Writing Great Fiction: An Introduction

Chapter 6: Theme and the Interior World

This creation of patterns and meaning where they don't actually exist is called apophenia and it's a perfect example of how hungry we are for depth and substance in our lives and in the stories we read. We are willing to imagine depth, to feel a bit cooler, even when the water is only ankle deep. We will even try to find meaning in the most vapid comedies or action fests. Heck, I once thought there was some meaning in a Michael Bay Transformers movie. But I'm brave enough to admit I was wrong.

So, what if you want to make your readers the happiest fans on the planet? What if you want to give them a story that they can immerse themselves in, one that they know they can go back to again and again to find new things in the deep? What if you want to plant something down there that just might latch onto them and not let go? To do this, you have to do one thing in particular. You have to open up the interior world of your story.

Of course we have to put first things...you know...at the beginning. And the first things that readers encounter in our stories, the things that rest on the surface, are elements of plot, setting and the descriptions about the outside of our characters that we call characterization. These are the parts of your story that readers get to splash around and have fun with, and they are absolutely vital! If you ignore them and try to focus exclusively on writing a DEEP and IMPORTANT book, your readers will be miserable.

So, make sure you create fascinating characters (more on this in the next chapter) and have a plot that wows the reader. But, to pull them in for read after read, where they discover new things every time they go through it again, then you will have to pull out a couple of techniques. Your characters will need to make big decisions with visible motivations. You will need to show not only the protagonist's goals but also the things inside her that need to change. You will need to raise some big issues and ask questions that only your reader can answer. You might even start to create a secret code to send messages to your readers. This is how you start to dive down and see how deep you can go into your stories.

And, trust me, this water can get pretty deep.

When we plunge into the depths of our stories, we run into a number of possibilities. We see the inner emotions of our characters, symbols emerge, subtext becomes apparent, the backstory and motivations of the players appear...all these different interior elements light up like glow in the dark fish...but the big one, the one to really go after, is theme.

You've heard the term before. Most literature teachers pull it out and talk about it at least a little bit. But what is theme, really? When do we see it? And most importantly, how do we use it and work it into our stories?

As we mentioned in the first chapter of this book, theme is an underlying statement or question that you want your readers to keep thinking about after they finish your story. That's a great start, but you are going to need more detail to turn it into a useful tool.

In a few chapters we will talk about the central question or problem of your story, the one that relates to the protagonist navigating the plot, or exterior level of what you are writing. But for now, let's focus on the interior side and work on the thematic statement or question for your story. Let's say you know that your main character is a thief. You could think about a theme that has to do with theft. The most basic level would be to say something like, "stealing is wrong."

Wow. That took a lot of thought, right? Well, just as with the other elements of your story, you want to spend some time on this, let it evolve and grow. Soon, you might come up with something a bit more interesting, like wondering when stealing might be the right thing to do. Or, you could begin to ask yourself what the character thinks of herself after stealing. When you let the theme evolve from the first simple statement or question into something bigger and more complex, it gives you several very big benefits.