Dispatch from The Quest: Scott Reynolds
Last week as we did here on GITS, the Quest writers focused on the subject of Theme. Today’s dispatch: Scott Reynolds gets friendly with theme:
A lot of Questers this week are making great posts about themes in movies and things that resonate with them, and they’re doing a much better job at it than I could. So instead I thought I’d take you on a journey into my personal struggles with THEME and how I’ve come out on the other side.
Bear with me, because this is going to all be dreadfully obvious to you if you’re good at theme. I’m sort of thick, so, I gotta come to things on my own after bashing my head against the wall a while.
Theme is one of those things that always scared me. It’s always discussed in dark back-rooms and alleyways as a mystical thing that is crucial to the life of your story, but undefinable if you’re not a 60th level gnome wizard with powerful arcane magics.
Or something.
Point is, theme seemed elusive and scary to me, because it’s built up as this thing, this essence, that’s of utmost important to your story, but you’re not supposed to try too hard to make it about theme because then you’ll be all preachy and transparent and the story will be weird, but you have to think about it or your story will be hollow and empty…ugh. It’s so easy to get in your head about theme that in previous scripts I’ve written I just ignored it altogether, assuming it would come up organically. It didn’t. Not really.
This week’s theme material really helped me sort out my feelings and approach to theme. In essence, I came to a comfortable place in my head that theme is essentially the over-arching subtext of a story. That’s it. It may not be entirely accurate, but definitions be damned, this one doesn’t stress me out.
Armed with that, I went about thinking of possible themes for my story, just brainstorming them exactly as I would any other type of idea. No special meaning attached, no added pressure, just the question “what are some ideas for things that could be larger subtexts of my story?”.
It was great. I came up with a few that really resonated with me. I came up with an idea for a theme that morphs into another theme as character growth occurs. I learned a little more about each of my characters by considering theme from each of their points of view. It was almost magic. In fact, on our weekly conference call, I said I felt like I did it wrong because it seemed too easy and natural, whereas THEME has been such a burden for me in the past.
Now I feel like I’m in a place where I’m armed with some theme ideas, but I don’t feel any pressure to just write the theme on point. Instead, I’m going to let those thematic elements show up in the story through character and dialogue and action and all that jazz.
You know. Like how good movies work.
Oh. I get it now.
I’ll bet many of you have a similar feeling about theme as Scott does… or did. It’s scary, primarily because who the hell knows what ‘theme’ is. What we did in our week-long Quest foray into the subject was demystify it: Theme = Meaning. Scott morphed that into “over-arching subtext of a story.” Works for me. The important thing is find a way to get comfortable thinking about and work with the concept of theme. I find that theme as meaning, and in particular emotional meaning, is something everyone can understand and use to enrich their story.
Tomorrow: Another dispatch from The Quest.
About Scott:
Brooklyn based writer and comedian who bailed on software to focus on writing words that humans could read. Twitter: @scottadhoc.
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