Rebeca Schiller

Yesterday I started a very brand new chapter for Julius.  As you might recall, last month Ritz, my accountability partner (Hi Ritz!) had suggested that instead of breaking a chapter with a flashback or back story that I make it a separate chapter. Well, 1,490 words later, I have a chapter that includes a little information (no, a lot) on Corinne, my MC.

Way back, when one critter on IWW, whom I greatly respect, noted that my characters tend to eat a lot. They go out to restaurants, the order take-out, they’re cooking and a lot of the dialogue and action revolves around food. He thought I should shake it up a bit. At first I agreed with him, but then I realized that for these characters food is important. It’s one of the bourgeois pleasures they have and won’t give up (that, and

I write a lot of back story, and some critters–the naysayers–inform me that agents and editors don’t like back story. If that’s the case, why is it that I come across novels that have a lot of flashbacks? (and let’s not mention prologues and epilogues).

The back story to Julius has its purpose. First, it delves into the narrator’s psyche. You can’t understand her actions, beliefs, doubts, dreams without the story behind the story. Secondly, as I’ve written before, I believe that you need to know history before you fully understand what’s happening in the present. And a lot of Julius is based on history.

I tend to intersperse flashbacks within the primary action and what I’ve discovered is that sometimes it works and other times it can get clunky. The question then is to ditch it or not? I discussed this before with Ritz (my accountability partner) and she likes the

I’ve been grappling with this for a bit, and after several revisions, it seems that I have a concrete theme. It’s taken several revisions to see it so plainly, but I realize now that when I first started Julius, I had no idea of  what this story could eventually turn into.

The main theme I’ve discovered is self-doubt. The issue that I’m grappling with is that I don’t want the narrator to come across as pitiful or have the reader lose their patience. I’m hoping that once they understand why she has this feeling that they’ll be able to understand some of her insecurities.

According to James Scott Bell’s Plot & Structure:

Themes deepen fiction, but you must beware of a common danger. It is tempting for a writer to take a theme and force a story into it. This results in a host of problems, including cardboard characters, a preachy tone, a