• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Theme in a story

Yes, Tolkien didn't like the allegory thing, but he also didn't like the thematic conclusions people often pulled from the story....

And yet..."I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about." ( The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, no 207)
 
I suddenly like Tolkien a bit more.



I've actually had something slightly similar happen to me that's given me a very cynical view on theme and symbolism. In high school, we had a project where we had to write a story. That's it. Write a short story and turn it into the teacher. I wrote my story, put a little bit of effort into it, and handed it in. The teacher comes back and apparently she was pretty impressed by my writing. So, she calls me over starts going on and on about how good all the symbolism and themes that I supposedly put in my story were.

When I tell her that I didn't do thing like that, and that it's just a story about a wizard that I put together in 5 hours, she says something to the extent of "Well, maybe you don't think you put any of that in there, but it's there."

That pretty much turned me off from any kind of literary criticism. When I write, my goal is to entertain. Not to create some symbolically thematic literary masterpiece that you need three degrees just to understand the plot. If you got something out of it other than wizards shooting fireballs at each other, great! But if you come back and start telling me that I have some symbolism or theme that I've literally never thought about, trying to teach me about my own story or that saying that you've gleaned some deep dark information about my psyche, I'm probably going to say that you're full of it.

So, for now I'll just write my stories and, if I ever publish anything, leave it to the literary critics to tag my story with whatever theme or symbolism they like.

My English teacher is like that! She'll be like "I love the way you did X" and I'll be like...what?

Apparently my writing has lots of biblical symbolism/imagery I didn't put there...
 
And here's the thing. You're going to hate me, but I don't actually care. She was right. Theme shows up many times, perhaps most times, completely by accident. But just because you didn't consciously put it there? That doesn't mean it wasn't there. Just because you don't like the fact that someone pointed out it was there? That doesn't mean you didn't.

The theme is, in short, the meaning behind the story. It's that simple. Are you writing a "coming of age" story? That's your theme. If you're writing to entertain? You will have a theme. You can't avoid it. A story without any kind of theme is a story that is not entertaining. A story with a theme is like the guy driving down the highway with a destination in mind. Sure, it may take him a decade to get where he's going, and sure there will be countless "rabbit trails" as he wanders down byways to satisfy curiosity or just have a lark. But he's going to ultimately get somewhere.
Writing without theme, even a subconscious one, is that same guy driving down the highway with no destination in mind. He's never going to get anywhere, even while he goes all over the place, and neither he nor anybody else is going to even remotely care about the journey.

Theme stems from feelings and ideas that are universal (or at least nearly universal) to people. I see theme as dealing with what is human.

They say theme is what the author is trying to communicate to the reader (English class lol) but I think, while accurate, it's not as simple as that. Theme is what is communicated on a more primal level than just the communication of an idea. Themes communicate something through the whole story and that means through the reader's emotions and involvement with the characters and plot. I think a story can make a reader understand a concept, intellectually, by demonstrating or depicting a "point." But to really SHOW the reader something and make them FEEL it...that's different.

I'll even go so far as to say that whatever your story makes your readers understand with not just their minds but their hearts is your theme. When you make your reader feel something to be true, you're communicating, aren't you?

You can't communicate without making a connection. You can't make a connection without appealing to something human, even something small like the feelings of a first crush. And theme is what? Something communicated.

This is why themes tend to be so universal and human, dealing with topics such as love and death and war. They're things we can understand in deep, primal ways.

SO, if your story doesn't have theme, it's not relatable, and vice versa. Or am I just rambling here.

This opens up an interesting can of worms, though, because not every reader gets the same thing out of a book. If a reader reads a book and feels no connection to it and derives no meaning from it, is the theme nonexistent? does this mean SparkNotes is WRONG when it says "the theme of X book is THIS?" *Gasp!*

Maybe theme is less of a frame to a story and more of a rainbow bridge from work to reader.
 

Vaporo

Inkling
The theme is, in short, the meaning behind the story. It's that simple. Are you writing a "coming of age" story? That's your theme. If you're writing to entertain? You will have a theme. You can't avoid it. A story without any kind of theme is a story that is not entertaining. A story with a theme is like the guy driving down the highway with a destination in mind. Sure, it may take him a decade to get where he's going, and sure there will be countless "rabbit trails" as he wanders down byways to satisfy curiosity or just have a lark. But he's going to ultimately get somewhere.
Writing without theme, even a subconscious one, is that same guy driving down the highway with no destination in mind. He's never going to get anywhere, even while he goes all over the place, and neither he nor anybody else is going to even remotely care about the journey.

