Let’s talk about theme.

I know, some of you are probably rolling your eyes. I know when I had to do literature study in school, most of the time was spent trying to find what nonsense the author really meant when they put that peg leg on the not-a-pirate lesbian. And the teacher sat up there with her educational text deducting markings if you failed to understand that the mewling lamb was a stand-in for Jesus. I think it’s the English Teacher’s job to specifically make reading as unenjoyable as possible

On the other hand, maybe you hear the word theme from the perspective of the writer and your palms get sweaty. You shift awkwardly on your chair, furtively glancing around at the other people in the room. You don’t really sit down and pen out a theme for your book. How can you? You’ve got to focus on the setting, characters, pacing, conflict, repetition, description, word count, chapter length, title and… phew, I’m already feeling overwhelmed. 

I think there’s a dirty little secret to themes that your literature studies doesn’t want you to know: it’s mostly made up nonsense. 

But it’s not entirely made up nonsense. 

And that’s the catch, really. I don’t believe authors spend a great deal of time concerned about theme. Though, certainly as other aspects of writing come easier you’ll free up more mental bandwidth capable of devoting time to it. And, certainly, having control of your theme will make your writing even stronger. But how can you not purposefully put something in but still have it there?

The answer is simple – we’re humans and not random text generators. Before we even sit down and set pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), we’ve already got a lot of preconceived notions, ideas, beliefs, perspectives and truths. Prior to creating our fictitious worlds, we’ve already formed some idea of the world we inhabit. And these beliefs are going to filter into our writing. Sometimes intentionally. Oftentimes accidentally. 

A lot of the time, this is harmless and unavoidable. I mean, how many stories have characters that love reading? It stands to reason that if you want to write, you’re probably a fan of books and literacy. Thus, naturally, your characters are going to put a higher value on that skill than others. When these biases align with the rest of your readership’s views, they go by completely unnoticed. Most of our biases are pretty invisible to our readers. 

But not all of them are. And if we aren’t aware of our biases and how it can shape our work, we may end up creating a theme to our story that is unintentional. It may even be off-putting to those who you want to read your book! Thus, it’s important to try and keep an eye out for our themes even if we’re not sitting down and consciously writing them into our story. An outline doesn’t have to have “Chapter 10 is where I rail against the inhumanity of the homeless” for that to crop up. 

However, we’re still responsible for whatever seeps in.

I’ve railed against Name of the Wind before, but for those with the stomach or appetite, I encourage you to read the text with an eye for the portrayal of women in the story. It’s quite likely you won’t have noticed the misogynistic undertones that seep through the text on your first read. But if you pay attention to who Patrick Rothfuss choses to highlight, describe and characterise, you’ll notice that there’s a large gender imbalance. Even more, all the women are contextualised within the story to how they can sexually gratify the male characters which the story is so focused on. It comes up in humorous moments where Kvothe will have a touching moment with his mother only for his father to swoop in to remind the reader that the two of them have a very active and very healthy sex life. But even when Kvothe goes to school and is harassed by the mean teacher (who I can’t even bother remembering the name of anymore), you’ll start to notice that the teacher insults Kvothe for his tardiness but he insults the female student for being a harlot. 

Now, do I think Patrick Rothfuss intentionally penned a misogynistic story? No. I mean, it’s possible. I’ve never met the man. But given how incidental a lot of the work is, it feels to me to be entirely unconscious. Whatever beliefs Rothfuss possesses, and I’m not making any grand claim to what those are, they somehow manifested in a pretty glaring sexual objectification of all the women in his story. 

And, frankly, I don’t think most of us want our writing to do that. 

Now, theme is a hard knot to untangle, especially if we don’t have the self-reflection to know our personal biases. But that is where some of those literature study skills come in. It helps, when going through your editing, to ask yourself a number of pointed questions about character motivation, intention and the general focus of the text. Even more, it really helps to get other perspectives to look at your story. And to ask those people if there’s anything that stands out to them. 

The problem arises, of course, is that most people aren’t literature students and probably fall into that first camp at the top of the post. And it can be an awfully difficult issue to properly examine. But just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least try to be conscientious of the messages we’re putting out. Ultimately, it rests on us as authors to be responsible for the themes we put into our stories. And we may stumble in our efforts but if we attempt to do our best from the outset, we can only improve as we grow more skilled.

So, when we’re looking at our book, we should ask ourselves:

What are the themes of my story?

What do the implications of my major character’s decisions and actions mean in a greater context?Am I touching on sensitive topics? Have I done so intentionally? Can I ask someone who is impacted by that topic to look it over for potential pitfalls I may havefallen into?