Making Room for Themes
Recently, while presenting The Secret Under My Skin to a grade nine class on Google Meet, the teacher asked me to talk about the themes in the book. This proved to be a surprisingly hard task and since then, I’ve wondered why. Themes are important. They give fiction depth and meaning, and the large canvas of a novel makes this genre the most comfortable of all to allow themes to grow and intertwine with character and plot. So why was it so difficult to talk about the themes in my futuristic novel?
For me, it’s not natural to think about themes as an element of writing in the first draft at all. As novels knit themselves together in parts of my brain that I cannot access, themes begin to emerge and grow without conscious effort. I was halfway through the second Dragon Seer book before I realized mass extinction was one of the main themes of those books. Of course, the fact that I wrote books about mass extinction is not random. Thinking about Earth’s natural environment and the future of the planet is a preoccupation and a passion for me. Themes come into my writing naturally because I write about things I care about. And really, that’s all you have to do where theme is concerned.
This is an important lesson for beginning writers. Don’t think about what’s trendy. Just write about things that matter deeply to you and the characters you create. This will make your writing into fertile soil that will grow the seeds of the ideas that are always present in your imagination, and these ideas will become themes without effort. Later, in revision, you may need to step back and ask yourself if you are really saying what you mean to say. You may wonder if your themes need to be pruned back to prevent them from taking up too much space because ideas are not the main reason readers come to fiction. To them, character will always more important and you must not mistake your novel for a way of teaching people ideas. But, in that initial rush of creativity, you will find that themes pop up and grow organically, without effort, or much thought as long as you connect your story to something that’s meaningful to you. If your characters care about that something as much as you do, it will seep into their actions, their hope and their dreams. This is how themes find their way into writing. A theme is not a hammer, it should be more like a cloud floating through the back ground of the picture you are making. The readers who need to see it will, and they are the audience you’re writing for. No idea can reach everyone and it’s not your job to worry about how readers explore your themes. That’s why there are English teachers.
