WRITING ADVICE: Absolutely Basic Theme

Some people have it easy!

Leo Tolstoy had no trouble finding powerful themes, plus he used them simply as titles for his books: WAR AND PEACE, CHILDHOOD, BOYHOOD and FAMILY HAPPINESS.

How easy was that?

But what about the rest of us? What is theme? http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=theme defines theme as a “unifying idea that is a recurrent element in a literary or artistic work”. That’s a bit highbrow for me. You can parse it slowly, but it doesn’t exactly ring with verve.

Orson Scott Card (creator, master and commander of ENDER’S GAME and ALVIN MAKER) doesn’t actually define “theme” in his book, HOW TO WRITE SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY, but he has plenty to say about it. One jewel is this: “I began teaching a science fiction writing class at the University of Utah and on the first day of class, I began a spur-of-the-moment exercise designed simply to show that science fiction and fantasy ideas are ridiculously easy to come up with…At the very first session, I asked them to think of the ‘price of magic.’” (Chapter 2 World Creation)

There’s no high-falutin’ statement of theme here, yet the phrase, “the price of magic” begs to be the central, unifying idea of a book. It became one in Card’s first fantasy novel, HART’S HOPE. Sounds like the theme of the HARRY POTTER books, too…

Examine your work to discover your theme or begin with a title and write to a theme or steal a theme from some other great work. Whatever you do:

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.” Herman Melville (MOBY DICK) [http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/theme/2.html]