The Underlying Message

I've been in all sorts of workshops where the author pushed the word "theme" and I've always just sort of thought, well, it's a romance. love is the underlying theme. What more do you need? Right? yeah. Boy was I wrong.

When I started out writing YCAGWYW (formerly About last night) I was inspired by the Rolling Stones' song of the same name. But once I'd formed my plotline, I let the song go. When I rewrote the story with a new focus, I kept the song humming in the back of my head... You can't always get what you want. but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need...
And I found that, as I was better developing my characters, I kept coming back to the song... or, my theme.

And by coming back to the theme again and again, I think it made the story stronger. It also helped me get rid of all that annoying backstory that I needed to know, but the reader didn't, because it didn't really relate to said theme.

So I get it now.

Why couldn't they have just said so in those darn workshops? *grin*