Themes?  We don't need no stinking themes!

In this blog entry, we continue answering the two questions for getting started, and inquire further about the reader experience.  (2) What do you want your ideal reader to think, feel, or know when they are finished reading your book?

This question points us toward the novel’s themes.  While it might be premature to decide final themes for a book, it’s useful to think about how you want a reader to feel, or what you want them to be thinking about when they finally put the book down, hopefully with a sigh of satisfaction.

Themestorming

Many writers eschew theme-thinking, dismissing it as limiting to the story creation process.  I don’t want your theme to become something you are writing about, but instead something that drives the creative process.  If you know, for example, that the theme you want to include in your book is environmental stewardship, or collaboration across differences, or the challenge of recovering from a traumatic childhood, you can use this theme as an impetus for brainstorming your scenes.

Let’s take environmental stewardship as an example.  If I want my readers to feel responsible for their planet when they are done reading my book, I need characters who become responsible for their planet during the course of their experience.  If I start out with environmental activists who spend their time preaching environmental public policy, I don’t have an interesting novel, though I might have a good public policy white paper.

However, if my character is either (1) flawed, like Neal Stephenson’s Sangamon Taylor in Zodiac, or (2) not at all interested in the environment when the story begins, like Dr. Fleischman in the incredible TV show Northern Exposure, then I might just have the beginnings of an interesting tale of either, (1)(a) wacky eco-terrorism or (2)(a) New Yorker against nature in all her stunning glory.

If I as a writer am unwilling to consider the theme of my writing, I might miss an absolutely fantastic opportunity to create conflict for my characters.  Conflict generates reader interest, which means the pages get turned, the eyeballs stay glued, and the books thankfully sell.

So let’s consider some questions that take us from theme to scene.

• how is my ideal reader like my protagonist?

If you want to leave your ideal reader with an experience, a feeling, or a thought, you might consider making your protagonist similar in some way to your ideal reader.  Let’s stay with this environmental activism example.  Does your ideal reader feel helpless in the face of global warming, for example?  Perhaps your protagonist feels the same way, or doesn’t even know that global warming is a problem until the action gets underway in your story.  You might not want to speak about global warming per se, since your novel takes place in a fantasy world, but you might have a character or a situation threatening the very planet upon which your character lives.  What kinds of scenes might happen to help your character learn skills, realize her own power, and take action to protect her planet?

Ka-boom!  Now we’re in the landscape of the traditional novel writing process, creating scenes and identifying protagonist and antagonist, helpers and obstacles, motivating actions, coincidences, and catastrophes.

• what does my ideal reader not know about my theme?

Fabulous literary novels often teach us a lot about something.  Perhaps the novelist even sets out to teach as he or she is writing.  Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown provides his Western readership with a significant education in the history and troubles of Kashmir.  Likewise, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides takes readers on an epic narrative journey from grandparent to the moment of egg insemination to help explain how his hermaphroditic protagonist came to face the difficult decision of choosing whether to change genders.  We readers learn a lot about gender identity, psychiatric abuses of power, and the range of responses to queer identity that people face in their families, cultures, and neighborhoods of origin.

Clever novelists teach via character experience, rather than through didactic lecture.  Once you know what you want to teach your reader, you may begin a brainstorming process to imagine the various ways a character or narrator might disclose or experience the information you want to impart.

• what do I want my ideal reader to feel about my theme?

Leaving our readers feeling something is one of the most powerful, transformative and rewarding feats of literary accomplishment available to us as novelists.  After all, stories that generate feelings have staying power.  Our readers remember when they cry or laugh, or when they feel staggeringly angry or helpless, afraid, proud or happy.  When Wilbur’s life is threatened in Charlotte’s Web, we root for Fern as she tries to save the baby piglet.  

But the great moment of tremendous feeling comes at the end of the novel, when Charlotte dies.  Her selfless commitment and great sacrifice become an ideal to strive for in the shaping of our own character, our own moral fiber, in the values, and actions we are willing to take on behalf of others.  We want to become Charlotte, as an act of love and gratitude for how she has made us feel.

If you want your reader to feel grief, you must give him something to lose.  Something he cares deeply about.  Imagine scenes of loss that might spur your protagonist to action.

Let your theme lead you to scenes that move and change your reader, and your book will become important to them.  When your book is important, it gets passed along, from reader to reader, becoming something more significant than words on a page, or a good story.  When a book changes lives, it becomes ageless, and as novelists, what more could we want for our precious creations?