Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery by Diane Holmes, Chief Alchemist of Pitch University
Power Moments
Writers talk about theme as if it’s a mystical addition that makes you, the writer, look deep.
I’m all for looking deep. It goes so well with my eyes, but let’s look at the practical side of theme.
Your theme tells you, the writer, where and what kind of POWER MOMENTS to include in your plot.
Your theme comes to life through the actions of characters over the course of Story Unfolding. And how does a story unfold? In specific scenes that create the cause and effect of plot.
Theme becomes real only when it becomes the events and turning points of your story.
To read more about this, you’ll want to check out Turns Out Theme is Actually Good for Something (this just in).
To put this another way, what is your story?
- It’s the trajectory of your theme.
- It’s theme tested over time.
- And in the end, the climax of your book the culmination of choices and actions tell the reader exactly how your theme is true.
I know, I know. You think them has to do with character and internal angsty stuff, like “what the character needs to learn.” But it has to be more than that.
Without focused action, scenes that bring together to culmination of all the causes and effects that have gone before (hello Power Moment), that angsty stuff is just talk.
You’re confused, I know. This isn’t what you were taught in the past. I hear ya. Me, too. I’ve heard the talks, read the articles, and bought the t-shirts.
In 3 Definitions of Theme I’d Like to Flush I very politely trussed up, set on fire, and catapulted the commonly taught definitions of theme out to sea, to die-die-die. The bundle made a nice sizzle as it hit the water’s surface somewhere over by Australia. The Coral Sea, maybe. Hard to tell from here.
Why did I do this?
At best, these pretty unhelpful definitions create over-arching theme categories. Groupings of themes for the purpose of collecting them into genus and species.
But I think the theme for your book has a useful meaning that is much more specific to you and your story.
We’re talking Power Moments, baby. Scenes, characters, gritty essentials.
The One Thing That Matters? The Reader.
That’s right. If you have a theme, then your plot is the way the reader experiences your theme.
I thought a quick reminder of that would prove helpful. Theme gets so self-involved for authors, and it is. But it an exercise in therapy if you never move past what you the author want to do and embrace the reader’s experience of your story.
So keep that always in mind. Theme needs to be useful to you as the creator of your specific story, but it ultimately must mean something to the reader in order for it to really exist in something other than your head. Or to be more than characters caught up in their own heads.
Surely story and theme must be more than you or your characters thinking and mulling over stuff. It’s more than journaling. More than FaceBook posts of random thoughts.
That’s why I’m talking about things you can point to on the page. Scenes and plot. Power Moments.
Theme Explores the Infinite Complexity of Experiences
Let’s take a break for a moment from scenes and actions and take a look at the big picture of story. Any story? No. Great story.
No matter how simple, no matter how focused on entertainment, great stories have…
- impact,
- meaning, and
- resonance
…for both the reader and the author. This, I’d like to suggest, is the proof of theme.
Theme is about how your characters cope, how they parse together a reality lived over time into something that defines who they are and what actions they’ll take all the way to the end (and beyond).
It’s a lens you can use to make sense of the story world and of the events that have led you to “here.”
It’s what they’ve been hitting up against over and over that’s hard work, invites resistance, and is worth the effort.
Or maybe it’s trap that is only illuminated with 20-20 hindsight and a trail of broken stepping stones.
***Theme is the effect and understanding (of your character and reader) of every single event in your story so that, in the end, the experiences of the character and the reader coalesce, as if caught by your story’s gravity into a simple pattern that captures a life-time of understanding.
Bingo. Now you understand how the big picture of theme and story relates to the little picture of events, actions, and scenes
What creates all the complexity of experience that leads to this simple understanding?
Continue reading The Secret Link Between Theme and The Plot of Your Book (well, it’s not secret now)