Writer to writer: From think to ink - Gail Carson Levine 2014

Theme park
Aspects of story

I’m taking a new crack at a question from a writer named Pororo. My blog answer was somewhat different, but I’ve done more thinking since then. Here’s the question:

“Do you have any suggestions for themes? For example, I read a story, and the theme was that once you have a dream, chase after it as hard as you can and that there’s no such thing as a foolish dream.

“That kind of theme. I would like my story to be inspirational to someone like that story was inspirational to me.”

I suspect we have a moral and not a theme on our hands here, so let’s look at the difference, and let’s take “Little Red Riding Hood” as an example. Its theme, I’d say, is a child’s first adventure alone in the world. The moral that was delivered to me when I was six or seven was: Don’t talk to strangers.

So theme is the idea—the gist, the thrust, the core—that runs through a story.

Moral is the lesson the story delivers, or that the author intends it to deliver.

I’ve begun to think about my next novel, and for it I’m researching the history of Jews in Spain in the Middle Ages, as I mentioned in chapter 2. The reason is that my father’s ancestors were thrown out of that country along with all Spanish Jewry in 1492. I plan to write about it through fantasy, but the theme will be prejudice that takes the form of expelling a population from a kingdom.

So if you’re looking for themes, mull over what’s important to you. Casting my mind back to when I was about age fourteen, here are five themes that I could have based stories on:

• Being influenced—how my mother’s worries got in my way.

• Friendship—my best friend, Beverly, and the fun we were having.

• Unpleasant people—how horrible my grandmother and my aunts were.

• Romance—my wish for a boy to like me romantically.

• Failure—how ashamed I felt about being terrible at volleyball.

I did write a story about one of my despised aunts. I never would have written about the fourth wish—too embarrassing!

Time to write!

Make a list of at least five possible themes for a story. Include your obsessions—the topics you can’t stop thinking about, no matter how hard you try. Put down subjects you talk or text about again and again with friends. Add in things that seem to happen to you more often than to other people. Don’t leave out themes that embarrass you.

A neat aspect of writing about themes that are important to you is that they’re likely to be important to other people as well. If I write a story about stinking at volleyball, some readers may have the same problem, and even more will connect because of a different skill they can’t master.

The next step is to develop the theme into a story. A real instance of my mother’s fears influencing me happened when I learned to swim. My mother worried that I was going to drown, and her fear infected me so much that I floundered in the pool at camp the next day. A lifeguard had to rescue me.

But that’s just a memory. To turn it into a story, we have to invent an MC. Let’s call him Taylor, and let’s stick with swimming. He’s just made the swim team. Tomorrow is his first day of practice. Ordinarily he’s not a worrier, and he’s not worrying about swimming either—until the morning, when he talks to his older sister, who reads the daily horoscopes in the newspaper and believes them completely. It could go like this:

Taylor went into the kitchen thinking that scrambled eggs—the protein—would be great for his swimming performance.

Isabel, newspaper at her elbow, looked up from her bowl of cereal. “You had a great day yesterday, right?”

Taylor nodded. The swim team.

“Yesterday your horoscope predicted Pisces people would achieve a goal. Today it says that danger lurks.” She deepened her voice, sounding like an oracle, and read, “Take no unnecessary risks.” In her ordinary voice she added, “Aren’t I a good sister to look out for you?”

“I’m not worried.” Taylor took the egg carton out of the refrigerator. Wrong choice? he wondered. Carbs might be better, or maybe he should just have celery and shed a few pounds. He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the feeling of uncertainty.

This is just a snippet of what might be a story. We need something that went before about the swim team, and then we have to write how it plays out at the swimming pool. But, depending on what else we do, we’ve established our theme: that worries can be contagious.

As I said, I would have been embarrassed to write a romantic story, but probably because I wouldn’t have known how to disguise it to eliminate my self-consciousness. I wish I could go back and tell myself. Luckily, I can tell you.

The character who wants romance doesn’t have to be human and could be a mouse, a fox, a dragon, an elf, even an inanimate object. For example, The Dot and the Line by Norton Juster is the tale of a dot and the line who is madly in love with her.

To further lessen our discomfort about exposing our feelings, we can separate the tale from our ordinary environment. We can set it somewhere distant in place, time, or imagination. If we do all this, the theme may still hold a germ of embarrassment but little more, and that germ is likely to make our story extra exciting.

