What's your message?

What do you want readers to take away from your novel?

I hope to get people to see the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. My story deals a lot with suicide and the inability of humans to take a break during which they don't think, or feel, or worry (in the sense that mammals hibernate, insects go through diapause)--for us it's either deal with all of it or none of it. So I guess the moral of the story is that there may seem to be only one way out, but weathering the storm leads to beauty and a better perspective on life.

Everything a write seems to deal with the ideas of 'good verses evil' and finding that there is instead a grey area there. In this book I also want to explore the idea of the 'underdog' and being able to do something to help someone regardless of where you are or where you have been - instead I want there to be known that where you're going matters the most.

Or I just want them to have a good read...whatever works :P. I might edit back late October when my outline is done to see if there is anything else I could add...

Your message seems really serious, but I like it. Sounds like something worth reading.

My novel... Let me see. I think it's about the fact bad things, heavy things, seem "normal" if you're used to them. And that only after something shakes you up you realize how awkward it was, but it doesn't matter, because that's the only life you know and it made you who you are.

Oh, and it's also about following your dreams, no matter what.

PS- Yes, I know "message" is an overused and abused word. But I do think knowing what you want to invoke with your novel/what you want to say is ok. As long as you demand for people to interpret your novel the exact same way you do.

I myself was at a bit of a loss when I started getting an idea for a story about angels. I shed organized religion for Agnosticism a long time ago. I wasn't sure how I could possibly do the story justice.

Then in a moment of clarity, I realized that instead of trying to have my main character discover some sort of answer that I myself never could, I could focus on her learning how to ask the right questions. And that's what I want people to take away from my novel. That faith, no matter its form, doesn't require you to have all the answers, as long as you know what questions you want to be asking.

I'm not sure I have a message...well according to my title maybe I do.

Basically, it's about letting go, moving on. At least I think. Yeah, it's the exact opposite of my title.

Ugh, never mind. I don't know yet. I'm going to have to work on that.

Mine did start with a theme or idea, along with my main character - I wanted to write a book from the perspective of a cancer patient. There are LOTS of books with characters who have cancer, but they're usually secondary characters and often only serve to further the development of the other characters. Some of these, I think, are well-written... but I've always wanted to read something from that character's perspective. Surely they are growing from their experience too and they aren't in wise/inspirational mode all the time. How does the disease affect THEIR daily life and relationships?

The message is more to normalize the experience, and help people understand what it's like. I've had cancer and some other serious illnesses, and often peoples' reactions are either a) "How do you do all of it?!?! I could never do it." (because I totally wake up some days and just decide, "You know, I want to have a brain tumour today. That's ALWAYS what I've wanted to do with my life") or b) "You are sooooooooo inspirational to me." Which almost always, unless I know you well and you are paying me a genuine compliment, comes out like you pity me and are just using my disease to make you feel better about your life. I'm more than my disease, and I want people to see that in this character. Then there are the people who just cannot function once they find out I've had cancer or the other diseases/problems, and totally ignore me or the opposite, totally ignore the effects it might have on my life and pretend like it doesn't exist (because yes, I have lasting side effects/disabilities, and you ignoring them makes it that much harder for me to be able to function normally). So I hope to make them more comfortable with relating to someone with cancer or another serious illness by being able to read about my character's life and realizing that maybe they have things in common even if she has a life-threatening disease and they don't.

So hopefully what people get from my novel is what it can be like to live as a cancer patient (my main character, by the way, has in some ways a totally different outlook toward her disease than I do, which is purposeful because I thought it would be interesting to explore another perspective) and moreover that she's just a normal person and you can still relate to someone even if they have a disease that seems scary to you.

I was just thinking about the message of my story. My MC is dealing with all kinds of teenage woes. He feels pressure from his dad, deals with being labeled as a bully due to the company he keeps, and worries he'll end up like his mom who abandoned the family - and that's all in the backstory. I think his message is to be true to who you are and don't let others define you.

I haven't finished planning all of my story yet, but as of right now my message is, like my title, about hope. Mostly about how hope can be found in the most unlikely of places from the strangest sources, but that it is always there.Even if you can't always see it, things always can get better.

My message is also about hope. It's about how much it sucks to be an outsider in your own family, and be trapped as a teenager in a life you don't like, but that eventually you grow up and get to leave and make your own life.

My messages all tend to lean towards the truth, or the inability to really distinguish truth. After all, "truth" - whatever it is - changes depending on perception. I feel that there is a difference between fact and truth. Truth is very difficult to pinpoint and I like to point that out.

