The Magic of your Anthology’s Theme

Last week we covered a brief outline of all of the different things that you need to think about and plan out before you launch your Anthology project. I know, it was a lot of stuff! But if you take the time to break down the individual topics and address one at a time, you can have a lot of fun and serenity around your project.

Brainstorm

Probably the most important thing you need to consider first is what do you want your theme to be? Start by brainstorming as many ideas as you can. Write all of the ideas down. I personally find brainstorming to be easier when using pen and paper, and I swear that using a fountain pen brings out even more creativity.

Don’t filter the ideas, just write every serious, silly, or dumb idea down. Even if you know that it’s an idea you would never use in real life, sometimes the process of writing those things down triggers other similar, tangential, or even opposite ideas that will end up being exactly what you need.

You can start at the low hanging fruit of an idea, but don’t stop there, go deeper. You may start with “An apple falls from a tree” as one idea, but for each idea try to latch on and follow that idea as deep down trail of ideas as you can. What if instead of falling, you’re picking apples from trees. But wait, go deeper, you’re not just picking them, you need them, these are magical apples that will save someone’s life. But the apple tree is guarded by poo throwing monkeys! So now you go from having a very simple silly idea that you wouldn’t use, “Apples falling from trees”, to a fun idea.

Anthology Theme: Magical Fruit
Anthology Description: Write stories involving magical fruit that holds magic that will impact the life of one individual, or possibly even an entire kingdom! But that fruit is guarded by an ancient protector.

There we go, we just turned a random apple idea into an interesting story. Come up with as many of these ideas as you can by not just grabbing the low hanging idea and stopping there, but follow that thread to as deep, or as many, conclusions as you can.

Another reason for not filtering your ideas, no matter how bad they seem at first glance, is the act of filtering your ideas puts you into more of an editing mindset instead of a creative one. This means you will have a harder time of coming up with an abundance of ideas to choose from, and what you do have will only be things that sound good at first glance, but that don’t have the ability to go deeper with the theme like we just did with the magical fruit theme. You will have fewer ideas, they will not go as deep, and you will end up passing over opportunities for countless amazing ideas while you seek to only write down the best of the filtered ideas. It just doesn’t work.

Filter your list

After you have a page full of ideas, now we can switch our brains over to the editing and filtering mode. Things to think about when going through this list, is who is your target audience? Are you writing this for military soldiers, or your church group? Do you want to appeal to adult readers but still want it to be safe for kids to read?

Also you will want to make sure that the idea is broad enough to allow for more authors to be interested in writing and submitting a story for your project, but you can’t be so broad that the stories that you get stories that are seemingly unrelated.

Another thing to consider is if the title is catchy. You want authors to read your title and instantly their imaginations start going down the rabbit hole of possibilities, and of course you want readers to see the title and instantly be interested in picking up the book. Keeping your title short and to the point is best.

It’s not easy to balance all of these things, but it’s such an important part of your process that it is worth putting in the effort to make the theme the best that you can.

When my friends and I put together our anthology Last Shot Fired we wanted stories that had to do with desperation but tied together with an idea of firing a shot. The authors came up with lots of creative ideas, from nukes to guns no longer working after one specific person was killed. Give the authors room for creativity and let them have fun.

Enlist a Community

As an author we often get into the mindset of having to work alone. Most of our time spent outlining, writing, and editing, is all done alone. However every author has had the experience of collaborating with other authors or readers. We share that idea that we have that we think is cool, but is missing something. As we discuss it with others we are able to find the path through the dark woods of despair, doubt, and incomplete ideas.

Find a community to work with. If you are a publisher that already has a team for the anthology, then that is a great place to start! However if you are alone in this endeavor, then seek out a community somewhere.

If you prefer in-person communities then find a local convention. Find the panels that are related to writing and go to them to connect with the attendees or the speaker. If you’re more of an introvert and that scares you, then go to a convention and talk to the authors at the author tables. One on one have discussions with them, find the ones in your local area that you can meet up with that might be interested in helping you with your project.

Connect with your local NaNoWriMo group. While most of the activity and connections will obviously be made during November, you can still find other local authors in the forums for your area.

Or find an on-line community, like the one over on our Community Forums! We even have a whole Brainstorming section that you can participate in to get the help of other authors or publishers. And don’t be afraid of others taking your ideas. There are plenty of ideas out there, and even more implementations of those ideas.

Get started!

Alright, that’s enough chatter for now. You have a place to start and some work to do. Get to it! Go start brainstorming lots of ideas, and enlist the help of others as you do that.

Join us next week to discuss the next important topic that you need to consider; your content guidelines.