On "Writing Your Story's Theme" by K. M. Weiland

When K. M. Weiland says she can help me engineer theme, I take notice. Her book "Creating Character Arcs" is already one of my favorite writing books for its depth and practicality (it would also work as your only book on plot structure). And, as a hyperanalytical type with a tendency toward story ideas that revolve around a feeling or abstract idea, the question of how to start with a theme and reduce it to actual sentences is important to me. I grabbed this book off the library shelf without hesitation. In this post, I'll be reviewing the book and summarizing, in my opinion, the most interesting parts.

One of the book's first jobs is defining "theme", which is already a challenge. Weiland offers several overlapping definitions. At its broadest, her idea of theme seems to include almost any kind or granularity of topic, with examples ranging from "love", "justice", etc, to "high school is hard". In the intro, she writes of theme:

It is the symbolic argument between a posited Truth and Lie, which will be played out in the protagonist's personal arc and throughout the external plot.

In Chapter 1, she gives her most dictionary-like definition:

Theme is a unifying idea or subject, explored through recurring patterns and expanded through comparisons and contrasts.

The main concept of theme she'll use to generate practical advice is the "Thematic Principle" or "Thematic Premise" (yes, she uses both words for the same thing). For Weiland, it "may be a word, or it may be a sentence", and it is "your story's representation and exploration of a universal Truth." All her examples are then of said "Truth", ranging from "life in the inner city", a noun phrase, to "does love conquer all?", a question, with some plain declarative sentence versions too, like the aforementioned "high school is hard". In Chapter 2, she narrows this down further to "The Thematic Premise's Explicit Argument", a position the story takes regarding the Premise. The protagonist's character arc consists of deciding between a Truth and a Lie based on the Thematic Premise (though they are not necessarily learning the Truth, as tragic arcs usually involve losing or abandoning the Truth). I don't think she uses the term "Thematic Premise/Principle" after Chapter 2, though the concept arguably continues to play a background role.

Besides defining terms, the intro and first three chapters are about the relationship between plot, character or theme. The actual first lines of the book, in the introduction, are devoted to putting all three on an equal level of importance. Weiland asserts that a writer can start from any of them and develop the others. She also takes time to debunk the idea that theme *must not* be deliberate or planned, because apparently some people believe that?

Chapter 1, "Discovering your Thematic Principle", is where the term "Thematic Principle" is introduced. She gives tips for analyzing a story, including your own in-development plot and characters, to find the "Thematic Principle". The main place to look is the ending of the story, but she gives a fair bit of other info here. She also introduces the term "Thematic Metaphor" to describe the way plot links to the theme.

Chapter 2 is "Using Character to Create Theme", and it's mostly what it says on the tin. It does start with a tangent about "text", "context", and "subtext"; I can't say I agree with her identifying "context" with inner conflict, but the point stands that inner conflict is a crucial part of a compelling story. This is where she renames "Thematic Principle":

As we talked about in Chapter 1, the essence of your theme will be summed up in its thematic premise.

Alright. Anyway, most of the chapter is about developing a character arc based on a question at the core of the thematic principle/premise, from the "explicit argument". She (briefly) runs over a lot of solid theory about character arcs, inner vs outer conflict, "Want" vs "Need", and so on. (There's also a brief, dense summary of "The Five Main Character Arcs", a big topic of her character arc book, in the appendix.)

Chapter 3, "Using Plot to Prove Theme", has some pivotal ideas that are not quite explicated to my liking. Granted, it's tricky to articulate how a fictional plot "proves" or claims things about the real world. Weiland puts it:

When characters get away with murder—or fall in love at first sight—or become conscientious objectors—or succumb to alcoholism—their stories say something about how reality is (or at lest how the author thinks it should be).

In my view, attempting to clarify: whether a thing can happen in your plot, why it happens, and the consequences, reflect real possibilities and causes. Critically, your plot says things about reality whether you mean it to or not. There's a danger that the plot "proves" something writer didn't intend, maybe even in contradiction to an intended theme, which ends up feeling "pasted-on".

There's a point in Chapter 3 that I hadn't considered quite this way before, about the importance of the antagonist (or antagonistic force as she refers to it, since it's often a natural force, the self, etc). The antagonistic force, in creating obstacles for the protagonist, largely determines the plot events of the story, and thus the theme it can prove. Additionally (overlapping but distinct), the antagonist and their obstacles drive the protagonist's character arc by challenging their beliefs. Thus the antagonistic force drives both plot and character, making it critical for theme. Weiland tells us to carefully craft the antagonist at the same time as the protagonist. In fact, close to 3/4 of this chapter, nominally about plot, is devoted to discussing how to create a good antagonist, including a robust review of types of antagonistic forces. I'm not even mad; she convinced me that's just the correct emphasis.

