You're Writing Themes Wrong

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Written, narrated & produced by Henry Boseley
Edited by Evan Wiley

Stock footage provided by Getty.

[TheCloserLook]

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Keep writing!
- Henry

[Señor-Donjusticia]

This is why when I teach students about theme, I tell them it needs to be stated on a complete sentence, not a single word. A theme can’t just be “love, ” it needs to be something more like, “Love is the capacity to desire the greatest possible good for another person, including those you find distasteful.”

[MaskedSongbird]

When I was a senior in high school over eleven or twelve years ago, our AP Lit teacher used to hammer home during our analysis essays, that she never wanted to hear the phrase "the theme of this story is" or "the theme of, " followed by a single word. The way she used to explain it was basically theme as a thesis: it is a complete statement, an idea that is well-thought out and developed that the author then spends the rest of the story exploring and extrapolating on. To badly paraphrase her words, a theme must be expressed as one (or, ideally more) complete sentence(s), or as you put it, a question to be answered, and never as one single word. If our essays ever tried to express a theme as a singular word it was a good way to take a significant hit to the paper's grade right out of the gate. I've held that lesson close to my heart in my personal fiction writing ever since.

[cyanmanta]

To me, Romeo and Juliet is about how feuds, grudges, and rivalries are more than just personal decisions; they take hold and infect generation after generation, poisoning everything.

[nathangoedeke]

I think Romeo and Juliet became such a famous love story because most people got out of it the message "love is so powerful it persists beyond death" rather than seeing it as a cautionary tale against loving too far

[SJRuggs]

I just finished a semester of a personally difficult 200 level college class called "Storytelling:Genre/Theme." Not a single lesson in the entire course was as helpful and insightful as this 20 minute video. Creators like you are why im minoring in creative writing, not these shitty classes.

[pubcle]

I will challenge this a little.
Firstly, it is fine to have a complex series of themes bled into one another, Tolkien has themes (very simplified) around things like the dangers of technology, the importance of myth, the value of the little people, how one man of humble origin can make such a change, the importance of fulfilling lineage, etc. The distinction is that each is full sentence with specific goals and is tied into each other cohesively.

Everything in a story should also play into concepts and ideas you want to portray. There are three things you can generally do in a story: instill an emotion, state something, or ask something of the audience. You can also do things to set presentation but those are a bit more superfluous.

Your central conflict needs to be pretty singular as a focused theme in a rule of thumb, but every character and sentence has a through idea and thus a theme behind it. You can have quite the variety bled into your story. It is incredibly rare any story is purely one thematic idea. Theme is another way of saying an idea and it is the genesis of story.

*The more accurate problem from your description seems to be that you muddled your central conflict and created a bunch of disparate themes that are only superficially tied together rather than integrated in a single narrative (a central conflict/theme). You could get away with such things in something like Pulp Fiction or by making it episodic, but you need ways to intertwine them and properly develop each. You can develop ideas quite densely with efficient use of language implementation extensive subtext and meaning.

**Also the claim that we must explore all directions on a question is incredibly false. A flat villain has many uses, objective evil is a useful tool & there are topics that just have a straight "this is the wrong answer." Set in 1930 Russia or Germany there's not a lot of room for ambiguity on certain topics there for example. That doesn't make them bad. These things are still complex because people, the world, everything is complex. This is just wrong. There are many morally questionable instances in the dog question even.

[jaybugo]

Words cannot express how this video has changed my mindset. I've been worldbuilding for over a decade, only because every story I tried to write would become so broad and unfocused. Until this video, I didn't understand why. After finishing this, I was able to hone in on what story I wanted to tell. After all of these years of having cool moments or cool ideas with dozens of unfinished/unpublished works piling up, I found that one of the biggest themes I've been sort of circling around was "Is freedom worth fighting for?" Once that came to mind, EVERYTHING began to fall into place like you said in the video. Thank you so much.

[breendart]

This is really similar to LocalScriptMan's approach to writing. He has a lot of great videos about theme-focused writing and using different characters to express different attitudes towards a story's theme. It's a slightly different approach of course, but it's changed how I think about writing and story structure A LOT and I think ties well into the ideas of this video.

[nerdthatcantfit]

The theme I have for the first book I’m trying to get published is “can you save everyone?” And I agree fully with making your theme a question. I didn’t even realize how concise and focused the story was. It just naturally moved around that question. I already wrote out the sequel to the book as well and the theme was “when does life get easier?” Which also helped keep my story focused.

