Themes and Over-arching Deeper Significance…That’s a lot of baggage for a commerical novel
What consistent theme do you regularly try to reflect in all of your works?
This is just one question in the many pages of questionnaires I have been filling out lately. It’s the type of question that stops me in my tracks because:
1) It’s tough enough to just try to tell the story without giving it significance. What is a theme, anyway?
John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, says theme is what the writer truly believes and can affirm for all time.
Whoa! That kind of esoteric thinking sends notoriously thin-skinned da Muse out the nearest exit, and shrinks my delicate imagination to walnut size, hard shell intact for protection.
2) Critiquing one’s own work is like cutting your own hair. You might be able to do it, but getting the angles right will be very difficult. Even if you succeed, you’ll still never be able to back up enough from the situation to get the big picture of what you’ve done.
3) Such questions make my head hurt. My in-head editor who parses every word I write looking for mistakes, gets enough encouragement from my first drafts without me consciously delving into what makes my stories work… if they are working. If they aren’t, I tend to look for the nearest magazine, pull up Spider Solitaire, or go in search of that snack I’m suddenly wanting.
I resist answering any question that asks me to delve deeply into ‘how I write.’
It’s magic!
Let’s leave it at that. Works for me.
All that said, it did make me stop and think about theme. What is it, who has them, are they of any value to a writer who’s writing? Or is something for the readers of a writer, or a reviewer of a book, or some literary researcher to tease out of the body of an author’s life’s work? All of the above.
And yet…
In the middle of plotting, or when I’ve written myself into a corner or a secondary character has hijacked my tale, I do stop and ask myself: what is this book about? Is the plot a dramatic exercise in that idea? If not, where have I gone wrong? What do I need to do to steer it back to the main point? What was the main point? Aha! Main point. Theme? Over-arching deeper significance. I get it! Yeah! I have a theme in mind.
Just don’t ask me to articulate it until the book is in print, and I’ve had a hiatus from the minutiae of its creation.
For many years I didn’t think I had a consistent theme because I wrote in such diverse genres:
historical romance, western, romantic suspense, saga, contemporary romance, and now mainstream.
But I’ve come to realize — because the question was asked and I couldn’t stop thinking about it — that I do have a theme.
I write about characters who are outsiders in their worlds.
Whether it’s
a 16th century Irish girl born with a red birthmark
on her face that brands her a ‘fairy child’:
or a 19th Brazilian jewel merchant whose heritage is African, Amazon Indian, and Portuguese
but whose wealth cannot shield him from trouble in the American South:
or a Regency English spinster who, because of why she was left
at the altar by her fiancé, is the subject of scandal and rumors she can’t outrun:
or a modern fifty-year-old who finds herself divorced and pregnant and facing ageism bias at work:
My characters tend to have unconventional circumstances in a world that doesn’t understand, or approve.
They have to find a way to make their lives work without being
able to simply follow the ‘rules of behavior’ of ‘common
conventions’ that everyone else around them follows.
They never quite fit.
They must define their lives for themselves.
So, yes, I have over the years seemed to have, quite without conscious effort, developed a theme. I write about misfits: people who have no control over how people see them, often as other within their own families, and are often thought to be a danger to the status quo. I write about what they do to survive and thrive despite what the world may think.
So don’t worry about your theme, or themes. Keep writing. The theme will develop out of what you produce.
