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.
PART TWO
Okay, so now you know how to find the theme of any story, and you’re hopefully not quite so terrified of all this theme bizzo. There’s still one thing I might need to convince you of though: Why does this actually matter? Who, apart from English teachers, actually cares about the theme of a text?
Well, for that, we’re going to need to go on a quick tour of Stories Through History. Buckle up. It’s going to be a fast and bumpy ride.
Storytelling has been around for at least as long as writing has, and given the centrality of oral storytelling in many cultures, it’s safe to assume it’s been around a lot longer than that.
The first recorded story that we have is the Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic written somewhere between 2150 and 1400 BC. It’s a heroic tale from ancient Assyria complete with brave hero, horrible monsters to be slain, and a quest.
But why do we tell stories at all?
Basically, there are two theories when it comes to storytelling. One is that storytelling, like other art forms, is essentially just a meaningless byproduct of human culture.
However, this fails to take into account the cost of creating art and telling stories: particularly in early hunter-gatherer societies, it doesn’t seem sensible that someone would willingly choose to expend significant time and energy creating something that is essentially pointless, when most of their day would otherwise be taken up with activities that ensure survival.
And so we have the second theoretical camp, which suggests that there must be something intrinsically beneficial about creating art and telling stories, in order to make the effort expended on it worthwhile.
So what is this intrinsic benefit? What does make the act of storytelling and story consumption worthwhile?
As we’ll see, research suggests that there are several key benefits:
- Stories draw on our ability to recognise and predict patterns to help us make sense of the world.
- Stories act as memory aids to encode information for easier retrieval later.
- Stories encourage cooperation and sociability.
- Stories and the telling thereof change or reinforce social hierarchies and power structures.
- Stories (of a particular kind) foster and develop empathy and our theory of mind.
So let’s investigate each of these now in more detail.
Chapter Eight: Recognising Patterns
Human beings, particularly in a pre-industrial, pre-(western)scientific setting, live at the mercy of nature, which can often make life feel chaotic, random, and driven by chance. Although we like to think that our actions drive our successes, many times in life this isn’t the case: we’re blindsided by either good or bad fortune, our hands are forced, and life (or the actions of other people) makes our decisions for us.
Whether there actually is an underlying sense of logic and order in nature that’s simply obscure sometimes, or whether humans simply require logic behind everything in order to satisfy our own intellectual needs, many stories (particularly from pre-industrial, pre-(western)scientific settings) focus on making sense of the world ‘out there’.
Stories have a particular, predictable pattern of their own (which differs a little across cultures, time periods, genres and mode of telling—oral vs. written vs. staged vs. filmed, etc., but not as much as you might expect) and through them, we can impose patterns on what we see around us. It helps us feel in control and stabilised, to find patterns in lives that might otherwise seem chaotic and random, and ultimately helps us to convey these findings to others, in turn helping them to feel more secure as well (which has benefits for the social group as a whole, as well as for the individuals).
In fact, humans are so good at detecting patterns that we often see them even where they aren’t: our habit of seeing faces in everything around us is one example of this, with the human brain so attuned to the importances of faces that it sees them everywhere, from the shape of a plug, to a passing cloud, to a stain on the floor, to a company logo.
This is just as true for stories. A well-known experiment tested this theory by showing participants a series of geometric shapes moving across a screen—some circles, triangles, etc. When asked to describe what they’d seen, almost every single participant responded in the form of a story, assigning emotions and intent to the geometric shapes they’d seen—transforming random movements into part of a pattern, or, more accurately, recognising that the random movements they were seeing actually fit a pre-defined pattern they already knew, a pattern that described a particular type of social interaction.