What are the motifs in your writing?

my biggest thing is, often even without meaning to, I write the golden boy?? Or leader of a group/family, either with an overwhelming sense of responsibility and accountability or with a complete lack thereof? My characters all typically have rather worldly views and thus the concept of freedom is recurring: What freedom means, how to get it, what a person would or would not sacrifice to get it. I try to always keep symbolism in mind, as I feel like it is a great way of distinguishing a character and giving them some individuality. I try to tie every day objects in with the characters and shine a light on their significance so much that people are forced to think of the character when they see the item.

Upper district characters get a lot of royalty/thrones and their appeal or lack thereof/luxury, that kind of thing. Children forced to relive their parents’ lives, children viewed as unwanted because of their insistence upon forging their own path, strife between siblings who’ve been taught to view each other as competition, learning late in life what it means to have a family.

Lower district characters tend to have more nature-based metaphors and such, ie “remember your roots,” / natural disasters / circle of life type things (and therein sickness, aging, growth, etc) / sun/moon contrast, things done in darkness will always find the light etc. Typically have much better family values/better relationships with their siblings.

More than once for tributes I have gone for the we’ll always have Paris theme aka “they can have our futures but they cannot take our pasts.” Also the gray morality of death and killing, if it is justified or not, who is blameless and who is at fault in these situations, whether or not the character cares. A lot of action-based writing with short sentences to promote urgency, flow of consciousness when at the pique of excitement?

Generally, I have no idea, and my mind isn’t really organized enough to do the pretty, poetic things? Oftentimes my characters may come off as scatterbrained, confused, or conflicted as a result, but my biggest thing has always been making the characters feel real and well-rounded, and I think I do a good job of it!^^

– Color is absolutely my most used motif; each character has their own color/color palette that also corresponds to their personality and emotional state. I'll often choose the colors in the background for a subtle emotional tone.

eg: Bette is brass, bronze and sienna with a maroon accent; Fiora is always wearing something pink or mauve; Alice was royal blue and white like porcelain; Anise was deep grays that gradually went softer and lighter; Ewe was scarlet like a lucky dragon.

– Food, and the action of eating as transition or a moment of rest. Textures and flavors as a complement/comparison to the situation, with specific intent placed on subtle character history (culturally accurate food, pickiness). Also, food is a great excuse for bringing people together for threads

– flowers: hydrangeas, peonies, dahlias, and snapdragons are used the most. Particularly for color descriptions but also used to emphasize time passing

– music terminology: focusing on nuances like vocal quality (timbre), and illustrating the scene with background noise. Use of music to describe thought process and state of mind (I use cacophony a lot).

– long moments spent looking at the horizon or placing characters in the world, because I like Miyazaki too much and his concept of "ma" is something I keep close in my repertoire

– post spacing (superfluous enters) to denote long pauses, or moments that we as readers are not privy to

– repetition as emphasis. Otherwise, I really try to not repeat words/sentence structure


Character-wise here, a lot of them have the focus of trying to find themselves in a world that is unforgiving; how it affects them and what they do about it

Heres a top 10 if you will (sue me):

1. I think my first and foremost motif has to be space, the stars, black holes, endless voids of destruction. Something about getting lost in a void where one is wallowing in their own destructions seems to always seep out of me.

2. Broken home life, and I think this is because I pull from a lot of my own past experiences. Its kind of my way of working through them, and while the hunger games isnt really the best genre to relive traumatic events, I find it soothing, and much easier to talk about then actually trying to face them head on.

3. Water. Especailly when it comes Annie. Whether it be a paragraph about her trying to swim through a cyclone, or her head feeling like its being held under water, there is a certain amount of beauty in it that I find calming. Always easy to write about for me.

4. Death. Morbid I know. But I keep thinking about Bella, and just how much death was tied into her prose. Going against it, being able to accept it, afraid of it, finding power from it or cowering from it. All of it leads to one road.

5. Forest. Trees, splinters, towering sequoia's, and using it to take shelter from the life my tributes have seem to pop up a lot.

6. Stitching and Sewing. Ripped clothing, which can lead to so many other things being ripped. Always a good anchoring point for me.

7. Resentment. Whether it be Annie and her father, or Hanaa and her father, or Stitch and his mother. My tributes, and a lot of my other characters all seem to have parental issues. Mostly harboring resentment towards their parents for something wrong in their lives.

8. The "What if...". I try not to fall into this one so much, because I feel like I can go off into a huge tangent when writing posts about it, but I always find it slipping in and out of consciousness as I go on to write more.

9. Astrology... kind of. I try to write my posts with my characters signs in mind. Try to do something that is more true to life or accurate to what the character should be feeling.

10. Last one would have to be worth. Worth to society, worth to family, worth to the goal they are trying to accomplish. The worth that they have for themselves. All of them are very important motifs.

I'm also more and more on Team Simplified Imagery. I love me some aggressively purple prose with certain characters, but I'll choose meaningful with a gut punch over pretty for pretty's sake any day now lol (but my favorite is still when they get to overlap). So in that way most of my motifs are less about imagery metaphors these days and more about emotional themes — most of which are, like a lot of people, rooted in me and my personal experiences/hopes/fears. Write what you know.

