Welcome to How To Theme, chapters posting Tuesday/Thursday weekly, available now 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.
Chapter Six
Alright, you’ve got your head around the idea of a theme; now it’s time to talk sub-themes. As you’ll have noticed if you’ve been paying attention (which, if you’re not, why are you reading this book right now?! Go sleep, or do something useful to reset your concentration meter!), every time we took one character or instance or quote and generated some themes from it, we did get themes—as in some themes, plural. This is the sticking point for people who don’t ‘get’ English-style thinking, because this is the reason there’s more than one right answer: because there’s more than one theme.
Now, granted, some of you will be or have been stuck with English teachers who didn’t let you have your own answer, and sometimes an answer is just plain wrong*. But on the whole, the point of a literary analysis is that you get to decide which theme is the most important right now—in reference to the question, absolutely, but also for you, as a human being.
A question asking you about power in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, leaves you open to discuss any one of numerous thematic points she is making about power, and it’s up to you to choose your focus and use it to respond to the question.
* I had a university professor once who was fond of noting that Hamlet is not a muffin. This was his way of pointing out that, while there are many acceptable interpretations of a text, if you’re contradicting its literal evidence then you can be flat-out wrong: Hamlet is not, in point of fact, a muffin.
This is why it can feel like the right answer is all in flux when it comes to theme in English. But actually, it’s just a product of the fact that we, as humans, are really good at taking one situation with some other humans, and figuring out ways that they apply to our lives. It’s a function of human interaction and society, the base necessity that we have to be able to learn from the actions and mis-takes of others. As we’ve seen in previous chapters, one event = multiple themes, because our brains excel at making connections that suggest how we should live, because it wants to keep us alive.
Now, any given text is going to have some themes that are more prominent than others. The most prominent themes are going to be related to the journey of the most prominent character/s.
But when you figure that, in a well-written text, you should be able to trace a developmental journey for most of the minor characters as well, you can see how the number of themes in any given text can quickly spiral.
I mean, I wrote you an 800-word version of the The Hare and The Tortoise with essentially only two characters (the rest are mostly props, rather than actual characters), and I still got at least four themes straight off the top of my head there.
People. Themes are everywhere.
Now, there are two things a writer can do when it comes to subthemes. One is to ignore them entirely and just let them happen as they happen. This is a legit course of action, and is often actually advisable.
However, really good texts often have some next-level stuff going on with their subthemes.
You can tell when an author is in total control of the idea of themes, because not only will they have the main character exploring one particular set of themes/ideas, the minor characters’ journeys will all speak to aspects of the same concept.
You might have a romance where the main character is learning to be herself and love who she is before she can find love from someone else; for the story to really hang together thematically, then, you could have the main male character exploring the opposite side of the coin: he loves himself so much he hasn’t got emotional room left over for anyone else, so he has to learn to dial it down a little and not be an arrogant poo.
And then you could have the ‘bad guy’ failing to learn to care for other people, and a side character never learning to love themselves or make peace with who they are; another side character learning to love who they are and being okay with being single because at least now they’re content with their own company; someone who’s alone and bitter and never learns to be okay with themselves; et cetera et cetera, so on and so forth.
You get themes like:
It’s important to accept yourself in order to live a fulfilling life.
You must accept yourself before others can accept you.
It’s important to care for others in order to live a fulfilling life/find happiness.
It is both difficult and necessary to balance your own needs with the needs of others.
It’s more important to love yourself than to find ‘true love’. (This is from that minor character who learns to love themselves while being single.)
So you see, you have the one central idea (in this case, the importance of accepting yourself) embodied in your main character, and everyone else spirals around that, approaching that central idea from different directions.
You’re going to end up with semi-random, unrelated themes too as natural consequences of whatever happens in your plot (say our romance heroine has to make the call whether or not to sell the family home, and now you’re also looking at themes relating to memory, whether you need physical things in order to remember the past, whether holding onto things past their usefulness is nostalgic and sweet or weighing you down, etc), but the primary drive of each character’s story is pointing in the same direction—and you end up with a magical story that feels super satisfying to the reader, because even if they don’t realise this consciously, their subconscious (the bit that’s expert at interpreting theme in order to survive) will definitely hear it, and will note that all characters point in the same direction, and will be Satisfied.
Subthemes: the literal icing on the thematic cake of story.
(Hmm, or is it that theme is sugar and you can just stick to using sugar in the main cake of your story—primary themes—but if you add some more as icing then you get a really amazing dessert? Look, something like that. You know what I mean. Onwards!)