It might not be an author tract as long as it's only an aesop, and not a pamphlet for those things with a story for digestion, previous poster. Any way-
— There's almost always a big brother involved with the main character, and usually the main character is the younger sibling, or in one case the older brother himself because he was the older twin.
— Blood relations between father and child are rarely even mentioned, because it's usually an adopted father son or daughter relationship. In the seven stories that I've written and are writing (three of them were part of a trilogy, so you could count three of them as one, and five of them are fanfictions), all but one has an adopted father-child relationship (The three stories were Hetalia, and it was the FACE family, though I didn't have to make them fatherly).
— The protagonist is almost always male. (I'm a cisgendered girl).
— Usually when the stories involve America, there's is either a part that takes place in New York City (where I live), or the main character is a New Yorker.
— The protagonists tend to be young, from 7-23 (I started actually writing when I was 17, and I'm nineteen now)
— All but five are psychological stories.
— Growing up, and childhood.
— Love, familial and romantic.
— Hope, traumatic events, and change.
— Things falling apart and not being the same.
edited 11th Jan '18 6:00:54 AM by frnmmma25
If there's any one thing that turns up frequently in my writing in one form or another, it's some kind of strong feeling, often but not always angst, towards parental figures. Usually mother-child relationships.
A protagonist in one setting has significant Parental Abandonment issues with her biological mother for leaving her soon after birth and pretending but to know who she was when they met in the girl's early teens despite her unknowingly telling her mother exactly who she was.
In the same setting, another character has issues with her grandmother for putting the family name over the family members.
The mains in setting include a boy who despises his abusive father and barely tolerates the mother who let it happen. Another grew to with a Fantasy-Forbidding Father while she wanted a life of adventure.
In a lot of my recent Detective Conan fanfiction I've more or less created an AU where Ai Haibara is adopted by the family of her fellow Fountain of Youth victim Shinichi Kudo while the latest version of a Pokémon OC has always has a Parental Substitute in a woman who, in past versions, either was a long lost mother or simply a trainer he idolized and, in those versions an orphan, daydreamed about having as a mom.
And so on.
On the surface, my own history, learning when I was eighteen that I was the child in a Family Relationship Switcheroo, would go a long way to explaining that. However, I can point to a few of my very first fanfics that carry the theme that pre-date my discovery of this fact. Further I've never had any conscious hostility towards neither my mother nor my mom/grandmother about all this, so the high angst factor seems odd to me.
That said, "conscious" might be the key word there. Between the early fics and one or two other factors I wonder if I didn't have some subconscious awareness of it all even before being told.
Still, parental relationships in general and mother-child in particular are probably my single most common trend.
edited 26th Jan '18 11:01:06 AM by sgamer82
I have about two dozen or so novels and short stories in various stages of planning or writing at the moment, and looking through them, there are definitely some recurring themes I've noticed
— Pretty much all of them (the ones that don't take place in fantasy settings, that is) take place in North Carolina or at least somewhere in the South. There are just a few exceptions.
— There's often a scientist or writer character whose work is discovered by the protagonist and sought after by the antagonist.
— I rarely use "stock" fantasy creatures (dragons, elves, dwarves, you get the idea) in my fantasy stories, and when I do it's always in a way that isn't the norm for the genre.
—Fantasy Gun Control is pretty much always averted.
—There are often lots of references to airplanes, aviation, and flight in general.
—Even in stories where the overarching threat is an Eldritch Abomination/alien invader/other supernatural force, there will usually be a human villain as well.
— They're often an Author Tract, usually involving left-wing politics, environmentalism, or the inherently flawed nature of humanity.