- Hands are a major recurring theme because as an artist it's easy to think of my hands as my greatest strength and the idea of losing them as one of my greatest fears. Denali's hands are burnt to the point that she can't use them for months and months — having to rely on other people to do nearly everything for her — and when her skin and muscle grafts heal she feels like she's wearing someone else hands. Gunner was raised to punish snitches and thieves by carefully removing all the flesh from the offenders hands so only bare, useless bones would be left. Beretta turned the bones of a fellow tribute's hands into armor. One of my first threads on the site had a post where Monáe caught herself thinking that she'd kill herself if ever something happened to her hands.

- Similarly the body and its strengths and weaknesses comes up a lot too. Skin as armor. Blood being traitorous. Having an actual mechanical heart. The idea of someone trying to steal your bones while you sleep. (A lot of this circles back around to themes of paranoia or trying to create control within one part of yourself to balance losing it within another and all of that obviously links to my past health issues.)

- On that note there's a lot about self-reliance vs. help from others (generally family or friends, but sometimes about when it's okay to accept help from people you're not close with). Most often it's the desire to always be self-reliant and wanting to choose the moments to accept help and how difficult it is when you don't really have that choice.

- Most of my characters fall somewhere on the autism spectrum, whether it's explicitly mentioned or not. (Part of that comes from intentionally not mentioning it, so that it's less of a personality schtick and more just... normal life. But mostly it's because I just don't know how to write neuro-typical people asdfkjhsdlj.) They're prone to fixating and obsessing over hyper-specialized interests and many of them are willing to sacrifice the development of other parts of their lives for these things, consciously or subconsciously. Actual social skills are missing in action, even for the characters who have figured out how to navigate social interactions without being called out as obviously awkward. Cricket gave up everything to be the world's greatest performer and her confidence in that gives an impression that she's confident/good at everything, but honestly she blows people off because she has no real idea how to interact with them. She's not cruel or heartless, she's emotionally ignorant and overwhelmed by the effort of trying to expand her understanding of the world beyond the tiny, comfortable bubble of herself and only herself. Caring for a tiger is one thing. Caring for another human is terrifying. She's easy to get along with, but incredibly difficult to connect with.

- I love a misfit, be it for the above reason or otherwise. Especially coupled with an underdog-wins-the-fight type realization that there's totally a found family situation out there that thinks they're the coolest kid that ever existed. I loveeeee an endearing loser who is legitimately bad at things and still finds people who appreciate them. I love shitkickers. YES. Give me kid who like to mess stuff up for shiggles sometimes. Give me a kid that desperately wants to be good at something without knowing how. Bullying comes up a lot in relation to all of this, but generally in a someone wants to tear you down? Time to build yourself up to be too strong for that bs type of way.

- Girls who are tough, stubborn, idiotically brave, wild to a point of detriment. Victorian boys who need to be fed soup.

- I really love contradictions. Characters who mess things up and can't tell when what they say and what they do are two different things and they're being a dumb hypocrite. To be self-righteous and hilariously petty all at once. To be just... painfully human. When really embarrassing moments are deeply relatable or getting things wrong still turns out a little bit okay. Characters who have normalized incredibly not normal things because they just... got used to it to the point that everyday life was redefined. They're not weird, you are.

- Family that is imperfect, but loves each other more than anything. The ups and downs, old traditions and new, daring the rest of the world to come for them because some things just can't be broken no matter how damaged they get. The dynamics of sibling fights. Parents flailing around uselessly as they try to figure out how to help their kids with the unpredictably tough things in life. (You wanna cope with your brother's murder by throwing steak knives at his bedroom walls? Uhhhhh... sure! Let's do that together! Mother-daughter bonding time! Yay!) Messing up and messing up and messing up and everything being okay anyhow. Doing bad things for good reasons. Doing good things for bad reasons lol. That there can be death and divorce and hoarding and comas and all sorts of complications and that doesn't mean that family stops being family. Even if there are times you wonder if you want it to.

- Time and the future and the idea of trying to cheat the system and live out moments you're worried might be taken from you. Sundrop was super obvious with this — imagining a house to grow old in and then marriage, children, and all those major mile markers people think they're supposed to have. Mostly it just comes down to someone feeling absolutely certain they're going to die young and how that impulsively affects their choices.

- The temperature of a relationship. Being warmer with certain people, colder without. Shivers as emotional turning points. Using warm/cold to imply unrealized feelings or the truth that underlies denial. All of this in general, really. Hidden truths and public lies and being scared to trust people because it's easier to be the person to hurt them before they can hurt you.

- Wording things so they can be interpreted in multiple ways at once (especially if it's in a way that's easy to miss for anyone but me lol — like writing complex, layered inside jokes with myself). Talking about twelve entirely different feelings or events all at the same time. The way it's hard to shake off your past and sometimes you think about things you wish you could forget at the worst possible moments. Subtle references to things from 53 posts ago that are HUGE FEELINGS if someone catches it, but not pointed out to a casual reader lol.

I like small, everyday stories way more than I like big epics full of dramatics and obvious action. It's fun to write cool kids being badasses, but at the end of the day the characters and threads that end up being my favorites are things that are just... small stuff. Gunner folding cash into origami when she's lonely. Taggerty sitting on a curb playing with a lighter. Denali and Lex taking turns telling stories as the other person dozes off to sleep. Beretta and the M Band girls going to a fortune teller and teasing each other over tarot cards. Scout secretly drawing a self-insert comic book. Andorra making fish-faces in a mirror. Calliope trying to get Aesop to help her with a homework assignment. Dramatic showdowns are great, but the biggest feelings are hidden in the smallest moments.