But suppose we want to write about a particular theme and we don’t have any real-life associations to help us? How can we move from theme to tale?

Let’s return to the theme of being influenced. The first step is to write notes to find our story problem. We ask ourselves what trouble being influenced might cause, and we list possibilities. Here are a few:

• An ill-intentioned person might persuade our MC to do something wrong.

• Our MC might get an idea from a book and try it out in real life with unfortunate consequences.

• Our MC might overhear a conversation, misinterpret it, and be moved to action.

Writing time! Jot down two more ways influence could cause trouble.

Next, we think over our choices and select one. Then we proceed to the character development stage we just discussed. Who is our MC? If, for instance, we picked the first option, who is that cunning character who set our MC on the path to no good?

After that, we have to work out the circumstances and imagine the scenes, just as we needed to do with Taylor.

More writing time! Pick one of your themes and decide on an MC. Consider the setting and the other characters and how they might be different from people in your own life. Start writing.

The moral—the lesson—of a tale about influence might turn out to be: “Hold fast to your core idea of yourself.”

We could start our writing process just as we did with themes, by listing morals. But I don’t recommend it. Morals can straitjacket a writer. Here’s how:

Suppose I decide to write a story with the lesson “Study hard to get ahead.” At the beginning, MC Otis doesn’t prepare for an exam and he does poorly. He fails to get into a writing program that he knows he would have loved. The awakening comes. Otis recognizes that he should have studied instead of throwing a ball for hours for his new puppy to chase. He writes a letter of apology to the writing program, asking if he can retake the entrance test. His appeal is granted. He devotes all his waking hours to study and does well enough to be accepted. The story ends when he takes a seat in his new classroom, vowing to work just as hard now that he’s here as he did to get in.

Please don’t get me wrong—I definitely believe students should study hard. That’s not the problem. I guess this is an okay story, but it’s predictable and boring. We can guess early on that Otis is going to reform and do better. As I wrote my summary, I weeded out any possible complexity, because I wanted my moral to come through powerfully. So I didn’t talk about the puppy who suffered from Otis’s neglect and peed in the house as a result. And I certainly didn’t include people who study hard and still don’t get into programs they’re longing for. I made Otis succeed because that outcome drove my moral home.

How much more interesting my story might have been if I’d just started with a theme about studying and made Otis be torn between playing with his adorable new puppy and preparing for an important exam. Then I could have followed my characters: the puppy; Otis; his parents, who have differing opinions about the writing program; and his older sister, who tends to criticize him.

As a reader I’m not fond of stories in which the moral dominates. I don’t read fiction to be lectured to. In a story that doesn’t dwell on a moral, we get more to think about, and we can shape the story in our minds to suit our needs. For example, I’ve gotten letters from readers of Ella Enchanted who’ve told me that the book made them more willing to obey their parents, because they realized that they, unlike Ella, had a choice. This is certainly a reasonable understanding to take from the book, but it wasn’t a lesson I was pushing; it hadn’t even occurred to me.

When I write, I don’t think about a moral or a theme. I start with an idea or a question. In my book The Wish, for example, my question was, What would it be like for a character to get her wish to be the most popular kid in her school?

After I’ve written my book, sometimes I think about theme, which in this case is popularity, but I’m often at a loss to name a moral. In The Wish, things turn out for Wilma in a way that doesn’t provide easy answers.

All my stories have themes, whether I give them no thought or hours of deliberation. Yours do too. Stories are always about something. The topics that engage you will bubble up whether or not you’re concentrating on them.

Time to look at your old stories!

Pull out a few stories that you’ve worked on in the past. Ponder what the themes might be. There may be more than one in a story. See if the same themes reappear in story after story. It’s okay if they do or don’t. You may settle an issue for yourself in a single story and move on, or you may be working through something complicated.

More writing time!

• Use this moral in a story: “Think before you act.” But don’t necessarily prove the moral right. Your MCs are two friends, one who does think before acting and one who doesn’t. They’re both good people. Mix it up and make it complicated. Have acting without thought, possibly on instinct, work out well sometimes and not others. Don’t decide which way your story should go—just make trouble and follow your characters.

• Expand my Otis example into a real story and bring in more characters. Don’t decide until you get there what Otis is going to do about his failure.

Have fun, and save what you write!