Lesson 2: Themes · 3:42am Dec 9th, 2021
If you think you already know what themes are present in your writing, and that you know how to clearly convey the meaning of your themes, I can guarantee that you don’t. No! Wait! Don’t write your hateful comments, at least not yet. There’s still a lot more to come.
What I mean by “you don’t know what themes you have” is that writers will often begin their manuscripts with a clear idea in mind if they are good. They have at least one thing, usually more, that they want to share with their reader. But the themes we add to our stories is dependent on the lens we view our stories with, and the themes our readers take out of the story is dependent on their lenses as well.
I might think that I have a diverse set of characters with fair and equal representation. Someone else might take my work and go “Ugh, another cis-gendered het male misrepresenting my demographic.”
To begin with, all stories are open to some degree of interpretation, because although the author decides what to put in the story, the subtext of those events and actions will be different based on who is reading it, just like when people try to interpret real-life events. When we lack control of our stories, we open up the themes to more interpretation, which of course can lead to a disconnection between all the story elements because now they’re not working towards the intended theme, they’re clashing with the reader’s themes.
But before we talk about identifying and using your themes in writing, we should first define what we’re talking about when we say “a theme.”
What is a theme?
A theme is a broadly applicable lesson that usually tries to convey some kind of moral, ethical, or life lesson. If you can take only one thing away from this section, it would be that themes are statements.
That might seem strange to some writers, especially because in casual conversation, many of us will refer to a story’s themes as things like love, death, power, friendship, revenge, and so on. If we have a clearer understanding of that story, we might instead identify “the strength of love” or “the inevitability of death” or “the corrupting nature of power” as a story’s themes.
These are not themes. And the easiest way to test whether a theme is really a theme is to ask the question “What about it?” If you can say more, then it probably wasn’t a theme yet.
Let’s use Lord of the Rings as a quick example. A casual reader or writer might say that “the corrupting nature of power” is one of its themes. I could ask, “What about it?”
An answer might look like this: “Tolkein shows that the corrupting nature of power can affect even the purest and kindest of people.”
Another example that hits closer to home for this fandom might be My Little Pony. If someone were to tell me that the central theme is “friendship,” I would ask “What about it?” What does MLP say about friendship? And the more specific you can get with your theme, the clearer that idea will be to you when you are writing and to your reader when they experience the story.
“Friends are good to have.” That is, technically, a theme.
“You don’t have to have common interests with your friends, enjoying their company is enough.” That’s a better theme, and avid viewers of the show might even be able to recall which episodes feature it.
Themes are subjective, but the more specific and clear you are with your themes, the more likely your reader to going to get your meaning. And that is why I place themes first before my lessons on characters, plot, or setting. If you have writer’s block or you don’t know where you’re going with a story, a theme will give your story a purpose or a goal to achieve. It’s like being lost but having a compass. You don’t know where you are, but you can at least pick the right direction.
Common themes in myths
Whenever authors write, especially if they are fan fiction writers or basing their works off of a very saturated genre like romance or sci-fi/fantasy, we like to look at contemporary examples for inspiration. The books we read, the shows we watch, or maybe the urban myths and legends that crop up in our local areas from time to time.
And you would be well within your rights to do that, contemporary references give us the best sense of what is grabbing the attention of readers right now. But there are reasons why certain ancient or classical myths have persisted in one form or another for thousands of years. One of those reasons is their themes.
Example: What’s one of the themes the Epic of Beowulf tells us when the heretofore indomitable hero cannot defeat the final dragon alone and dies after completing the ordeal? Even Beowulf, despite being an inhumanly strong warrior, has his limits. There are forces in the world that no individual can overcome.
Another example might be the Hymn to Aphrodite. Now, this is a bit more obscure myth compared to Herakles, Hades kidnapping Persephone, or that time Dionysus invented dolphins. But don’t worry, it’s super easy to understand. Aphrodite, as the Goddess of Love, is super sure she can’t be smitten by love. Until she sees a particularly attractive dude and that stops being the case. Greek adult things happen, and the next morning Aphrodite swears it was just a one-time thing.
