Theme

When you're writing, the theme of your piece can seem very elusive, and perhaps inconsequential. But, as poet William Carlos Williams said of the Red Wagon, so much depends upon it.

But that doesn't mean that you need to know the theme up front. In fact, in writing Secret Spy, I truly had no idea what the theme might be when I began. I imagined that after forty or fifty pages it would start to emerge, but that didn't happen. A hundred pages? Nope. Two hundred? Still not there. As I wrote the last paragraph of  the epilogue, which centers on the experience of Tom Huttle, I still didn't have a theme. I wondered what Tom Huttle might think as he looked back on all of the twists and turns of the story. "You never know what's going to happen," Tom thought. "So you just keep going."

I had my theme. It hadn't become clear to me literally until the last sentence of the book, but I knew it was right. How did I know? Because it had been played out within all of Tom Huttle's actions in the book. The theme is nothing more, and nothing less, than the controlling idea of the book. Now, beginning the rewrite, I KNOW what that controlling idea is. For a character, a theme is something like their life philosophy. They may not, in fact, be able to articulate it, but it operates in the background. For example, in life, if someone believes they always get a raw deal... they always get a raw deal. Objectively, they may get some very good deals in their life, but they aren't capable of seeing that. The "raw deal" becomes their theme. In fiction, themes operate much the same way.

The theme of my book Huttle the Hero was "If you suppress your imagination, it will control you," also featuring Tom Huttle. Tom was quite unaware of this for most of the book, but the idea plays out in myriad ways throughout the story. By the end, he understands it quite viscerally.

I think that, in a story, if your characters are authentic, and if they operate according to coherent motivations, striving toward goals in a way that is true to them, and encountering and dealing with obstacles in a likewise coherent manner, the theme will emerge. Why? Because, unconsciously, you are imposing on the narrative your own life's philosophy, and your own values and view of the world. Call me kookie, but in this way all books are autobiographical. I, for example, have been thinking a lot lately that in life one never knows what is going to happen, and that even so, you just keep going. In some sense, it was not a big surprise that this should reveal itself as the theme to Secret Spy... but then again, it was a shock. I truly had not grasped how I was on imprinting my philosophy on every page.

So, now that I know what the theme of my book is, what am I going to do? I'm going to go through the book and make sure that Tom and the other characters are living consistently within that theme. Some characters may take a different aspect of the theme, of course.

Finding that consistency in theme requires you to start at the beginning. As the story of Secret Spy opens, for example, Tom is at a crisis point in his life. He's unhappy with the status quo and decides to take a leap of faith and do something different. He takes a leap of faith. He does not know what will happen. By the end of the book, owing to the experiences he has had, he, along with the reader, looks back at what has happened and realizes that "You never know what's going to happen in life, and you just keep going." By then, Tom has reached many points where he didn't know what was going to happen. He just kept going, and when he looks back at it, he realizes he did the right thing. In other words, he learned this lesson as we learn all lessons: through experience. The reader has been with him during these experiences, too, and consequently has learned the same lessons.

Maybe you don't know the theme of your book. It is there, however. Try doing what I did: take the point of view of one of the characters and ask him or her: what have you learned? Their answer may very well surprise you, and lead you to the theme.