how i think about theme and plot
I'm currently engaged in the effort to unfuck one of my problem child WIPs, and at risk of jinxing myself, I've turned a corner. While the efforts of my unfucking centre around plot--making the sequence of events make sense and feel satisfying, because currently they do not--I started making actual progress when I set down my follicle-damage-inducing attempts to rearrange, cut, or add scenes.
Plot and pacing (which is closely linked to plot) were the things I found most daunting when I started writing long stories. This is a common experience! Particularly in fandom, many writers are happy to say they write plotless things; there are whole subgenres of fic ostensibly founded on the lack of a plot. But is there even such a thing as a PWP? What is plot, anyway???
A lot of what's contained below will likely read as incredibly basic and obvious to people who already write fiction, especially longer fiction, but there was a time at which these things were neither basic nor obvious to me, and sometimes I need to be reminded of how engine go brr. I have to pretend I was a baby longfic writer again, and revisit what it took to "get" plot, which was not Freytag's Pyramid or three- or five-act structures or the Hero's Journey or anything else you can visualize via diagram, but themes.
All stories are about something, whether or not the author is doing it on purpose. If your main characters have learned something or changed in some way, that's a plot, even if they've been lying in bed the whole time. The trajectory of that change is plot.
Plot and theme are deeply misunderstood and often mystified by both writers and non-writers. Plot is often seen as a uniquely challenging aspect of storytelling, and one that isn't even really necessary for emotional or character-driven stories. Theme, on the other hand, is either a mystical ethereal quality that just kind of Emerges through the creative process without input from the writer, or something only pretentious people even care about.
These characterizations do a disservice to two of the most important and powerful tools in the writer's kit, as well as, IMO, contribute to writers feeling too intimidated to attempt more complex or sophisticated (structurally, not regarding quality) stories. If you write fiction, you should care about plot and theme. They're already there whether you like it or not; isn't it better to be the one driving the bus, instead of letting Jesus take the wheel?
It's not that plot and theme are the same thing--they aren't--but in a competent story, theme and plot are inseparable. Theme is what a story is about; plot is what happens in the story, or how the theme comes into context. Fundamentally, theme is an emotional idea and plot is the expression of an argument about that idea.
(Note: the way I talk about stories here is specific to novels [within which I include novel-length fanfic] written, at least in part, for entertainment value; there are many things you can do with the novel form, and if this isn’t relevant to the kind of fiction you write or read, that’s fine and you can stop here. If you're like "not all novels--" please assume I know and am trying to be concise.)
The infamous “themes are for middle school book reports” quote from the Game of Thrones showrunners is galling not just for its anti-intellectualism and disdain for literary criticism, but the ignorance it demonstrates of how, on a basic mechanical level, to write satisfying fiction. GoT went on to have one of the most infamous series finales in television history, and it’s unlikely things would have gone so awry if the showrunners cared about or were attuned to theme. I don’t mean this in an abstract way. Theme can, essentially, tell you what needs to happen next, or at least narrow down the possibilities.
“What happens next?” is a panic-inducing question; you can write whatever you want, but that expansiveness can work against you when you reach a crossroads. “What situations would lend themselves to an exploration of my central emotional idea(s)?” is a much more tangible question. There’s still a vast array of different choices you can make, but some situations will lend themselves more naturally to an exploration of the emotional idea than others.
If you’re writing a story that keeps returning to ideas of failure, and you don't know what should happen next, you could reach for the tried and true "enter a woman with a gun" maneuver, and that might work great (it certainly has for me, at times.) But if you're stuck and nothing fun is coming to mind, your best option is likely to return to theme. You could have your lead character try and fail at something, but you could also have them watch someone try something they’ve failed at in the past, or that the protagonist has failed at in the past; they could encounter a situation that reminds them of a past failure; they could succeed at something and not know how to respond to the emotional whiplash; they could deal with the consequences of someone else’s failure; etc. You’re not hemming yourself in; there are so many potential inroads to theme, because themes are generalized emotional ideas, but theme functions as a compass when you’re lost.
The first step, which can be hard if you’re not practiced in it, is to figure out what your themes even are. The good news is that you’re not stuck consulting an oracle; you can use whatever exists of your WIP, whether drafted prose, notes, an outline, etc, and start looking for patterns. What images keep popping up? Are there particular words you keep using? Does anything happen multiple times? What’s the nature of the conflict present in the story? What impulses or drives underlie the characters’ actions, particularly the protagonist’s? All of these things are clues to latent themes.
I started making actual progress on my WIP unfucking when, rather than keep picking away at the sequence of events as I’ve written them out, I took out a blank sheet of paper and started listing all of the ideas, statements, motifs, song lyrics, etc that came into my head when I thought about this story as a whole.
