A deep dive on theme

probably part one in a series

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I was thinking about this the other day—as someone who is not particularly good at visual art I’ve been in this position a few times: I want to depict something—like the ocean and find that I can’t do it. I see the ocean in my head and I pick up the color blue and try to draw the concept of the ocean except what comes out is one dimensional: a flat smearing of color.

Recently I was in Croatia with friends. The water surrounding Dubrovnik is technically the ocean but is really still: no waves to be seen. We decided to go on a short, 7 minute boat ride to go to Lokrum Island. I’m extremely prone to motion sickness, but given that the water was still and that it was only 7 minutes, I thought it was fine. We got on the boat and all the sudden it was the motherfucking ocean. It wasn’t like the weather got bad or something, just that the boat was picking up on things you couldn’t see with the visual eye. Under the calm surface, there is a lot of activity going on with currents and waves beneath. Visually rendering motion under the water would be a difficult thing to do. In dependent of this, even though the water is relatively still, the surface is not flat blue. There’s tiny crests of waves with light flickering off, spots where the water is darker and so on, which is why one blue crayon won’t work—you’d even need colors that were not blue.

I was thinking about how this is like the difference between good and bad fiction. The child smearing the blue crayon all around and calling it ocean is like bad writing that is all plot. We can tell its the ocean, but does it really look like the ocean? (ie, real life) I think theme is one of those elusive thing that turns that flat, one dimensional smear of blue into something that has life teaming beneath the surface. For some writers, theme just sort of intuitively comes out. For others, there is no theme at all. For me, it’s some combination of planned and unplanned. Because I plot out my books ahead of time, starting with a vague notion of what sort of book I want it to be, this pitch to myself typically includes some element of character, a premise, and some elements of theme.

I’ve developed this series of questions as an exercise to help you hash out your theme(s). I recommend sitting down to do this exercise when you actually have time. I’m going to walk through the questions using two examples: my second book A Step Past Darkness and Lord of the Rings. (The reason why I use LOTR so often as an example is because nearly everyone has some familiarity with it.)

What is the central (plot) conflict of your book?

LOTR: An evil ring that can destroy all that is good in the world has fallen into the hands of good folk who must destroy it before the bad guy gets his hands on it.

ASPD: A bunch of people are killed in 1995 and the local megachurch gets away with it/ an old friend from the past dies under mysterious circumstances and her murder must be solved.

What struggles do the MCs deal with?

LOTR: Aragorn (in the movies) has some reservations that he can fulfill his role as the rightful heir of Gondor. The Hobbits must leave their peaceful idyllic life and face dangers they are woefully unprepared for. The Elves face trying to balance their desire to save Middle Earth against noping out of there to the Undying Lands. Frodo struggles with the increasing corruption of the ring even as he carries it.

ASPD: Jia doesn’t comprehend her own psychic powers, which are scary and seem out of her control. Kelly isn’t as brave as she’d like to be. Maddy is having a crisis of faith as her church has betrayed her. Padma is too scared—of everything. Casey never thinks he’s good enough. James self-sabotages because he doesn’t think he deserves to be happy. (note that some of these could tie in with the central plot conflict and some of them are independent of it).

What lessons can/ do the MCs learn?

LOTR: Good can triumph over evil—maybe it is even destined to do so. But this comes at the loss of innocence. We can’t go back to the simple old world before. Even good friends must say goodbye. That there’s good in the world, and it’s worth fighting for.

ASPD: Friendship is a powerful force. Evil cannot continue unabated as long as good men walk the earth. There are no shortcuts in life—there are always strings attached. Things that seem holy are often profane. Home has many definitions.

What do you want the reader to walk away thinking about/ feeling?

LOTR: the satisfaction that against all odds, good can triumph over evil. A feeling of having been on an epic journey and grown a little over the course of it. Investment in the friendships that have formed because of the Fellowship. Tolkien wrote of LOTR (in reference to repeated questions about whether or not his work was an allegory for the World Wars): “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.” The dude, if anything, loved history and mythology. There are so many nooks and crannies to the history of these books that it’s clear that he wanted you to have a sense of the vast scope of that history. Nothing is “X happened because Y happened” without a long series of actions that occurred before it.

ASPD: Mainly, I wanted to evoke nostalgia in the reader. I wanted them to think “Yay friendship!” but also “yay a romance!” and I also wanted to raise some critical questions about the Prosperity “Gospel” that proliferates in US Evangelical churches. I wanted them to be reminded of the book It.

What is the ideology of the book?

LOTR: If there is a Tolkien expert in the house, please correct me, but IMHO: there are corrupting forces in the world, and the weak will fall to them with some seizing power through this corruption, threatening life for everyone else. It is easy to fall into temptation, but hard to resist it; standing at the side is not a moral option. (Hmmmmmm)

ASPD: Positive forces of good—like teamwork, cleverness, and love—can stand against established systems of corruption. What calls itself good and holy (organized religion, in this case) can actually be hiding small-mindedness, prejudice, and social dominance. Burn down systems that are corrupted.

What kind of world do the characters live in?

LOTR: This is a broad, vast, and varied world. It’s possible for terrible darkness to be brewing in Mordor where hobbits over in the Shire can be having a chill small-town time, smoking weed. Geography matters, history matters. (Why should Rohan ride for Gondor??) There are different races of beings with vastly different understandings of what “life” can mean (elves live for thousands of years, Gandalf is a being closer to god than man). Magic exists, and I think deliberately Tolkien is not explicitly clear on the magic system. (ie, we are not fully aware of just what Gandalf is capable of, or just what magical thing is around the corners and what powers it has). Around the corner can be an orc that you have to defeat with a sword, but around the corner could be an ancient Balrog that goes back to way before you were born.

ASPD: The world looks very much like ours—like suburban PA in the 90s—but we have some sense that maybe supernatural things exist, although this has never been proven. 90s means no cell phones, limited internet, kids could wander around after school and during the summer without parental supervision. This was during a period of time where purity culture was really blowing up in Evangelical churches in the US. This is also pre-911 America, pre-2016, and pre-Columbine—the world felt a bit more innocent. (If you’ve read the book, James’s painting of the gun would have been interpreted really different after Columbine than before.)

What conversation is your work (this book) having with others?

LOTR: if we consider JRRT as having birthed modern, high fantasy, one could argue that he kinda started a conversation. He created a fully realized world, complete with languages and long span of complicated history. This, then, set a bar for fantasy that followed.

ASPD: This book is in clear, direct conversation with Stephen King’s It. I was also responding to what I felt at the time was a desire for more earnestness in works of fiction, as the world felt particularly dark at the time (not to imply that it doesn’t right now). People want the earnestness of kids becoming friends, of them going to bat for each other, standing up to bullies. They want the earnestness of people falling in love and getting to be in love. The want the bad guys to be beaten. It’s in conversation with my first book in a sort of meta way— Never Saw Me Coming is deeply cynical, while ASPD is the opposite. I kind of wanted people who have read my first book to do a double take when reading the second, a sort of, “I didn’t know she was capable of that.”

What questions do you deliberately not answer?

LOTR: (this is hard to answer for anyone else, but I will try.) Are we good here? Sauron has been defeated (spoiler) but he’d been defeated before in the past and he still came back…

ASPD: Where exactly did the big bad come from? Do our kids live happily ever after? (I sort of cheated and half answered this in a way you can only do if one of your MCs is psychic.)

What is the emotional core of this book?

LOTR: Sam and Frodo. Can two little humble dudes save the world.

ASPD: Friendship and nostalgia.

Ok that’s all for now- I hope to return next week with some related thoughts.

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Photo by Matt Hardy on Unsplash