Greetings again my scribes.

There is a saying in Spanish which goes, “cada loco con su tema.” It can be roughly translated as the Spanish version of “To each their own,” but literally it says, “every crazy with their theme.” I have been thinking about this a lot over the last week.

Those of you who read my blogs two semesters ago will know that I am not much of a planner when it comes to writing. Usually I have a vague idea, or—most often—a character or two that are engaged in conversation, and I plunge in to see where the story goes. In most cases the characters guide me in the direction the story should take. This is not to say I don’t have instances where I run into a dead end, or the story manifests in a way that an entire backstory for a character needs to change to fit with the new plotline, but in general I have written my most satisfying and successful stories flying by the seat of my pants.

There are people I know that would read the words above and cringe. They need an outline, a synopsis, a gameplan, some sort of skeleton to hang their ideas upon. There is no right or wrong here. The only universal truth about the craft that I have ever heard is that “writing cannot be taught; it can only be learned.” Find your own way.

All this is well and good when I am writing for myself. However, I am now in my senior year and in the middle of writing my English Honors Thesis. And the looming monster in front of me is theme.

I never think about theme in the beginning. To be honest, I rarely think of theme at all. My opinion is theme is the milieu of the reader. If you think my story about a worker bee human who does nothing but commute to her job and tend her garden on the weekend is a metaphor for existentialist ennui, then good on ya, mate. I am not going to burst your bubble and tell you that I wrote the story as allegory of a Zen epigram.

Because I have to give reasons why I wrote what I did in the thesis, I have to address theme. And since I have a limited time to write the thesis, I really can’t afford many false starts, so the logical path is the address them first and then write to those themes.

God help me.

It is all about fear, really. Despite having written for quite some time now and having a little bit of success at it and mostly great feedback, I still put my fingers to the keyboard with a healthy dose of imposter syndrome. Who am I to try to craft a story? I will never compare to Faulkner, Huxley, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Edgar Allan Poe. There is a line from a Simon and Garfunkel song that is never far from the front of my mind when I am writing:

“All my words come back to me, in shades of mediocrity.”

Yeah.

The fear I speak of when I think of theme is that I will use theme like a sledgehammer. It is similar to the phenomenon that happens when once you notice something, you then see it recurring all the time. For example, if someone tells you a series a numbers keeps appearing in their lives, like say 723, you will then see every sequence of those numbers everywhere. You will look at a clock and it will be 3:27. Or you will go to the store and your change will be $2.73. Your car repair bill with be $723. Nothing has changed in the world, really, except your focus. And there is where my fear lies. I prefer to be a subtle writer. I want the reader to work a little. I fear that if I approach the page with a theme in mind, let’s say, alienation, then with every sentence I will pound into the reader’s head that these characters are alone, and disconnected, ad nauseum.

The way I combat this is to assign theme to the editor in me and then tell him to shut up until I am done. I am referring to Dorothea Brande’s invaluable craft book title, Becoming a Writer.” Brande proposes that every writer has at least two personas. There is the persona that is writing and then there is the persona who edits the work. The Writer, she urges, must be as free of fear and censure as they can be. The story must get to the page before anything else can occur. The Editor then takes that metaphorical lump of clay and shapes it into its best form. One of the things I admire about Brande is that she realizes that there is no way that the two personas can be completely isolated from one another. The Editor will always be looking over the Writer’s shoulder and vice versa. The tricks, she says, it to know which persona is in charge and that that persona be pro-active in telling the other to back off. What the Writer is doing is none of the Editor’s business. He can certainly give his opinion, but until the magical words “the end” are typed, the Editor has no great standing within the work.

So, as I plod through my thesis, I am aware in the back of my mind that I am exploring the themes of familial dysfunction, alcoholism, and incremental self-destruction, but I am just trying to tell a story about people and relationships and how despite knowing our past and our history we still tend to fall into the same holes.

My advice to any writer struggling with theme is to ask themselves, not what the theme is of the story, but why the story is interesting to you. I have said before that if you are writing a story that doesn’t fully engage you there is little chance it will engage anyone else. So, you have three people sitting on a bus and two of them are just roasting the other one, but you can see they are all friends, and it is in fun. However, you can also see the hurt in the roastee’s eyes, and you know they are taking some of the barbs more seriously. Why is this interesting to you? What do you want to say about this? Are the friends truly joking or are they passive-aggressive frenemies asserting their dominance, and what does that mean to the dynamic of the group? Therein lies your themes.

I will leave you with this thought. There is a reason you write. The reasons that are possible are infinite. You will always return to the same themes because I believe nearly all writers write to try to understand their world and their souls just that much more. Don’t let theme overwhelm or paralyze you. In the end, it will emerge if you are true to your vision.