I spent fifteen minutes and ended up with the following list:
- the things we do for love
- get in loser, we’re living past the end of our myth; “I guess it’s a story so much greater than our own…”
- nobody deserves anything; everybody wants to be happy
- labour
- care work
- the importance of autonomy vs. the impossibility of true independence; the joys and sorrows of interdependence
- we’re all products of our fucked up perverted lives
- love is not a symptom of time/time is a symptom of love
- trees growing out of stumps and logs
- the sublime and the mundane
- vulnerability, risk, trust even in the presence of terror
- food, nourishment, consumption, the body
- dreams, memories, fantasies, and the places where these things cross over into or influence the material world
- harming and being harmed by the people you love
- what we owe to others, what we owe ourselves
- how we live with ourselves
- how we carry our childhoods with us
At first glance, this seems overwhelming. Most stories cannot sustain this many major themes! However, it becomes clear pretty quickly that many of these statements overlap, or speak to dimensions of a few big emotional ideas.
I took a couple markers and started putting dots of a certain colour next to all the statements that felt, in some way, connected with one another. Many statements had multiple dots next to them; a few only had one. This brought me the following clusters, which I gave some uninspired headings:
harm
- the things we do for love
- the importance of autonomy vs. the impossibility of true independence; the joys and sorrows of interdependence
- we’re all products of our fucked up perverted lives
- trees growing out of stumps and logs
- vulnerability, risk, trust even in the presence of terror
- food, nourishment, consumption, the body
- dreams, memories, fantasies, and the places where these things cross over into or influence the material world
- harming and being harmed by the people you love
- how we live with ourselves
past/present
- get in loser, we’re living past the end of our myth; “I guess it’s a story so much greater than our own…”
- we’re all products of our fucked up perverted lives
- love is not a symptom of time/time is a symptom of love
- trees growing out of stumps and logs
- dreams, memories, fantasies, and the places where these things cross over into or influence the material world
- how we live with ourselves
- how we carry our childhoods with us
care work
- the things we do for love
- get in loser, we’re living past the end of our myth; “I guess it’s a story so much greater than our own…”
- nobody deserves anything; everybody wants to be happy
- labour
- care work
- the importance of autonomy vs. the impossibility of true independence; the joys and sorrows of interdependence
- trees growing out of stumps and logs
- the sublime and the mundane
- food, nourishment, consumption, the body
- harming and being harmed by the people you love
- what we owe to others, what we owe ourselves
- how we carry our childhoods with us
Blamo.
These groupings might seem arbitrary, but that’s fine, as the point isn’t to diagram out Exactly Which Ideas Fit Under Which Themes (especially as I’m sure some of these ideas will matter a lot more than others in the end product of the story.) The point was to identify my 2-3 Big Emotional Ideas, as well as identify some points where these ideas can relate to each other.
As you can see, I really do mean “big emotional ideas.” Theme is broad. Theme is not what you’re saying about the thing you’re talking about, but a cue toward where this story’s attention lies, what it preoccupies itself with, which conversations it’s interested in having about what it means to be a person.
How do you get from a generic concept to something meaningful? Plot, baby!!!!!!!!!! Plot is the vehicle through which your story makes a thesis statement about its themes.
Through fiction, you can make these statements with much more nuance and emotional complexity than just saying something like “By caring for others, we care for ourselves,” even if that’s a viable distillation of a story’s thematic argument. Because plot anchors a story’s perspective on its themes in highly specific events, drawn up using evocative language or framing devices or deft pacing or any of the other tools in a writer’s arsenal, it can express highly particular perspectives on abstract ideas, perspectives that can never actually be expressed in a one-sentence summary of What It’s Trying To Say. Compelling fiction maintains an aspect of mystery, places where the reader has to engage affectively or interrogatively with its ideas. This is why reading the Sparknotes page for Romeo & Juliet is different from reading Romeo & Juliet; the execution matters, and what I call “plot” here encompasses the whole of a story’s forward motion, its internal momentum, the “how” of how it says what it has to say.
Having a degree of conscious insight into your emotional ideas isn’t about trying to seem smart or taking yourself too seriously; if anything, you’re giving yourself a cheat code to making things feel intentional and tightly planned, even if you’re making them up as you go along.
…Okay, there is a wrinkle of complexity to consider, but it’s not scary, don’t worry. This wrinkle is called ~coherence~. But before talking coherence I should finally define what I mean by “plot.”
(Note: I’ve never taken any creative writing classes; everything I’ve picked up has either been through other people’s discussion of writing craft or my own trial and error. In this post I borrow language and ideas from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
synecdochic's writing meta, which influenced me massively when I first started approaching fiction writing as a craft.)
The way I understand plot is a double helix made up of two strands: an emotional plot, which includes things like character arc but goes beyond a single character in scope, and an action plot, which is the sequence of events that happen in the story's world.
