You, Me, and the Theme

I think a theme can be useful. It can serve as a backbone to build things off of or serve to tie things together. For me coming up with a theme is most useful when there's an aspect of the story that I find myself frequently conflicted over. Then I can make a theme for that aspect and use it to guide me.

 

If you asked me directly, I'd say what matters to me is characters, but I don't think you can do a good study of two or more characters without finding some point of contrast between them--people are too complicated to just throw two complete personalities at the reader and say "Hey, these people are different!" That point of contrast develops into a theme, and you can use it to draw further parallels with more characters. (This can be a lot more organic than it sounds--if you put two people in the same situation and have them react differently, the difference determines a theme even if you don't do anything to say "Hey guys, this is the theme!")

There's a book called Implied Spaces that uses architecture as a metaphor. No one sets out to have a triangular empty space under the roof, but you're probably going to have one if you have a triangular shape in the roof design. For me, that's what themes are--the implied spaces of my character studies.

 

You make it sounds like theme is optional. I don't think it is.

A very useful approach.

 

I use theme as the "spine" of my stories, but thoroughly in the background, informing conflict and character development.

 

I think the theme/questions are one of the most important parts for you as a writer to understand in the context of your story. There are so many times I find myself up against a wall and if I bring it back to the theme or the questions my character is trying to answer within herself/himself (most of the time subconsciously) I can usually find a character to bring in to help, or a way to rework the storyline to get them there.

 

A theme is like the bass track beat behind everything. It's not what you normally remember but without it everything else becomes unstuck.

 

What Devor said. If I try to consciously come up with a theme, things get clumsy and stilted. If I just write the story, theme seems to be a side effect that just pops up on its own. Once it's there I can work with it and develop it, but if I try to develop the theme first, if I sit down and say, "All right, what's the theme of this story going to be?" I can't seem to make it work.

 

A few years back I had a guy criticize my stories because they had no unifying theme that kept everything together. He likened them to a computer RPG that just threw enemy after enemy after the player without any real story structure.

Ever since then I've found that developing a theme or at least a character arc can help with structuring a story. It's rather like how you build a research paper around a thesis. On the other hand there is the challenge of keeping the theme subtle to avoid preachiness.

 

^ what he said.

 

These aren't really themes, but symbols with particular usage (for instance, water signifies rebirth and the character may be thrown underwater before a significant change).

If we say, for argument's sake, that the theme in the Wizard of Oz is self-belief (taken from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ) then you can see how the final shape of the character, plot and world is a function of theme, not the other way around.

You can play around to find it however you want, but the final shape has to be reworked around theme.

Americans think about theme in exactly the same way as that Italian lady.

Thematically, you can't rewrite endings without changing a lot of other things. Use The Wizard of Oz again. If the theme is self-belief, then Dorothy has to do it in the end. And that's why you need to give her Ruby Slippers earlier on. And that's why a big part of the story is her seeking assistance outside herself.

 

Here's the thing, a lot of the themes that people see in LOTR, Tolkien did not put into his work intentionally. People actually pointed out what seemed like obvious symbolism to him years later which he insisted he had not been conscious of in the writing.

Theme is basically the answer to "what's the big picture of this story, what's it all about?" Or, when you've finished reading a story, and sit back to think about it, what did it all mean?

Now, you can determine this "what does the story mean, what is it really all about" factor before writing it and then write the story to fit the theme. Or you can just write the story and then determine what the primary meaning that comes through from the story you've just written was. (And then perhaps edit it to make the meaning more clear.) Either way is valid. Or you can just write the story and not worry about the theme and trust that your readers will find meaning in it for themselves.

But there is not story that doesn't have any meaning or any "big picture" idea of what the story was about. That is just part of what a story IS. It makes sense of and instills meaning in a series of events. And readers will always find ways in which the story has meaning personally for them. We read stories for that very reason.

 

I'm curious about how you would go about starting with a theme and building a story off of that. Can anyone give me a hypothetical example of what this would be like? I think I would like to give it a try.