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 TWO
FOR THE PANSTERS*
* So called because pantsers write ‘by the seat of their pants’, making it up as they go along, without an outline or a specific plan.
Pansters, exploratory writers, writers-into-the-dark: whichever name you call it by, for you, it’s all about journeying into the unknown, letting your subconscious filter the story onto the page, surprising both your readers and yourself. It’s like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle with only the vaguest glimpse of the picture on the box, at once scary or frustrating, and also elating.
If you’re keen to introduce theme in a purposeful way into your writing, you have a couple of options, depending on exactly how you ‘pants’ your way through your writing. If you’re a reviser, you can check for it afterwards in revision (see below).
If, on the other hand, you’re a cycler (you revise as you go and end up with a basically finished story by the time you hit the end), you might be happy to know that you can build theme in exactly the same way you build story: piece by piece until you have a finished puzzle.
As you write, you’ll start to get a sense of both who your main characters are, and what your major conflict is going to be. This should indicate to you some core concepts that your story is revolving around. As you make decisions about which piece of the jigsaw puzzle best fits next, you can start to consider the ‘fit’ of these pieces also by whether or not they align with the core concepts you’ve set up. And once you know what your ending is, you’ll be able to figure out what some of your specific themes are—or what they might be, depending on the actions your character takes to get to that ending.
(Does your character save the puppy to get to the ending, or do they ditch the puppy to get to the ending? Different theme, depending on which one plays out best.)
You might also find that theme becomes a helpful way of spotting what the best jigsaw puzzle pieces will be: as you approach your ending and the range of possible options narrows, the options will narrow even further if you consider them through the lens of theme, or what point it is that you want to make about how humans should live.
Instead of just relying on plot and character to determine which jigsaw puzzle pieces you want, you’re also now working with theme—something akin to knowing that you want the picture of the green leaves dancing in the wind, not the picture of the yellow ones. Same concept, different colour, but now you’ve figured out that you’re building a puzzle of green leaves (which, depending on how many leaves there are in the picture, may have been easy to spot, or may have taken you weeks of piecing together all the sky bits before you realised the picture shows dancing leaves as well), you know you’re safe to skip the yellow pieces, even if they’re pretty.
FOR THE REWRITERS/REVISERS
This is actually where I find theme most handy myself. After I’ve written the story, I’ll go back over it and as well as tracking things like character arcs and plot holes, I’ll also note down any core concepts I can find and track these through the story, usually just with a bit of a colour code: scenes with a blue spot all deal with family relationships in some way, scenes with a yellow dot deal with feeling responsibility for the protection and welfare of other people. Et cetera.
It’s simple, but can be a handy check when you’re trying to decide whether you need to keep a scene or let it go. If it fits with your core concepts in some substantial way, you’re probably good to keep it. If it doesn’t touch on any of them, the scene is likely to feel disconnected from and/or irrelevant to the main story.
COUNTERPOINT FOR EVERYONE
Here’s an intriguing counterpoint for you: You don’t actually have to think about this at all! After all, you’ve written stories before, right? Guess what? They had themes! Congrats. You are officially a certified theme deployer.
Of course, if you want to make sure theme is working as hard as it can for you in stories, it’s worth honing your skills—but that doesn’t have to mean tying yourself in knots while you’re writing the actual story. Your subconscious is just as clever as you are (sometimes a little cleverer, actually, I’ve found), and absorbs all the same information as your conscious, critical brain. So if you start paying attention to theme any time you see it around you (TV shows, movies, books: available everywhere stories are found!), you’re actually training your subconscious to recognise theme as important.
The more time you devote to something, the more important it is, right?
Well, guess what? Your subconscious knows this. Start paying a lot of attention to theme, and your subconscious will get the message that you consider theme important. Your subconscious, being you, after all, wants to make you happy, so if you say theme is important, by golly, it’s going to work hard to make sure theme works for you in your stories. I know, it sounds too easy, too vague. But I promise: it really does work.
Pay attention to theme. Trust your intuition when you’re writing and something pops up, as this is often the subconscious signalling to you that there’s a better, cleverer way to get to where you’re going. Practice, and eventually you’ll find that theme is working out in your stories just fine on its own.
If you want to get a sense of where you’re at now, it can help to have someone who’s good at and comfortable with the idea of theme look over something you’ve written and tell you what they think the themes are; you might be pleasantly surprised, and find that there’s more thematic resonance in your stories than you thought, especially if you’re at the stage where you’re brave enough to sound like you on the page. If you’re writing in your own, authentic voice, your values and philosophies are going to seep through into your writing (you know this, you’ve heard it before)—which means there are going to be themes there that you believe in, whether you meant to put them there or not.
Remember: just because you did something by accident doesn’t mean you didn’t do it.