I guess my point wasn't 100% clear.

What I'm saying is that I hate it when people try to read too deeply into things. Take the example Russ gave. The author's work he mentioned is being connected to a very specific group of people in a very specific circumstance, and only that group of people in only that circumstance (I'm making a few assumptions here to make my point). There are certainly others throughout history, and probably even today, who are facing similar circumstances, but it's being taught as an allegory to only that circumstance when the allegory actually wasn't intended.

I still don't think I'm quite being clear. Say I published a book about someone who tries to quit smoking and someone came to me saying how my book resonated with their own life and inspired them to quit smoking themselves, I'd say that's great! Even if I didn't do it intentionally, someone got something out of the book.

Now, if that person came to me and started insisting that I must actually be writing about my own experience quitting smoking (even though I've never smoked in my life) and that my book has subtle references to an obscure work by a German author that I've never heard of, but no matter what I say to the contrary they insist that this must be the case, then I'm going to get ticked off.

Because all of this theme stuff is entirely relative to the reader as well. Art is in the eye of the beholder and all that. I can't completely control what everyone gets out of my writing, so how can someone say "These are the DEFINITE themes of your story?"

Do you get what I'm saying yet? Sometimes I just want to write stories about wizards throwing fireballs at each other, but this literary critic over here won't stop analyzing it long enough to just enjoy the story and maybe actually get something out of it.
 
Last edited:
I'd said previously that I don't think about theme much, and given the confusing or inexact nature of theme — Does it simply emerge unplanned? Is it important to a story? How important can it be if readers simply get it wrong when stating it? — maybe the idea of building theme in each scene, as a scene goal, is questionable. But I'd also said that I do want each scene to be meaningful and that meaningfulness seems very relevant to the idea of theme, so maybe I do develop theme often, even if I don't consciously think, "What's my theme?"

For me, this meaningfulness is a combination of tone, narrative consistency, logical consistency and relates to the overall direction of a story.

For instance, if in 2-3 chapters I've had the MC discover his best friend has betrayed everyone, forcing the MC to confront his friend and kill him, I'm not going to begin the next chapter three weeks later in the narrative with the MC having a blast at a banquet as if nothing's happened. There are consequences to events and actions. Maybe until the discovery, the MC had been blindly trusting of everyone around him, letting them call the shots and protag in the story; but now he's going to take things into his own hands. Perhaps the ultimate theme in this will be something like Learn to trust your own resources or If you let others call all the shots, don't be surprised if you have no control over events. Probably, before the theme really emerges, there'll need to be other instances similar to this. For instance, maybe the princess of the realm, another POV character, has been blindly involved in court festivities, petty interests, and it lands her in a bad spot, forcing her to break from that approach to her life. This is the sort of thing that can be planned when first conceiving the story, but chances are just as good that I'll have merely had in the back of my head this desire to show the way exigent circumstances can force people to stand up if they don't want to fall down. That might be the tone or general gist of the story I've already had in the back of my head.

I don't think this meaningfulness needs to be extremely serious. Let's suppose I'm writing comedic fantasy about a troup of bandits. Through the first third of the book, they've engaged in a few instances of robbery, but every time they've run into trouble and barely escaped with less than they'd intended to take. So suppose the reason for this is one character in particular who's always rushing in without following the plan. Everyone yells at him afterward, but this is handled in a comedic fashion. Then comes one robbery in which he does the same thing, and this time they don't escape unscathed. This fool's mentor is captured and hauled off to a dungeon where he'll be tortured horribly, setting up the story for the rest of the book. They'll need to rescue him. Now the theme could be, Never bring a Leeroy on your missions! or it could turn out to be, Don't be a Leeroy; other people are affected by your actions. The whole thing could still be a comedic romp, without bashing the reader's head with the theme.
 

Gryphos

Auror
Vaporo said:
I guess my point wasn't 100% clear.

What I'm saying is that I hate it when people try to read too deeply into things. Take the example Russ gave. The author's work he mentioned is being connected to a very specific group of people in a very specific circumstance, and only that group of people in only that circumstance (I'm making a few assumptions here to make my point). There are certainly others throughout history, and probably even today, who are facing similar circumstances, but it's being taught as an allegory to only that circumstance when the allegory actually wasn't intended.

I still don't think I'm quite being clear. Say I published a book about someone who tries to quit smoking and someone came to me saying how my book resonated with their own life and inspired them to quit smoking themselves, I'd say that's great! Even if I didn't do it intentionally, someone got something out of the book.

