Theme

I finished Beyzl during NaNoWriMo! I actually finished a few days early and have been taking some time off to relax since then. Since I am most productive on the weekends, I had three 3,000+ word days over Thanksgiving weekend and knocked out the rest. The total story ended up at just over 50,000 words, but I think there is some filling out that I need to go back and do at the beginning. At least, I can remember having the thought that I need to go back and add stuff. But, I didn't take notes, so I hope I remember what I was thinking about.

What I wanted to talk about today is Theme. Writing the end of Beyzl brought up some interesting things about the theme I had in mind. For anyone that doesn't know, theme is basically the general point of a story, the 'moral', if you will. I'll take an example from a well known story. The novel "Watership Down" is told from the perspective of a group of rabbits whose home is destroyed. So, they travel and face many hardships in order to find a new safe home. But, once they get there, they realize that almost all of the rabbits are male, so they make forays out to find some female rabbits to join them so they can have a long lasting, safe home. In the end, this is an allegorical tale about the importance of home and safety. That would be the Theme of this story.

As you can probably see, theme is often a little bit of a fuzzy concept. I might interpret a story's theme a little different than someone else, and it generally isn't 'hit you over the head' obvious. Unlike in an Aesop's fable where it's written out at the end.

In fact, from what I've gathered, most writers don't write with a theme in mind. They come up with a plot or character first, and then write the story and see what theme emerges. I generally don't work that way. For me, the theme is kind of the point of writing. I don't always start with the theme, but figuring it out and exploring it during my outlining is an integral part of my process. And, it helps me to know what it is during my writing, because if I get lost or don't know what to do next, the theme can be like a signpost telling me which direction I should head.

When I first came up with the concept for Beyzl, I didn't have a theme in mind. I just had a story that I wanted to tell and a character that I wanted to get to know.  So, I spent some time thinking about what it would be. I finally latched onto the idea that it would be about a girl realizing that she was strong enough to depend on herself. But, when I worked on the outline I found that I had lots of scenes about my characters betraying each other, not trusting each other, or having to trust each other despite the earlier betrayal. So, I thought that maybe the theme would be more around trust and how it can be fragile and hard to develop, but is absolutely necessary to get through some things.

I decided to run with that and got almost all of the way through my rough draft, getting to the climactic scenes, before I ran into real issues with it. Well, that's not exactly true. I had difficulty writing Beyzl as not being trusting. In my mind, she's just an open kind of person, but I tried to lay the betrayal on hard so that she would have a reason to not want to trust. But, in those climactic scenes, I ran across a couple of other possible themes that I think might be a better fit. The first is the idea that a single insignificant person can make a big difference in a big system. And, the second is the importance of 'home' to someone who's never had one.

The first one I think will play a bigger role in the sequel, so I don't think I'm going to focus on it too much, but I would like to leave the seeds of it in there. But, I really like the second one. It feels like something I can sink my teeth into. So, what does that mean? That means that when I start doing my revisions, I'll need to work that into my story from the beginning, rather than just having it show up in the last few pages. But, I think that will tie it together much better than the idea of trust did.