Weiland is rather militant about rejecting any primacy between the three of plot, character, and theme. I think she's correct that all of them are important to think about, and each of them can be a starting point to develop the others. However, I can't avoid seeing her approach as a character-centric vision of theme and everything else. Even if they have equal "importance", from a pragmatic standpoint character is the skeleton the others are built on. Theme is expressed in the Truth/Lie the character arc is built on. Her model of plot is organized around character-arc milestones. Even as someone inclined toward concept-driven stories, I have to say this is probably correct as far as emotionally satisfying stories go. Humans are social animals and we want to change ourselves and others, so we like stories about people who change. I just don't see any reason to be shy about it.

Most of the following chapters are a grab bag of topics. There's quite a bit of wide-ranging, valuable advice, particularly my favorite kind: lots of clarifying questions to ask yourself while writing.

Chapter 4 is about using minor characters to build theme. It's a diverse pile of good tips. The central idea:

At the deepest of story levels, the minor characters are there to provide thematic representations of your protagonist's various fates.

...where "fates" in this context roughly means different ways the protagonist could turn out, or could have turned out. My main complaint here is that toward the end, she starts getting really prescriptive about what side characters should be present. She acknowledges the love interest is optional, but why is the "sidekick" mandatory?

Chapter 5 is "Differentiating Theme from Message". My initial thought on this was: why wasn't this in Chapter 1? There's an important distinction here, and I kind of see what she's going for, but I don't find her definitions satisfactorily precise. The basic idea seems to be that a "message" is more specific or situational than a theme, but I can only see that as a spectrum rather than the sharp divide Weiland seems to think it is. This is also the chapter where she goes in depth about why and how to create a complex moral argument regarding the theme, by presenting counterarguments to the premise in their strongest forms.

Chapter 6 "Deepening Your Story's Subtext", has a lot of good stuff in it. As someone who tends toward explicit, straight-line logic, "writing between the lines" (as I like to call it) is a challenge. The critical point is that subtext comes from a gap between two (or conceivably more) fixed points, which are themselves relatively concrete and well understood by the reader. Pretty often they appear contradictory. To engineer subtext, you focus on creating those explicit reference points, with a question between them. She emphasizes that the writer must know exactly what fits in the gap but, of course, must resist temptation to spell it out.

While discussing subtext in dialogue, she says something that caught my eye. She lists the jobs of dialogue as:

1. Advance the plot
2. Accurately represent characters
3. Mimic reality
4. Entertain
5. Offer subtext

She claims that not only is this the priority order of dialogue, but ability to accomplish these goals represent skill levels in dialogue writing. I don't know enough to endorse it, but it's an interesting proposition.

Chapter 7 is "Including Meaningful Symbolism." Oddly, the first few paragraphs are about the possibility of a story having multiple themes. She mostly pitches symbolism as a way to keep a story "cohesive" even if it has many sub-themes (she hasn't explicitly discussed cohesion yet, but we'll get there). "Once you've identified your main theme and all its little satellite themes, look for something you can use to symbolically represent them all." I believe this is the only time the book mentions multiple themes. The rest of the chapter is basically a taxonomy of types of symbolism, some less obvious than others, with ideas for how to use them. It's a short chapter that does its job efficiently, aside from the mildly tangential intro.

Chapter 8 is titled "Crafting the Best Theme for Your Story", and starts off talking in broad terms about picking a better or "more impactful" theme for a given story by tweaking character or plot. Then it drops the line,

The best themes are both universal and unique.

After that, the chapter is largely about picking a unique theme. She points out that we don't get tired of themes like "good conquers evil", but we get tired of the same details. One approach is to inject fresh details, and she gives tips along the lines of putting a familiar story in a fresh setting. But the main thing she recommends, and spends a lot of time on, is "honesty" in the story-telling sense. Obviously honesty is an interesting concept applied to fiction (one that I'll probably come back to). Weiland focuses on honesty in terms of writing a theme you truly, personally care about. You're a unique person, so personal honesty is likely to result in something unique. Relatedly, she suggests writing stories that "resonate with the universal reality of morality".

