I don't know how to express my compulsive need to torture MC's as a three-word core story, lol. Maybe that's not it then. Possibly it has to do with trust and betrayal, but that doesn't fit some of my stories. It does pop up a lot, though. Is it possible I'm still searching for my core story? I do feel like everything I write is to some degree an experiment for me. I love the feeling that comes from exploring new territory, whether it's voice, genre, character or something more thematic. I'm a little jealous that everyone came up with theirs so easily, but then maybe I'm not ready to give up the freedom to try out new cores.
We go through phases, we grow, we change. Your core story might be different than it was five years ago, and you might have several that you flip between.
My main themes generally fall into the categories of faith, tradition, family, etc., and the struggle of all these to survive in a world actively hostile to all of them. I portray both the successes and the failures.
I had to think about this a lot and it's very challenging to boil it down to three words or less. Even if I limit myself to the two novel series I'm currently working on, sussing out a "core story" is anything but easy. If I absolutely have to limit myself to three words, those might be "belonging, love, redemption". Belonging: a lot of my stories seem to deal with that in various ways. Oftentimes it's a character not belonging anywhere but looking for it. At other times it's a character being snatched from where they belong and having to make adjustments, or fighting their way back to the familiar. I chose this one because it covers a lot of ground. For instance, a story could deal with a character feeling like they belong somewhere, only to have their illusions dispelled in whatever way, and then we're dealing with subordinate themes of alienation and estrangement. To me, it has within it things like solitude, isolation, and loneliness, and represents a deep well you can draw any number of things from. It had to do with finding your people, your place in the world, your purpose, or conversely with having none of those and the suffering that entails. Love: I wasn't sure if this one was too close to "belonging" to be worth mentioning separately, but nevertheless it's a device I often use and a thing I enjoy exploring. I rarely write stories that have love as their main focus, I certainly don't work within the Romance genre, but it's still something that crops up too often to ignore. Love can be spun in so many different ways, and it's such a manifold concept that you can stretch it wide. Insofar as I deal with romantic love I don't tend to deal a lot with how people meet or how the initial stages of a relationship might play out. I prefer to dig into old, tried and true love stories where there are plenty of complications in play (such as, in one memorable instance, one of the better halves being dead). Its just a very interesting thing to explore, it lets you take your characters through the heights of bliss and into the very depths of despair. Love had always been a pretty mysterious thing to me, so I find it rewarding to explore it through character and story. As for Redemption, I'm not exactly sure why I went with that. I know I tend to write characters that are borderline villainous and have a change of morals somewhere along the way. Maybe "Morality" would be a better third word for me. Still, I'll come as I am. When I say Redemption, I'd like to include its opposite in that. Call it Corruption. I like to write characters that find their conscience along the way, but also characters that lose it in the heat of tribulation, as well as those who never had any to begin with. I think my final answer might be "belonging, love, change." Outside of that, I often hit on mythology, religion, and spirituality in stories. They're not necessarily core themes, but they are prevalent. Sometimes I just take the surface flavor and apply it to story, but at other times I like to dig deeper and try to tangle with the essential message, which I'm really not qualified to do, but here we are. In the Yggdrasilium, for example, I draw heavily on Norse mythology and Christianity for characters and places, but it's not that deep. In The Eight Barrows Braves I play around with Vedic teachings in a somewhat more profound if rather clumsy manner.
I've thought about this before. When I look back on stories I've written, the same themes and elements repeat over and over. If I were to boil it down to a few words, it might be "search for unity" or "release from bondage" where the main POV is inherently foreign to their setting in some way and must grapple with that reality (or un-reality). examples: - a dead pigeon wedged in the fork of tree on a busy street falls in love with a pedestrian -children on the playground only identified by the patterns/textures of their clothing -a night-shift parking lot sweeper befriends a nymph who inhabits a polluted retention pond (affectionately termed "the garbage nymph") more generally: -distortions of reality; characters who can induce hypnotic or altered states in themselves or others -traumatic loss of loved ones which leads to a loss of self -characters who are not natural (robots, cyborgs, clones, experiments, phantoms, chimeras, monsters, magical creatures, gods, the undead) -generous use of irony as a form of humor Not only do I write them, but also respond strongly to stories with those themes. It's surprising that this is so consistent over a wide variety of works. I suppose it exposes my own hang-ups in life.
To come full circle, but changed; to make sense of the world and find one's place in it. An unapologetic echoing of the Hero's Journey.