Now, if that person came to me and started insisting that I must actually be writing about my own experience quitting smoking (even though I've never smoked in my life) and that my book has subtle references to an obscure work by a German author that I've never heard of, but no matter what I say to the contrary they insist that this must be the case, then I'm going to get ticked off.

Because all of this theme stuff is entirely relative to the reader as well. Art is in the eye of the beholder and all that. I can't completely control what everyone gets out of my writing, so how can someone say "These are the DEFINITE themes of your story?"

Do you get what I'm saying yet? Sometimes I just want to write stories about wizards throwing fireballs at each other, but this literary critic over here won't stop analyzing it long enough to just enjoy the story and maybe actually get something out of it.

I get what you mean about people trying to suggest that any one perspective is the definite way to read a text. Literary criticism is inherently subjective, differing from person to person, context to context, so it is a mistake to claim that there is any single message to take from a text. It is perfectly possible for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to be a critique of Victorian society and an ode to to the Romantic construction of the Child.

However, I vehemently disagree that it's possible at all to read too deeply into a text. Assuming a Barthes-esque position of 'Death of the Author', meaning can be gathered from a text even on levels far too obscure for the author to have intended them. The author's intentions don't matter, because they're dead, they don't exist anymore — it is impossible to ascertain what they might or might not have intended even if you care. All that exists is you, and the book in your hands, and the feelings the words in that book prompt.

That is not to say, however, that the author is in any way powerless as to what the reader will gain from their work. An author wants the reader to feel a specific thing, and so constructs their art in a way that they feel is most likely to elicit the desired reaction in the reader. That's why literary readings of certain texts do tend to follow similar lines; almost everyone sees Jane Eyre as a statement on the position of women in Victorian society, because it is constructed in such a way to make that the most obvious meaning to be gathered. That construction is the job of the author. It is your job to make the reader feel what you want them to feel, to manipulate them mind into perceiving a certain message.

If you pay no attention to theme in your writing, and the message you wish to send, then you relinquish control over the reader.
 

Futhark

Inkling
This is an interesting thread and a lot of what I think theme is about has already been said. I think FifthView's comment about the 'desire to show', be it a conscious or subconscious thought, influences the writing in a fundamental way. This guides the direction of the plot, how the characters act and react, and ultimately what goals will be realised in the end. However serious or lighthearted, strenuously woven into every scene or just touched on over the length of the story, theme provides the motive force for the construction of the story in the first place. Even if that motive force is just to entertain. You will put what you thing are awesome fun things in an entertaining story. Will this provide an insight into your psyche? Absolutely. Will others know all the deep dark information? Not a chance. It is art and will always and only be understood from the subjective perspective of the Other experiencing it. The literary critic over-analysing a fluff piece, finding all these themes and symbolism, is still getting something from it, even if it's in their own mind. To tell the writer that this is the absolute and definitive meaning behind the story is simple arrogance. Oh, and if the reader is finding lots of biblical symbolism/imagery then it might speak more to their psyche than yours (unless lots of readers tell you the same).
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
A theme had better be there or your story will lack unity. The theme can be as simple as "ain't dragons fun?" But without it, you wind up with a jumpy story that leaves the reader wondering why it was written. The OP may be restricting theme to profundity.
 

Peat

Sage
People seem to be conflating someone saying "I found this theme within the story" with someone saying "I found this theme in the story and its absolutely definitely what the author intended and is the only way to view the story".

The latter is very annoying and untrue. There are plenty of people saying the former though without saying the latter - the majority of people talking about theme in my experience - and doing so is completely valid. To conflate the two as if the latter is all that happens is just as untrue as the statement contained within.

And for everything else, I agree with Gryphos.

One final note - to every author who's nonplussed when someone reads something into your work that you don't remember putting there, get used to it. Your art only exists through the filters of other people's interpretations and we all see different things. The only way you'll never find out about someone doing this is if pretty much no one reads and talks about your work. That seems a terrible fate to me.

And what is critiquing and external editing if its not someone teaching us about our own story?
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
I would be delighted and fascinated if people read things into my story I did not intend. For one thing, it would mean people were reading my story!

But seriously, folks. People read into song lyrics. They read into paintings. They read into all forms of art. No reason to get huffy about it. I include you, J.R.R.
 
I would be delighted and fascinated if people read things into my story I did not intend. For one thing, it would mean people were reading my story!

But seriously, folks. People read into song lyrics. They read into paintings. They read into all forms of art. No reason to get huffy about it. I include you, J.R.R.

It's a natural part of art, isn't it? Readers take your words and interpret them with relevance to their own thoughts/feelings/beliefs/experiences/ideas. If anything, that means it's working.
 
Top