The two strands of the plot rely on each other to move. The emotional plot is generated by the way the characters respond to the events in the world around them, and the characters act upon the world as a result of their internal emotional landscape. Narratives are expressions of the way a changing world acts upon people, who in turn change and act within that changing world. (I enjoy writing fiction, particularly longer-form fiction, in large part because I find this sense of motion and ripples of action-reaction really crunchy and satisfying to work through. Systems theory-adjacent, you feel?)
Changes in the status quo of the world should force the characters, particularly the protagonist(s), to change in turn. (Note this change need not be "growth" in a positive sense; "reinforcing someone's worst tendencies" is still character development, as long as the character would respond to a new situation slightly differently than they would have previously, even if that difference is "being noticeably even MORE on their bullshit.") There should be a clear relationship between the changes to the internal and external worlds; this is how you make people give a shit about your plot, which is how to make people want to know "what happens next," which is the most basic goal of most popular fiction. Regardless of whether you think you are a plot-heavy writer, I assume you want your readers to be engaged! That means getting your readers swept up in the momentum of the story--momentum that can be carried by either the emotional or action plot (though ideally both.)
Again, by "action plot" I mean "anything the characters actually do in the world." Emotional plot is a character's internal journey. The romance in a romance novel is an action plot inasmuch as it is driven by characters taking actions (interacting with each other and others.) The emotional plot is the progression of feelings and attachment between the characters, as well as any changes to their subjectivity that happens as a result of the action plot.
Now, what does this all have to do with theme?
Theme is the adhesive between the emotional and action plots. It's what makes these things feel related. The blank page is a powerful and scary thing; you can truly just write whatever, but writing whatever isn't how you come up with a competent--or, dare to dream, good!--story. The big emotional ideas that surface in fiction are always in some way aspects of what it is to be a person in a messy, complex, ever-changing world. Theme is the place where internal and external reality come into contact; X happens, Y feels a way about it, Y does Z in a particular way because of those feelings. So-and-so regards themself as a failure, life presents them with circumstances in which that self-understanding will either cause problems or be challenged, and in the hands of a writer who knows what they're doing, the actions taken by so-and-so as they deal with these circumstances will deepen, shift, or subvert their experience of failure. This is the difference between a satisfying story with things to say and a sequence of arbitrary events, even if the constituent parts are identical.
Coherence is where that difference really becomes clear. What I mean when I say plot is an expression of an argument about a theme is that plot--by which we can just read "narrative" or "story," for the appropriately zoomed-out lens--is an articulation of a perspective on its theme, and, like any argument, it functions best when it doesn't contradict itself.
This doesn't mean the emotional argument should be flat, didactic, lacking nuance, etc--good fiction makes these emotional arguments with more nuance than arguably anything else, as I said earlier--but that it should "add up," so to speak. If our hypothetical failure story makes the case through the trajectory of its emotional and action plots that failure is a flawed concept because mistakes are human and everything is just practice for what comes next, that's great, but there probably shouldn't be scenes or moments in the story with the uncontested takeaway that failure is real and sometimes you fuck things up irreparably and just have to sit with the heaviness of that and figure out what comes next. These are both interesting arguments that could sustain a story, but if a narrative is attesting to the emotional truth of both of these statements without any kind of synthesis or integration, it's going to feel incoherent.
In other words, theme is a powerful diagnostic for figuring out why something just "isn't working" in your outline. Is this story element at cross-purposes with the broader emotional arguments being made by your plot? And if you don't know what those are yet, what steps can you take to identifying the emotional concerns or preoccupations of this story, so you can proceed with greater understanding?
(Rather than go into great detail about prioritization, how many themes is too many, and story scope, I'll point toward More on the Embryonic Novel and call it a day. Tl;dr a novel-length story can sustain a few major themes--with "major theme" being understood as one that "goes somewhere," rather than being a static motif; note the momentum implicit in "going somewhere"... that's the plot! Not all plot elements need to speak to every theme at the same time, but they should wherever possible speak to at least one, and the more elements you can come up with that pull double or triple duty, the more tight, coherent, and layered your story will be.)
This is a gross oversimplification of the delicate art of storytelling, but the point of this post is to encourage people (including, frequently, myself) who struggle with these big aspects of storytelling to realize they don't need to be precious about it. Being a "thematic writer" or a "plotty writer" isn't some psychic gift you either have or you don't. You can almost approach it like math.
The stories I'm most proud of are often the ones I approached with the most mercenary intentionality regarding plot and theme. The result is a story where everything that happens feels related to everything else, the characters never feel exactly the same even chapter to chapter, and, importantly, that change doesn't feel inconsistent but natural, because it's rooted in the things that have actually happened in the text of the story. And even those stories I approached in such a way surprised me with emotional undercurrents I wasn't consciously putting into the work. That's the fun part! In my experience, it's easier to embrace unexpected nuances and wrinkles when you're reasonably confident that your story is internally consistent with regards to its core concerns. And if you're not sure about whether you're landing the plane, that's what beta readers and editing are for.
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