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 Seven Part 1
So you’re a writer, or a student who has to write a story for school or some such, and now you have an understanding of how theme works in other people’s work and why it’s important… but you’re not really sure how to implement it in your own work, or what all this means for you.
That’s okay: I’m here for you!
The first thing to bear in mind is that it’s nearly impossible to write a good story with specific themes at the forefront of your mind. I’m sure it can be done, but generally speaking, if you’re writing to a very specific theme, you’re going to end up with a sermon poorly disguised as story, rather than an actual story.
Nobody reads a story to be preached at. Theme is important, foundational, and the reason that stories are valuable—but it’s entirely incidental to the telling of the story. Theme is designed to hit us hard in the feels, and that doesn’t work if it’s blatant, unsophisticated, and/or too obvious—that just hits us right in the criticals, and no one appreciates being hit in the criticals.
So, if you’re writing stories and want to introduce theme purposefully, what you’re actually better off doing is reverting to that incorrect-but-generally-accepted definition of a ‘theme’ as a single word or phrase—a concept. Think about writing a story about ‘love’, rather than writing a story about ‘Love is necessary in order to live a fulfilling life’, or whatever. The actual, specific themes will develop through your characterisation (remember, it’s im-possible to write a story without a theme, even if you don’t think about it deliberately), and you won’t be tempted to veer into preaching territory.
Concepts. Stick to concepts.
And speaking of ‘sticking’, if you are going to look at theme in your own writing, something to watch out for is making sure that it’s consistent throughout. You can pre-plan this or deal with it after (see below for options), but if there is a specific concept that you’re aiming for, you need to make sure that a) you rely on it consistently throughout to b) inform the character’s decisions.
If you want love to be a key concept in your story, the choices your character makes must be consistently related to love. And if you do want to make a particular statement about love, you’d best make sure your main character isn’t making a key decision that contradicts what you think you’re trying to say.
So. Onwards to look at your options for im-plementing all of this. Make sure to read all the sections below (please?), no matter what kind of writer you are. There’s information in each section that is also generally useful and widely applicable.
FOR THE PLOTTERS
Ah, plotters. I understand, I do: it saves time to work the kinks out of the story when it’s in outline form, rather than when you realise you’ve written 60,000 words in the wrong direction.
You feel in control.
You feel confident in your story.
It’s efficient, because you’re not writing so many wrong words, and when you sit down to write, you can skip most of the agony of trying to figure out what happens next. I get it. So how does theme fit into your plans?
Quite, quite easily. You can perform a thematic analysis of an outline just as easily as you can of an entire story! Look at your character’s decisions and mistakes, their moments of despair and triumph, and just like we did in the early chapters here, figure out what message you’re sending.
Check out your minor characters, and see if you have them pointing in similar directions to your main characters.
While you’re outlining, figure out what your core concept is likely to be (‘romantic love’; ‘courage’; ‘friendship’), and when faced with a decision about what a character should do or how a plot cog will fit, think about how you can make this decision relevant to that one central thematic idea that you’re dealing with.
They don’t all have to be, of course, but the more arrows you can point in the direction of your core concept, the more themes you’re going to have that relate to each other, adding layers of depth to your work.
(It is probably possible to overdo this; stories are not, fundamentally, about preaching a point after all. So if it feels like it’s starting to get too much, or too contrived, or too coincidental, feel free to back off a bit. Remember, the themes will be there whether you think about them or not.)
(continued next time)