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.
Introduction
Theme.
Apparently, it’s a scary word, one that sends students, readers and authors alike into fearful fits, remembering the Bad Old Days of high-school English. (And if this doesn’t apply to you, congratulations! You’ll still learn something from this book, you just get to skip the anxiety stage. And if you’re still in high school, well, hopefully by the time you’re done reading this book, English will seem a little less intimidating. We can hope, right?)
It’s a shame, really, that so many English teachers end up inducing in their students fear of the very thing that makes stories stories, especially since we, as a profession, are generally some of the greatest story-lovers on the planet.
And okay, not all of us manage to terrify our students into quivering wrecks every time the T-word appears; some of us even actually manage to teach our students what theme is, and how to find it. I obviously believe wholeheartedly in the value of English teaching, and English teachers in particular—”obviously” because I am one.
But it is nevertheless an inescapable truth that many students have negative, overwhelming experiences in high school English, and if that’s you, and all you’re left with is a lingering sense of anxiety about what exactly a theme is, you’re one of the lucky ones. Some students make it through high school English and never pick up a book again.
Heck. Some students make it through high school English without even picking up a book.
Another obvious statement: I think this is pretty sad. But what might surprise you is that the reason I think this is pretty sad is actually closely tied with this idea of theme. Let me explain.
Throughout this book, you’ll find out that first of all, theme isn’t as hard as you’re afraid it might be; in fact, you’ve been doing it since you first began listening to stories, and your average seven-or-eight-year-old can be a relatively competent theme-spotter.
Secondly, you’ll find out that theme is the part of stories that make them important to us as humans; themes are how stories teach us how to human.
That’s why I think it’s pretty sad that some people never read again after high school English—because if you don’t have stories to help you learn how to human, you either need darned good mentors in your life (which is possible, though less and less so as contemporary western society fragments us into smaller and smaller units), or you have to figure it all out for yourself.
Which, okay, there’s a time and a place for experiential learning; some things you just have to learn by doing them yourself. But how to navigate heartache? How to empathise with people different from ourselves? How to keep our heads above water when everything around us seems to be pulling us down? Stories can teach us these things. We don’t have to go it alone.
So it’s pretty sad that a profession notionally dedicated to teaching people to love and value stories (i.e., us English teachers) is often the pro-fession responsible for turning people off stories altogether—though usually that ‘turn off’ is limited to written stories, since visual stories (like movies and TV shows) are more pervasive, easier to digest, and, generally speaking for the average member of the human population, faster to consume.
Which brings me to another important point: themes aren’t just for novels. I’m very deliberately using the term ‘stories’ here, because if it’s a story, it has themes, and that applies to all stories, in all media: novels, short stories, TV shows, films. You name it. If it’s a story, it has a theme. If it’s a story, it’s teaching us how to human.
Some stories do a better job of teaching than others, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that what I’m going to talk about here is as easily applicable to your favourite movie as it is to your favourite book—or that book you’re writing, if that’s you. You’ll see that in the examples.
Theme also applies to every genre of story. It can be tempting, thanks to some of your historical English teachers (or current ones, if you happen to be a student right now), to imagine that theme is solely the domain of stuffy, literary novels designed to make your brain hurt.
Now, I’ve nothing against a good stuffy, literary novel (though I do have a distinct preference for ones with something uplifting to say about hu-manity—there’s enough pain and agony in the world to make me feel hopeless without my fiction trying to tell me that as well—and you’ll realise by the end of this book that this statement is almost exclusively about themes), but a novel—a story—doesn’t have to be stuffy and/or literary in order to have a theme.
Every story has a theme.
Every story has multiple themes.
(This is one of those things that people who prefer the black/white aspect of high school maths often resent about high-school English. It also makes it harder to be good at English without really engaging, because you kind of actually have to have an opinion in order to have something to say.)
And, interestingly enough, different genres tend to have different clusters of related themes. An integral part of romance, for example, is the happy ending—and guys? That’s related to the themes.
Okay. Enough introduction. Gird your loins, refill your coffee cup, grab your pen, your en-thusiasm, and a good, stout leash for your anxieties: it’s time to analyse theme.