This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the four hundred sixty-th episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors Podcast.

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode which is called How to Find Your Thematic

Principle. There are words I your thematic principle.

There are words I think of as infinite words. These are words that express more in their essence

than we can ever quite seem to explain.

They are the words of poetry.

Indeed, many are complete poems all in a single word.

For me, one of those words is theme.

Theme is one of those endlessly fascinating subjects you can study all your life and never quite nail down.

You circle it many times and think you've got it captured in some neat little formula.

Only to discover you've just yet seen one of its faces, one of its mini ambiguous and numinous aspects.

That's fun, but it's also frustrating.

For a writer, or indeed any artist, who is trying to consistently create stories that are thematically strong and solid,

our finite relationship to the infinitude of theme can often feel akin to facing down the night sky in an attempt to

understand the universe. As with so much of writing, we either go mad or realize

the struggle is the glory.

Last week I offered a bird's eye view of how I see theme.

That episode was the first of quite a few discussions on theme which I hope to pause it this year.

Today I want to investigate the thematic principle.

One of the reasons theme is a tricky topic to master is that it is also often a tricky topic to talk about.

Because it is such a vast and abstract subject, every writer seems to have a slightly different definition.

I learned this firsthand via the many writing questions of the day that I've

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