I also like to cover the gray area. None of my characters are all good or all bad. Even my antagonist. There are redeeming qualities in everyone, so there are no "good guys" or "bad guys," even if I sometimes refer to them as such because it's easier while explaining.

Those two usually show up in all my stories, but this NaNo has those plus its own message: balance. You can't have night without day, happiness without sadness, good without bad. Balance in the world is important. If everything is happy, then nothing is happy, because you have no comparison. Does that make sense? I feel like I'm over-explaining.

Ugh, there are a lot of gray areas and clashing ideas in my story, but basically, it boils down to these three points:

- Science in and of itself isn't immoral, though people often use it in dubious ways. It can be as dangerous as it is useful, but ultimately, knowledge is better than ignorance.
- Xenophobia isn't cool. Even when you're dealing with a clone of yourself grown in Russia.
- This is the big one: the government is often corrupt, especially when it comes to starting an unnecessary war so that defense contractors can profit. When you figure this out, you're going to want to revolt, start a revolution, tell everyone - but the honest truth is, you're one person. There's next to nothing you can do, and the people in power will probably not hesitate to consider you collateral damage - look at what happened to David Kelly. You won't always save the day.

They're all kind of depressing messages, huh? There's no It Gets Better campaign to be had here. I just really want to write a YA story with a serious downer ending, where the spunky kid doesn't outsmart the grown-ups and save the day.

Summarized as concisely as possible-- Vengeance has a short-lived satisfaction. It has a voracious appetite that, if not killed, eventually consumes you.

The message in my story is "The terms 'hero' and 'villain' are often misused. A hero is a person that wakes up every day trying to make the world a better place".

It's a place where everyone has varying degrees of extraordinary, and my hero is relatively unendowed compared to many other higher-order heroes. But he's also the one who makes effort to make sense of an insidious crisis going on before it destroys his home. He begins his quest on the simple basis that he wants freedom, and continues when he finds out that something is defintely not right out there.

I don't see why so many stories need downer endings and downer messages. I'm actually hoping to downplay the ugly parts (in this case, division by fear and domination by corporate mercenaries in the wake of an alien invasion) by showing they are there, but not making too large a deal of them. But then again, I am planning for the hero to win and then end up discredited (or at least, someone tries to discredit him but only succeeds in fading him to obscurity rather than infamy due to a lack of evidence he did anything wrong, and then the hero vanishes without a trace). Even with a "bad ending", he still shall emerge victorious and his efforts will not be in vain.

Mine's about diversity, acceptance, and fighting for the right to exist. It's a reaction to #yesGayYA, so a lot of it has to do with queer themes, and deals with racism and ableism. And with all that, I'm hoping it doesn't come off too terribly beating-you-over-the-head-with-it, message-wise >.>

Mine deals with temptation - so I'm aiming for my message to deal with surviving peer pressure. Let's hope I can pull it off well.

Message, ugh! Haven't really thought about it. I am writing about a girl who makes a really stupid mistake, but doesn't know why she did it. So in a large part my novel is going to be about regret and how the MC learns to cope with it.

This topic also got me thinking about YA/MG books and how they are often expected to teach something. Do we expect the same from adult books? How did a book's message/theme/ get morphed into a moral?

I think there is always a moral (or lack of one) emphasized in any book. Think about the classics, the new wildly successful authors etc... you can find a theme in any of them that has a moral (or deliberate lack of one).

Hmm...since mine will most likely be a story about a teen who gets obsessed with learning is dead grandfather's secrets and will probably include a girl who has unrequited feelings for said boy, the message will probably be something about the importance of learning how to let go. Although I've always wanted to write about the pitfalls of vanity and greed...I hope I can somehow include that too, without making the story sound too preachy.

My MC judges her 'antagonist' because she's 'perfect' - good grades, perfect friends, perfect looks, everything. The 'antagonist' isn't really antagonizing at all - it's my MC's desire to break free from her mother's idea of her perfectly tailored life that makes her despise the girl her mother wanted her to be just like. The antagonist, in reality, isn't really as snobby as she is proud, a distinction my MC makes later in the novel. I want people to take away not only that we sometimes despise what we envy, but that when people are pushing us to do bigger and better things, it's not because they think we're not good enough - it's because they know we are capable of anything.

Lie, cheat, steal, manipulate people, cause unnecessary confusion and drama, put your friends in bad situations, spend most of your time drunk and never study. It will at least be interesting, and you will learn invaluable life skills for extricating yourself from trouble!

Possibly I am not very good at messages.