Welcome to How To Theme, chapters posting Tuesday/Thursday weekly, available now for pre-order in print, in ebook, and on Amazon. All chapters are also up on Patreon, including the bonus information on genre-specific themes that’s in the final book, but won’t be appearing here on the blog.
PART ONE
Before we get to talking about what exactly a theme is, it helps to have a refresher about things like theses. If you’re super comfortable already with the idea of a thesis statement, let me give you the potted summary right here:
Theme is to fiction as thesis is to non-fiction.
Or, even more simply:
The theme is the point of the story.
If you’re happy with that, feel free to jump ahead to chapter three. Otherwise, stick around and we’ll do a quick refresher.
Chapter One
Our starting point is this:
Everything is a text.
This, as I would say to my students, is a text right now, a little more obvious to you because you are reading literal words I have written, but no less applicable to the students in my classroom, sitting in front of me, listening as I create a verbal text.
Everything is a text: that ad flashing on the side of your screen, this book you’re reading, that TV ad playing in the background… (Wait what, people watch TV with ads still? Yeah, yeah, I’m stuck in the dark ages, I know). The song you’re listening to, the advertising poster you drive past on the way to work or school, the conversation you just had with the person next to you.
Everything is a text, and these days, as an Australian English teacher, I’m pretty much expected to be across all of these text types. What a good thing there are a lot more similarities than there are differences!
So, the next point is this:
All texts have a point.
See? I told you this would be easy. The point of this book, for example, is to convince you that theme is easy and accessible, and that knowing about it will enrich both your reading and your writing experiences; in short, I’m trying to tell you that theme is worth paying attention to, and that it won’t break your brain to do so.
The point of an ad, generally speaking, is to convince you to buy something—unless the ads are produced by the government, or a non-govern-mental organisation (like a charity), in which case the point is often to change your behaviour, or convince you to donate money to something.
The point of songs varies widely, but layered in on top of the point of the lyrics is the emotional point of the music: music is supposed to make you feel.
Conversations vary widely in their purposes, too. Just in the last hour I’ve had a conversation where the point was conveying information about a block of a land; a conversation wherein I tried to convince the two-year-old that it really was time to go to sleep; and a conversation wherein the point was conveying gratitude for a brunch my family attended. In point (!) of fact, the latter wasn’t even a conversation: it was a text message. Because yes, obviously, text messages are a type of text too, and they too have a point.
And in fact, it’s even possible for ‘no point’ to be the point: I’ve had plenty of silly, giggly, meandering conversations with friends—usually late at night, hyped on sugar and short on sleep—where the entire point of the conversation was simply entertainment.
When you get to the stage where ‘green cup’ makes everyone explode with laughter, you know you’re well beyond reason, but the statement ‘green cup’ still had a point: I can’t even remember who it was that said that any more, but I do remember the mood, the tone it conveyed, the idea that we were all tired and silly and illogical but that we were these things together. In this context, ‘green cup’ was relatively empty of literal meaning (wow, yes, you’re right, that is in fact a green cup; so observant of you), but rich, in context, with emotional meaning, and so all that emotional meaning became the point of that short, apparently-ridiculous text.
Also, you can create a point by accident. Have you ever had someone take something you said or wrote entirely the wrong way, leaving you blinking in shock, going, “But that’s not what I meant!”?
Yup. Congratulations: you are such an expert point-maker that you make points without even realising you’re doing it. This is going to be important later on, so tuck it away in your memory banks for future reference.
To recap:
Everything is a text. All texts have a point. Even the ones that seem like they don’t, because if you’re intending to be pointless, well, you’re still intending something, so the point is to be pointless. (Paradoxes, we can has them.) You can also create a point accidentally.
Now, for whatever reason, figuring out what the main point of non-fiction is seems much easier for people than figuring out what the main point of fiction is. Probably, this is because we feel safe relying on logic:
The point of a recipe is to tell you how to cook the item. The point of a dictionary is to define words. The point of an essay is to discuss such-and-such a concept (say, key themes in Romeo and Juliet). The point of a news article is to tell you what happened. The point of a magazine opinion piece is to convey the opinion of the writer. The point of an ad is ‘This product is amazing enough that it’s worth spending x number of dollars on it’.
Sometimes, we have fancy words to describe these ‘points’:
The point of an ad is often a call to action—the action the ad-makers actually want you to take after seeing the ad.
The point of a (non-fiction) paragraph is the topic sentence.
The point of an essay is the thesis.
The point of a story is the theme. (See what I did there?)
If you’re feeling comfortable with this analogy, go ahead and skip on to chapter three now. If you’d like a bit of a refresher about what a thesis statement is (the point of an essay), continue onwards to chapter two.
(This is practically a choose-your-own-adventure, isn’t it?)