I’m usually one of those obnoxiously active people. You know the type, multi-tasking to a fault. I’ve always been doing, or planning, while doing or planning something else. I can’t simply read a book (more like four in progress at once, plus a magazine) without thinking about other things at the same time. Meditation efforts fail because while I’m trying to visualize some pastoral scene and breathe in and… “Oh, hey, I’ve just solved that plot issue” … “I need to add mustard to my grocery list” … “I should plant beets this year.”

No, I’m meditating, breathe in, and … “I better pick up chicken feed, and cat food, and if I’m going out I need” … It’s the curse of the over-active mind. I can’t simply write, but must also be listening to music, following several social media conversations, and participating in an online game while waiting for the bread to rise.

Lacking a good rabbit hole picture: instead here is the entrance to a Hobbit hole from my visit to Hobbiton. Photo MegTurville-Heitz.

But every so often, I fall down a research rabbit hole, that time sink of link-leads-to-question-leads-to-link that takes you deeper and deeper until you have no idea where you are, how you got there, and may not even remember how the journey started and I simply can’t stop myself.

Trigger the Imposter Syndrome

It was during one random Internet term search that I came across a statement on some editor’s blog that claimed writers need to first choose a theme to explore – that central message behind the story – and that every plot needs a theme, and writers even need to go back and add in motifs to help reinforce the central themes they’ve chosen.

I thought, “Wait, what?”

During those college lit classes we talked about themes and the motifs and symbols that reinforce them, and what the author was really saying. But that always seemed like an exercise in attaching after-the-fact-meaning to a story, for the benefit of the reader. I mean, unless it’s nonfiction, I don’t go into a piece of fiction with a theme. A plot idea, maybe, a character in conflict maybe. But thinking, I am about to write a “coming of age” tale, or a story about “power and corruption”?

Trigger the imposter syndrome. Maybe I have it all wrong! Maybe I shouldn’t be writing at all! I need to be mapping this stuff out!

Or Not

Photo Meg Turville-Heitz

Themes emerge. I know that. It’s part of unspooling an idea and turning it into a story. But is that where the author starts as the editors on that blog suggest?

Part of this musing came about when someone reviewing my novel Black River saw in it a theme that hadn’t occurred to me. I don’t consciously build themes into the story, or go back and add motifs to reinforce them. The key word being consciously.

Another article, after a long discussion about good writers needing themes in their work, at last stated that many themes emerge without authorial intent and admitted that forcing a plot and characters to fit a preconceived theme would likely end up making the story feel stilted.

If we create a believable and relatable character with a compelling motivation and beset them with appropriate barriers to achieving the end they seek, shouldn’t these kinds of things just emerge naturally, without an author needing to map “themes” up front? I’m so confused.

The Author’s Intent

I loved the puzzles of finding all the hidden and not so hidden deeper meanings in the works in those lit classes. Yet, I always wondered a little at our insistence on talking about the “author’s intent” when mining themes and motifs. Would the author agree with our interpretation? For example, in a German literature in translation course, the professor’s edition talked about a character’s hat licking up like a tongue of flame in the wind. He said this was a symbol that reinforced the character’s inner turmoil as part of a theme I no longer recall. The student edition translated the same passage as the hat flapping in the wind like a flag. It didn’t suggest inner turmoil to us.

How much of that interpretation is the reader assigning their own meaning to a story, helping them understand some aspect of the human condition, and how much the author’s intent?

Sure, theme is suggested by the story you choose to write. Like, in choosing to write a story about abandoning the earth, as I did with my short story “Garden of Souls,” musings on place-based identity and even grief naturally emerge as themes. It’s kind of baked into the plot. But I didn’t consciously insert motifs, nor even think of “place-based identity” as I wrote it. In considering the arguments people would make to remain on a dying planet, my imagination filled that information in. Sure, after the fact I can say, yup, the character musing on the fate of a dead loved one’s cremains left behind reinforces those themes … but did I consciously write it to do that? Consciously, no.

In the Eyes of the Beholder

We tell stories because there is something resonant about them for ourselves and others; we feel connected to the characters, situation, or plot in some way that fits or contrasts with our understanding of our own lives and lived experience. And the writer draws from their own experience. I haven’t abandoned the earth, but I certainly can imagine the kinds of questions and concerns I’d have.

It reminds me of debates (*) over J.R.R. Tolkien’s insistence he hated allegory, while allegory can clearly be seen in The Lord of the Rings. He acknowledged this to a degree. How much was in his unconscious storytelling, how much intentional, and how much emerged after the fact because something resonated for a reader? The author doesn’t necessarily experience everything they write about (if so, I’d have some questions for murder mystery writers), yet they write from experience. Much of it is imagination, but that imagination is built upon our lived world. There will be points of convergence.

*For example, this exchange walks through an argument over Tolkien allegory.

I Did Mention Rabbit Holes …

This one reviewer comment thus had me pondering themes that might occur in my writing, consciously or unconsciously. Naturally, good vs. evil, that kind of comes with the genre territory and it’s one I know consciously plays into conflict plotting.

Image taken from CNN

But I also realized there are several other themes that I see in most of my stories. Maybe I see them because they are concepts that resonate for me, emerge in the interplay of my characters and plot and setting that are part of my way of seeing the world. Others might list different themes, or motifs, or symbols that resonate with them.

Image of Odysseus from Wikipedia

Essayists have stated a story can contain only one or maybe there can be multiple themes, of the six or 20 (or 200?!) most common themes, and will fit one of just three or seven or 36 plots. Maybe following a recipe is individual. Maybe that’s the point: as humans, for all of our divisions and rivalries, certain universals still connect us: love, jealousy, grief, hope, etc. The specifics of those universals may be culturally or circumstantially derived and complicated, but in the end, we can empathize and see our shared humanity through those key themes – the motivations – and the fairly universal underlying plots for coming to some resolution or closure. We recognize, say a temptation or perseverance theme in a story of a person enduring an epic journey, whether it’s a diminutive Hobbit or a heroic Greek king. Did the author think, I will include the theme of perseverance? Or did they instead look at a character and see their motivation: to do the job because they must or even simply to get home? Perhaps as readers we apply our thematic label because we recognize, empathize and know these as universal themes.

Displacement and alienation. Fate vs. free will. Justice and loyalty. Tradition vs. change. Power and corruption. Grief and loss. Courage and perseverance. Universals. I can see arguments for all of these, and more, in my longer works, and some of them in my shorter works.

But only because I went down a rabbit hole looking for them.

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Maybe down a Hobbit hole? A Hobbit house from Hobbiton, near Rotorua, New Zealand. Photo: Meg Turville-Heitz