[KingKayro]

Before, my story's theme was simply "Religion." Now it's "What role does God really serve in the grand scheme of the universe?" The good guys believe that the universe was created by God, but it is the actions of the mortals that determine its fate. The bad guys, on the other hand, believe that the universe is controlled by God, and their objective is to conquer the universe and "usurp the throne" in a way.

[legion]

Okay, Your big secret at the 5 minute mark completely blew my mind. It's so obvious. I'm writing a story centered around a character who struggles with self-discipline and how their lack of it almost rules her life. Honestly, it never occurred to me to ask how do they gain self-discipline, and it immediately becomes a different story. That... I never would have thought of that myself. There's a like and subscribe for you

[X-SPONGED]

For me personally, a story is like a tree. You can have multiple themes but you need an underlying theme (that's part of the central story) to tie them all into. If your themes are disjointed and disconnected from one another, then it's not going to be as good as when there's a main theme to glue them together.

[jesustyronechrist]

Yeah, I noticed this too while currently writing my first book/comic script. But I had to opposite: I already had the proper theme, but I was trying to force it into one singular word. Yeah, I could get it into "perseverance", but I already had a perfect "no matter of how dire the circumstance, no matter how hopeless it seems; one should never give up and keep fighting through it." while I contrast it with "sometimes only way to move on is to give up."

[ehdrake]

*PANSTER HERE* Firstly, thanks for addressing us. it's so good to feel appreciated. Honestly, I feel like prioritizing theme doesn't make a story. It just makes a list of events. I find things go better if I write the story I want first and then focus on the more emotional element. Basically theme is a great tool for editing and revising my story once i know my characters better.

[balistikscaarz]

Constraints are why I've always loved stories where rules and boundaries are very clearly established especially in fantasy setting, as it makes bending those rules or skirting around them in unique ways VERY satisfying. It's part of why I still love Death Note so much. It asks questions like "how do you find an anonymous person who kills from a distance entirely discretely" and vice versa "how do you stay anonymous and continue your process consistently while under surveillance". They're so dead specific and this cat and mouse makes for some of the most intense tension while the characters are nowhere near each other a good chunk of the time.
It's probably better to think of a theme as more of a thesis statement that may not be explicitly stated but is more than clear when reading.

[demonqueenazazel]

Nah, I just write cool shit happening and enjoy myself. /j

Really good video on themes and you bring up a lot of great points. Handling of themes is honestly what separates amateur from expert fiction.

That being said, I’ve learned that I myself can still enjoy stories that aren’t thematically whole or rich. I read a web novel with nothing but mechs and lesbians fighting alien bugs and enjoyed every moment of it. I’ve also enjoyed critically acclaimed and thematically rich stories as well.

I believe thematic richness is an indicator of quality, but not necessarily enjoyment.

If you wanna write, having an underlying theme can really help glue everything together like starch in baking. But definitely get comfortable and write what you like. Because if you don’t like it, it’ll probably never get done.

[stormwarden]

Thank you so much for this video! I'm currently a senior in High School, and after all these years of english classes telling me to write a theme, this is the first time I've understood how. A 20 minute video just covered what 12 years of English classes has failed to teach me. School taught me the "theme is topic" thing and I've never been able to come up with a good theme for anything i've written since. Just during the runtime of this video, I know how to rewrite multiple stories from the last few years with a better theme.

I'm sharing this video with all my friends who like to write. Please, keep up the astounding work you've done in all your videos! You may have just given me my motivation to write back.

[whensomethingcriesagain]

I strongly agree that themes are a question and an answer. To take the original story premise and edit it a bit, I'd just edit the third point to instead be about a police officer committing murder and then trying to get away with it. Thus the question is asked, "What is the commonality of injustice in the system?", and the answer is "The system protects its own, and cares not for what the actual just answer may be". Suddenly you can have these 3 vignettes all tie together into one thematically cohesive picture, with a singular point and central thesis.

[YungM.D.]

I just finished Station Eleven, which somewhat breaks a few of the rules here: it’s actually kind of ambiguous about what it’s saying, and covers quite a few topics: art, survival, the modern world and the apocalypse’s potential for connecting people and sapping them of their potential, memory, identity, performance and privacy, interconnectedness—however, all the themes sort of build upon one another and intersect in interesting ways, and it never feels like it’s “saying too much” since it keeps a lot of these themes subtle, intertwines most of them, and gives a broad sense of potential views without settling on one.

Also helps that Emily St John Mandel was already a published author at this point and could be given more free reign, but it goes to show that while very difficult and tenuous, you can juggle thematic topics and questions (even those with no clear answer) as long as it still feels cohesive