How to Write a Book in Six Months - Themes
Originally published at Cassie Alexander. You can comment here or there.
It's been awhile since I've done one of these, so here goes:
Everything echoes.
I'm reading House of Leaves right now (almost done, prolonging the ending by posting here) and I've recently started in on a crit of a friend's work. My friend has written a memoir that is factually correct, but which neglects to make use of the themes therein, in her devotion to accuracy. What's interesting is that they're in there anyways, only they could be shown to better advantage to give the work a more cohesive feel. And I was thinking of how I'll explain them to her and I thought I might as well share those thoughts here, too.
(If you have read House of Leaves, please insert the chapter on echoes, and footnotes wittier than I can possibly hope to recreate. You will tell from my writing here that I've been reading it solidly for too long. Like Stephen King warns, the milk has been tainted by what it shares the brain with.)
It's been said that there are only seven plots in the world. I think the number of possible themes are similar. If our plots are Man versus Nature, or Man versus Man, Man versus Himself, themes (for me) are the emotional tenor of how Man goes about his efforts. Is he, or she, tireless in their efforts towards reconciliation. Is she inexorable -- willing to throw the now away in a fruitless effort to fix the past? Is he shamed by the path his father set him on by condemning their people to war? Is she bloodthirsty in her attempts at finding salvation for her child? Exhaustion, longing, blindness, bitterness, revenge, lostness, confusion, sadness, sorrow, honor, depravity -- really any verb that might occur to you while running out of supplies on the arctic tundra is a good verb to make a theme out of.
They aren't the engines of the plot, but they're the things that hold the plot together, the shining light to which the gem of the story must be held up and the number and precision of its facets determined by. In certain lights, some gemstones change color -- without light, gemstones have no color. The theme is what shows your story -- plots, characters, events -- best.
Note that none of the examples up there were happy ones. If you have something chipper like happiness or true love as a theme, you are likely writing a very short book. I kid. It works the same way, only you're tasked with the job of showing it by its absence. We usually cannot know how happy the protagonist can be until we have seen him at the depth of his horror. How much can she relish the discovery of true love, if she hasn't seen her fiance kiss another woman? No one can experience joy without first knowing sorrow, and so even sorrow works towards the eventual happiness of your main character.
Here is where I show you a shitty graphic of theme and story:
Imagine the black line at the bottom as a linear graph of your story. Beginning to end. The maroon arc over the entire story is the theme. Let's use revenge, an oldie but a goody.
You'll note that revenge is not the story itself. You think you've read stories (or watched them) entirely about revenge, but really you haven't. No one wants to read a book entirely about revenge -- it would get monotonous, quickly. Someone killing someone else for sheer killing's sake would be dull. It's the mystery of why, of who, of how, the pieces of the stories in scenes, settings, and characters that revenge illuminates along the way. The revenge is what you take away from the story (and why the word revenge has more intrinsic meaning in your gut than Man vs Man), because it's the theme of the story, but the story itself was all the different pieces pointing you towards its end:
The time when the protagonist saw his father sleeping with another woman. The piece of rock your protagonist digs out of his arm after having been pushed into the dirt at recess. The moment in high school when he realizes he can safely cheat. The girlfriend he won't believe doesn't cheat until she does out of spite. The boss at the job who takes credit for his creations. The drunk drive home where he takes a life. The pact with the devil he sees in his concussion after the accident.
Revenge on parents, authority, yourself, death, etc.
Even if it doesn't feel like the book's a revenge book, it is. Even if the protagonist never actualizes his desires for revenge, even if he cannot admit them to himself, it's still revenge. Even if the revenge is inflicted on the protagonist from an external force for a reason of which the protag is ignorant (consider the movie Oldboy) it's still revenge. Revenge is the filter through which the story must be viewed -- assuming the author has not made a misstep. And this is why you can't change themes in midstream. You set up an unconscious pact with the reader in creating a theme -- even if you do not know that theme is there until you are finished writing the story, in which case you've created an unconscious pact with yourself -- and if you change that theme at the last minute, hoping to arrive at a place other than where the reader expects you to go, the reader will be left disappointed, even though they may not be entirely sure why. Your heart may soften and you may want to keep that character alive for the next book, but your reader will feel as though they've been cheated, subconsciously, they'll know that that character should have died.
Now, there's a lot of other colors in my shitty graphic -- they represent plots, and characters, and arcs big and small. Your story should look like this. There should be no tangents off into space, no characters/plots/places which are not there intentionally, and which do not serve the story. (Some people go even further, with tones, character thought processes, particular word repetitions. It can become fractal in intent. If done well, that's not a bad thing.) The more your story looks like a map of mutually assured destruction, ICBMs raining hellfire down on the world, the better job you will have done. There will be temptations along the way to do things for the sake of doing them, shooting stars of meaningless digression, merely because you can, but very few writers can get away with this. It's safer (and more easily understood by your reader, unless your readership enjoys esoteric things) to make sure that everything in your story is wrapped up tightly, with the theme over arcing all your final bow.
Your theme is what makes people, when they dismount your story at its last page, feel like what they've experienced has been a cohesive whole. They have been the gemstone, and have had the light of loneliness, impossibility, hope, abandonment shined through them, and have wound up where you wanted them to arrive, better for their illumination, on the other side.