Connecting the Elements of Your Story
Learn how to think about and use theme to connect your characters, setting, and plot.
Themes. Central ideas. Driving force. Meaning.
These words and ideas may seem scary because no one wants to preach to their audience, or maybe you think stories shouldn’t have these heavy meanings, or maybe you think they just happen on their own without the writer thinking on them.
Whatever the reason for avoiding thinking about the themes of your work, they are misguided.
Knowing your theme will only strengthen your story because it gives you authorial control over your telling and the reader will be able to pick up on it.
Even if you’re writing absolute fluff there is an overarching reason why you’re writing that piece of fluff. There is something in that fluff that you really want to say, but instead of out right stating it, you write that fluff. Why not make it stronger by having an idea of what you’re writing about so that you can fluff what needs to be fluffed and cut what isn’t benefitting that fluff.
Themes help the pieces of our story connect. Knowing the themes dominant in our story will help us make decisions about what is going to strengthen our stories and what is going to weaken our stories.
A few books on writing say that every action, decision, line of dialogue, scene choice, etc. should all serve the overall theme.
That may sound extreme, but when we start looking at well-crafted stories and examining the themes within, we’ll notice that great writers and creators have done exactly that. They’ve pinpointed their theme and wrapped it in complexity and intrigue and continuously had it at the back of our minds.
Some examples include Get Out, Sorry to Bother You, Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers(free to read), and so many more.
The hard part at times is discovering what our themes are and what we are driving at with our stories because examination is hard and we might not always like what we find there.
But that’s okay because writing is hard and as writers we understand the difficulty that it takes to make a story work. We knew the moment we decided to be writers that this was all going to be hard work.
A common misconception about themes is that they are short simple things like ‘love’, ‘friendship’, ‘family’, ‘justice vs injustice’, etc. That, however, is where we are going to leave the simple and common notion of themes behind to join the masters. Themes should be complete sentences that state a fact or message about the story world that you are working in. For example, one of Get Out’s themes is ‘the commoditization of Blackness pulls us down into ruin where the only way out is ‘death’ or a forceable escape.’
Saying that Get Out’s theme is racial trauma or even simply just racism does the story zero justice, in fact it makes it sound like thousands of other stories and doesn’t make it unique or stand out as an original and unique story. When we identify theme, we can see how it plays out through the story in various ways. We can even develop unique places (The Sunken Place) that shake our audiences and deepen our stories.
That’s what our themes should be. They should be statements that are unique to our story and what we are writing about. If we are writing about love, what makes it different from The Notebook, Wuthering Heights, Stand By Me, or countless other stories on love?
The challenge for you and me will be to identify and mark ways that we can strengthen themes in our work through metaphor, setting, dialogue(subtext), character(s), motify, story action, and other elements in our toolbox.
Below I included some resources for people to read through to see how other writers, editors, and educators tackle theme and describe it. Like all resources, read them to learn not to take as the law. My explanation of theme above has been taken from years of classes, books, and study. It’s what’s helped me strengthen my stories and have better connecting story elements.
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