Incidentally, Weiland talks frankly about "moral reality" as an objective or at least universally experienced thing. Personally I tend to agree with this, at least as it applies to the basics like respecting other people's rights, but some people will object. I think hardcore moral relativists will still be able to translate Weiland's points into their own framework.

Chapter 9, "Writing Your Theme in the First Draft", is an exceptionally wide-ranging chapter, with a lot of good advice. She places a big focus on weaving plot, theme, and character together, working on all of them by turns, as your work for one of them surfaces constraints for another. As a tool for keeping plot, theme, and character aligned, she puts forward a "Truth Chart", roughly a beat sheet or listing of plot-structural milestones mapped to things a given character learns re the Big Truth/Lie of their character arc. There's a discussion about scene/sequel structure; notably, the sequel (or reaction scene) is usually where characters change, as they reflect on the action in the previous scene. On the topic of scene structure, she says that to achieve theme goals at the scene level, it's usually sufficient to intertwine plot and character "to the point where they're crucially affecting each other in every scene."

The last chapter, "Creating Stories That Matter", starts off with some more lists-of-tips on how to create memorable and "weighty" fiction, then comes back to principles. Here at the end it discusses "cohesion" and "resonance" as being critical to "skillful fiction". The tone of this section hits "inspiring and uplifting ending", but in practice I sat there thinking, again, "wait, where was this in Chapter 1?" I would have introduced it early, along with concepts of plot and character and how they relate to theme, to provide context for the whole pile of nitty gritty tips in the rest of the book. In her rendering, "cohesion" is tied to logic, organization, and everything being there for a reason. "Resonance" is tied to meaning, soul, and deep emotional connection; she borrows the term "mythic value" from one of her readers. A story with cohesion but no resonance is pointed nowhere interesting. A story with no cohesion can't really resonate with anything.

"Cohesion" is a good note on which to start talking about this book's organization. A book on such a sprawling topic must have been a nightmare to organize, and I can see a lot of work went into it, but I feel it needed at least another pass of editing, or reorganization. Naturally large pieces of the book are miscellaneous lists of techniques and questions. That's common for writing books, and it's especially hard to see how this book would avoid that. But here, they often seem stuffed into places they only vaguely fit. The chapters themselves are un-cohesive. I suspect the book would have been better with more, shorter chapters, for example pulling the long discussion of "thematic metaphor" from Chapter 1 into its own chapter, and similarly extracting the "Truth Chart", a tool for tracking how the Lie/Truth the character arc is built around lines up with plot-structural milestones, from Chapter 9. Chapter 5 could have been split into separate "theme vs message" and "complex moral argument" chapters.

On top of that, the text occasionally slides between topics, and goals she thinks we should have, in a way I find disorienting. For example, the way chapter 8 goes from choosing the "best theme" to a "unique theme", and the way chapter 7 starts off talking about multiple themes. Yes, it's common to ease into a chapter with an introductory tangent, but most of these intros feel too specific to really do the same job, and the main topic of the chapter still isn't predictable. Most chapters have some kind of disconnect between at least one of the chapter title, opening lines, and main content of the chapter (with chapter 6 somewhat ironically being the biggest exception: it's straightforwardly about subtext from front to back). Many chapters (e.g. 3, 5) pivot hard in the middle, too. I found it hard to keep track of what the goal is of each piece of advice. Among other things, it makes the book hard to summarize.

For a new writer, this book would be a handful. Obviously not every book needs to be targeted to beginners, so on its own this is less of a complaint than a fair warning. The book throws around lots of writing concepts and terms, for example using terms like "Act 1/2/3" or "midpoint" consistent with their common usage in discussions of fiction. She usually explains them, but briefly, often in the appendix. You'll get more out of this book if you can take those terms in stride. And of course that base knowledge will probably help you stay oriented in the more chaotically organized sections of the book.

Ultimately, I found this book interesting but frustrating. It contains a lot of good ideas, enough that it's at least worth checking out at the library like I did. Still, it's not quite the lucid revelation I hoped for after reading Weiland's book on character arcs. Some of it is just not that clear, and in those parts it takes a lot of work to get out the actionable insights. If you were going to buy a single book, you could choose Weiland's character arc book and get the most critical information about theme (as mentioned, it's pretty character-centric in practice) in a more digestible form. But then you would miss the good chapter on subtext, and various tidbits scattered throughout, enough that I couldn't summarize them all here. With any luck, this post has given you enough information to decide whether you want to read the book for yourself.