The theme here is love. Oh, wait. “What about it?” The hymn makes the point that even Aphrodite, the personification of love itself, cannot escape the feelings of infatuation. Love is a universal and powerful emotion that it is hopeless to try to escape. (The hymn mentions three goddesses who are exceptions and why, but we’re going to shelve that for the sake of simplicity).
And finally, I want to leave you with an example of how themes from ancient myths find relevance in modern stories and media. And that example is Pacific Rim. One of Pacific Rim’s central themes is developed off of Beowulf’s. And that’s not saying Guillermo del Toro was directly inspired by Beowulf, he probably wasn’t. But through culture and by spreading ideas and shared human experiences, we encounter similar themes in our lives.
And if you don’t believe me, one need only refer to the sequence of Pacific Rim that introduces the Gipsy Danger. The narration from the pilot encapsulates the theme perfectly: “There are things you can’t fight. Acts of God. You see a hurricane coming, you have to get out of the way.”
This is the same theme that Beowulf presents, because as strong as the hero is, there are forces of nature that no one can overcome.
Guillermo del Toro takes this one step further. Jaegers in Pacific Rim are gargantuan machines, feats of engineering that takes crews of hundreds of people to maintain and prepare. They’re the pinnacle of human technology and engineering. And what does the pilot have to say about it?
“But when you’re in a Jaeger, suddenly, you can fight the hurricane. You can win.”
Pacific Rim’s theme is that “Although there are forces that no human can overcome, when humanity works together is when those problems become surmountable.”
Common themes in popular culture
When we look to pop culture stories for themes to reference, we’re not really looking for how they create something brand new, because in most cases they didn’t. Modern stories take what has existed before and iterate them into something familiar but different.
Hunger Games was not the first to feature themes along the lines of “Freedom against authority is worth the risk of fighting back.” Nor was it the first story to have a potential couple form a suicide pact in the name of love, slapping President Snow with the classic “Love is more important than life.”
But what Hunger Games, and other wildly popular stories, manage to do is bring new contexts and combinations to the old themes, roping in enough interest that the reader is going ignore the similarities to other stories, even if they notice it.
“Katniss is in a cliche love story. Oh! But she doesn’t really want it, she’s just putting on a show to survive. That’s different. I’m not thinking about Romeo and Juliet anymore.”
Common themes in human nature
Though I have separated these examples of some common themes into two sections, I hope it’s clear that all of these are do not belong in any one category. They’re more like an amorphous blob of concepts that are constantly being recycled and spliced apart. Understanding commonalities between all these separate works requires that we delve a little bit into our own psychology.
At our core, what do we fear? What do we crave? What drives us as people and motivates us to change. And at the end of it all, what do we want to take from our experiences and pass on to others? These you must answer for yourself in order to write a story unique to you. However, I do want to give a brief list of some very broad subjects for themes. These are not themes themselves, but just a few subjects that might help jumpstart your thinking.
- Escaping Death
Love and Lust, or Love vs Lust
- Common subtopics: Forbidden Love, Unrequited Love, Lost Love, Rekindled Love
- Revenge and its Consequences
Proving/Redeeming Oneself
- Common subtopics: Honour
- Seeking Peace in Times of Turmoil
- Seeking Action in Times of Peace
- The Struggle to Survive
- Freedom vs Oppression, or Freedom vs Order
I also want to be clear that stories don’t have to have just one theme. In fact, most of the time they should have multiple. And if your story is a novel-length book, they definitely need to have multiple or else it’ll feel like you’re just hammering on the same idea over and over again. Mixing themes together doesn’t mean you have to mix them all into one thing.
Homework
Watch the “Heros and Villains” episode of the “Myth and Monsters” series on Netflix
- Read my story “Broken” and discuss its themes (comment here on the blog)
