Story Components: Themes

One lesson that has stuck with me since high school English was that the author of any story controls every single word. Grammar may put some bounds on what is possible but you can always choose what word to place or omit anywhere. As you read any story (or take in any artform) you have to remember this and always ask why they wrote these specific words. When you do this analysis you can take another step back and ask “Why are they telling this story at all?”

The story behind this picture is trying to influence you.

Themes are the answer to this question and provide the meaning for any story. Fables, for example, have themes related to morality to teach people right from wrong and give consequences when morals are broken. Any political book will have themes to push some ideology and maybe get someone into power. It may be innocent, but there is an attempt by the author of the story to influence you in some way. As a rational person you have to figure out what that is for each story and any story can have multiple themes.

Part of the fun in reading all the Nobel winners is exploring the theme genres over the last 175-ish years, especially when exploring the early winners. The pastoral nature of the early winners was prevalent both in the Scandinavian winners like Hamsun and Lagerlöf, as with the Provencal writers like Mistral and Prudhomme exploring the ideality of a simple life before industry dominated countries and subtle nationalism poking its head. Later we find the post World War II destruction in almost every winner (Sacks, Camus), then exploration of what could be like Marquez and Oe, and in more recent years we see exploration of memory with Ernaux, Munroe and Alexievich.

Each writer has their own personal reasons for these themes and they are able to impart their own personal fingerprints on them. Next time you are chit chatting first start with understanding what you want the other people to think, feel or understand and put together a theme. After you have this in mind your story can take on purpose and maybe idle chat won’t be so idle anymore.