Hey Everyone,

So I subscribe to Steve Pressfield’s weekly Writing Wednesday blog. He wrote The Legend Of Bagger Vance, The Lion’s Gate, The War of Art among others and also runs a small publishing company called Black Irish Books.

He has been doing a focus on theme and how knowing it is important for writing one’s book. I find it applicable to creating an ecourse as well. There are currently 8 articles so far and they are brilliant. I’ve been learning so much about theme, transformation, and subject reading these.

Here is the link to his blog:

http://www.stevenpressfield.com/category/writing-wednesdays/

his other series, What It Takes, is also very inspiring

Here are some quotes from some of the posts:

“As a young writer-director he got the chance to interview the great playwright and screenwriter Paddy (“Network,” “Marty” “The Hospital”) Chayefsky, the only three-time solo Oscar winner for Best Screenplay:

As soon as I figure out what the theme of my play is [said Chayefsky], I type it in a single line and Scotch-tape it to the front of my typewriter. After that, nothing goes onto the page that isn’t 100% on-theme.”

“But what is critically important is that we as writers know the theme ourselves. We should have identified it and be able to articulate it, not vaguely but spot-on. Why? Because we’re the architects of our novel or movie. We have to know the foundation.”

“The subject of the Jurassic Park movies is dinosaurs.
The theme is, “Don’t mess with Mother Nature.”

The subject of Out of Africa is Karen Blixen’s experiences in Africa.
The theme is possession. “Is it possible,” the movie asks, “for a person to truly own something—a farm, a lover, her own fate?”
The theme of Out of Africa in statement form is, “It is not possible to own anything, and the harder we try, the more certain we are to lose what we wish to hold.”

In a lot of the posts I learned even more from people responding to them, so if you go and read these, definitely read the responses too.