Thoughts on Theme: Part I

During the month of June, I’m taking an online writing workshop called Plotting Bootcamp over at Rose's Colored Glasses. I’ve decided to return to a shelved work in progress, All Roads Lead to Ross, and basically start over with it through this one month long plotting workshop. One of our first lessons asked us to write down the theme for our story, and that got me thinking…

I know what theme is. Years ago, as an English major, I wrote numerous essays on it. I analyzed it in the classics extensively. In my former life as an English teacher, I taught the concept of theme to hundreds of students, yet I’ve never thought about theme from the perspective of a writer—just as a reader. I’ve never consciously chosen a theme for a story and tried to embed that theme throughout the plotline from the very beginning stages of development. I wonder why I haven’t?

It may be because the way I learned and taught theme isn’t the way most writing craft books and online workshops present the concept. I taught advanced English courses which had a heavy emphasis on writing literary analysis essays. I used the words “theme” and “universal meaning” interchangeably when I taught my students to find evidence of the author’s philosophy about life in the story.

Holman and Harmon’s A Handbook to Literature, sixth edition (1992) defines theme as “a central idea. … The abstract concept that is made concrete through representation in person, action, and image. No proper theme is simply a subject or an activity. Theme implies a subject and a predicate of some kind—not just vice in general, say, but some such proposition as ‘Vice seems more interesting than virtue but turns out to be destructive.’ ‘Human wishes’ is a topic or subject; the ‘vanity of human wishes’ is a theme.”

When analyzing literature, I taught my students that a theme wasn’t a subject, but that a subject was a part of the theme. I had them make two columns on a piece of paper and label the left hand column “subject” and the right hand column “universal meaning.” We would fill the subject column with the abstract concepts the story was about—love, for example, or betrayal or revenge or secrecy. Then in the other column, we had to dig deeper. We had to figure out what the author was really saying about that subject.

Then we had to avoid the cliché trap. Of course the easy theme for love is “love conquers all.” For revenge, “revenge is sweet.” But we had a rule: No fortune cookie themes.

So we had to dig deeper than the cliché to find the real heart of the story and then strive to write it in a fresh way. For love, I might use something like, "love can unlock unknown inner strength to get a person through devastating loss and hardship" as a theme statement.

I googled for common themes in literature and compiled a list of the first several that came up. This list overlaps with suggestions I’ve gotten from several writing craft books and writing workshops when they address theme. Here’s the list:

Abandonment
Acceptance
Alienation
Ambition
American dream, the
Beauty
Betrayal
Birth/childhood
Coming of age
Commodification/commercialism/commerce
Community
Courage
Cruelty
Death and dying
Dreams can come true
Duty (filial piety)
Education
Ethics
Family
Fate
Father/son
Fear
Forgiveness
Freedom
Futility
Gender
Good conquers evil
Grief
Guilt
Heroism
Hope
Identity
Illness
Importance of family
Individual and society
Innocence and experience
Isolation and exile
Jealousy
Justice
Loneliness
Love
Love conquers all
Loyalty
Memory
Mother/daughter
Nationalism
Nature
Oppression
Overcoming fear
Parenthood
Peace/non-violence
Perseverance
Prejudice
Pride
Race
Regret
Rebirth
Redemption
Rejection
Religion
Responsibility
Reunion
Science and technology
Separation
Sex/sensuality/eroticism
Social class
Spirituality
Stages of life
Success
Suffering
Survival
Terrorism
Time
Tradition
Violence
Work

Now here's my issue with the list: None of those words or phrases, in my opinion, are themes. They're starting points for themes, but they're not themes by themselves. And for some reason, I find myself unreasonably irritated to find so much information out there that says they are. I'm inwardly cringing for all the English teachers who have to repeatedly explain, "just because you found it on the internet, doesn't mean it's true."

I've put some feelers out for opinions from other writers about theme and their definitions for it. I also want to emphasize that my rant about theme here is not directed at Plotting Bootcamp. Thus far, I'm finding the workshop helpful and informative. The Bootcamp assignment was merely the trigger than sent me searching for more information about theme.

I'll be writing my thoughts on theme, part II when I get some feedback.