page. The person who can’t focus is not without his own obsessions, vocabulary, and approach. However, either he can’t find his form or he can’t apply the necessary discipline that ultimately separates the published from the unpublished.
For those of you who want to lock all of your works with all the silly AI scraping of AO3 (which AO3 is recommending you lock your works, as stated in this post)
Here is a quick and easy guide of how to edit ALL of your works at once.
From your Dashboard click on “edit works” on the far right. This will bring up all of your works that you can select.
Select all the works you want to edit, then hit “Edit” at the bottom right.
Scroll to nearly the bottom of the page where you find “Visibility” and select “only show to registered users” and then update at the bottom.
That’s it, all of your works have now been locked without having to go in and edit each fic individually.
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being a symbolism enjoyer should humble you because at the end of the day no matter how eloquently you articulate it youre essentially saying “i love it when things have meaning”
my hobbies are Colours and Shapes but, like, in a mature, sophisticated adult way
There’s so much about this. The tumble itself is so irredeemably funny. The child stops asking for food and just stares in silence as the adult completely beefs it. The adult, absolutely ashamed, wandering off screen, refusing to make eye contact with the baby.
Showcasing art from some of my favourite artists, and those that have attracted my attention, in the field of visual arts, including vintage; pulp; pop culture; books and comics; concert posters; fantastical and imaginative realism; classical; contemporary; new contemporary; pop surrealism; conceptual and illustration.
