Build Theme into the Atmosphere (Bite Sized Method)
Theme is one of those classroom words that make eyes glaze over the moment it’s mentioned.
But I think that’s mainly down to misapplication.
In my experience, any story where I’ve attempted to force feed theme from page one comes off as contrived. These are the stories that end up having a moral, a message or a high concept. These are the stories that tend to die in the water before the end of the second paragraph.
Theme can be a powerful tool though. It just needs to be found in revision. Which is why it’s so often done badly—because that’s the boring bit. That’s the bit that people tend to skip.
I’m no expert, but the way I try to deal with theme comes after a first draft is complete, after the characters have been fleshed out and the full story has a general shape of what it’s “about.”
For instance: one of my recent stories Injured revealed itself to be about the fine line between adversity and damage. The first, being useful, the latter being limiting.
While writing the first draft, I didn’t pay any attention to theme because I didn’t know what I was dealing with yet. But once I’d identified that final “Aboutness,” I then went back through the story and started scanning for other areas where I might echo and expand this idea.
One example of this is the wetland that features near the end of this story. The character Jake observes how it got dammed to mitigate flooding—a change to the landscape that might be viewed as an improvement or a violation depending on who you are.
Another example can be found in the opening line:
“The glasses clink and Jake’s almost shatters.”
When a reader comes to this story, I don’t expect them to pick up any of these connections consciously, but it all helps to build on the atmosphere of this story’s internal world. It helps reinforce that theme implicitly and if done successfully, allows the reader to reach the conclusion I want them to without any need to spell it out for them.
And even if this fails to break through to a conscious “oh, the difference between damage and adversity is a theme of this story,” the fractal morphing of a single idea should at least give the surface story an interesting texture and a sense of forward momentum.
This concept is subtle if done well, obnoxious if done poorly, but I prefer stories that attempt to do it however successful they are.
It just adds a richness to the immediate experience and allows even banal features of the environment to mean something. Fiction is not reality, so you may as well lean into that.
I’m not saying a story about anger needs to have lightning cracking all the time, but if your character is getting himself a glass of water, why not have him burn himself under an unexpectedly hot tap? Layer that otherwise banal activity with some deeper significance.
This also allows you to take some heavy lifting off the language. In a medium where words are all you’ve got to liven things up, this is a way to use very simple language to trigger a disproportionately deep resonation with a reader. There’s no need to get poetic or metaphorical all the time, in fact doing that can become tedious
I hope some of that makes sense.