Community Conversation: Illuminations of Theme
How Critique Can Teach Us What Our Work Is Trying to Say
My background is in design, not writing, and that has given me an unusual relationship with critique. Design education relies on group critiques, not tests or papers. Students pin their drawings in front of the whole group, and then the teachers and students critique it, pointing out strengths and also weaknesses.
When this process worked, it was fabulous. A good critique could literally turn the light on in the artist, giving her a clear understanding of how to improve the piece. When it didn’t work, it was horrendous. The artist, unable to translate the critique into a clear strategy, would grow confused and defeated. Living through years of these pin-ups taught me how to take criticism but also how to identify what made for a good critique.
A good critique can identify the nascent larger significance of a creative work. The artist, whether designer or writer, can then harness that theme as a guide in discerning what to excise and what to insert, honing the artistic details into stronger form. The end result is a work that rings powerful and true. In this essay, I offer guidelines for why you need such a critique, what you should expect from it, and how to use it to turn on the lightbulb within your work.
FIND YOUR THEME
What is your story about? If your answer to that question merely involves a detailed list of characters, settings, and events, then you might benefit from an outside critique.
The characters, settings, and events are your story; the larger meaning that all those story details evoke is what your story is about. Think about it as the theme or the point or the message. It is a meta-story: a larger, perhaps universal narrative or conflict that transcends cultures, classes, races, and ages. It is an exploration of the human condition.
Just like a powerful piece of music can transport the listener beyond the experience of the individual notes and inspire visceral emotions, a strong piece of writing can pull readers out of the specific story and draw them into a higher level of awareness. This experience takes the focus away from what is happening and inspires readers to consider why it is happening. Not just why, as in the simple cause and effect that lead from one story point to another, but Why? with a capital W.
Many very successful, highly popular stories include strong themes. Here are a few examples:
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is a story of a girl trying to survive a brutal, structured political event that generates a steady stream of life-threatening situations. It is also about rising above oppression by choosing to take individual action in a political system designed to prevent it.
- Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is a story that details the spectacular dissolution of a marriage. It is also a story about the absurdity of traditional marital relationships in the social dysfunction bred by this modern world.
- In the movie Up, produced by Pixar Studios/Disney and written by Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, and Tom McCarthy, a man flies his house to a remote location as a means of fulfilling a promise. The story is about mourning and letting go of the past.
These are not the only themes that can be drawn from these works. Different readers and reviewers of the same book will discover various points and nuances. That variety spawns conversations, reader recommendations, social media attention, watercooler chitchat, and professional reviews.
Clearly, a strong theme is something a writer wants to generate.
UNDERSTAND HOW THEMES MANIFEST IN STORIES
When a story has a strong theme that gives purpose to the actions and characters, readers think about and remember the work for days, months, or even years after they’ve read it. Without a strong theme giving purpose to your characters’ quirks, readers may recall a story’s memorable cast without remembering the story they inhabited.
If this kind of harmony between story and theme were easy to create, then all works would have it. In truth, a majority of books include passages where the story and theme work together (usually identifiable as the “good” parts that readers savor) and passages where the story and theme are out of sync (usually identifiable as the boring parts that readers skim or skip altogether).
How, then, do themes work?
From a reader’s perspective, themes work like literary magic; they imbue thrilling sequences of events and memorable characters with a sense of larger significance. Readers become aware of not just the story events but also the value of coherence in a crazy world, or meaning in a senseless system, or bravery despite oppression. You get the idea.
From a writer’s perspective, how does this effortless magic happen? Through honesty and hard work.
The theme develops when you do the following:
- Become aware of where your work has a larger resonance.
- Clarify exactly what that resonance is.
- Revise until the themes and the story are integrally connected and mutually reinforcing.
This is not easy. It requires seeing the proverbial forest and the trees at the same time.
DISCERN THE THEMES IN YOUR WORK THROUGH CRITIQUE
Developing a theme requires the writer to hold in mind a clear vision of the larger meaning of the story while developing its individual details. This dual mind-set allows the writer to tailor each sentence, each passage, in a way that serves the theme. It also requires a writer to be aware of the themes manifesting in his work, and a writer’s daily experience can derail that awareness.
On a daily basis, a writer's focus is necessarily on story movement. What happens next? What is said next? How does the character respond to developments? The theme grows out of the sum total of each of these decisions but often only becomes perceptible after a full draft is done.
Even with a complete draft in hand, it is nearly impossible for a writer to see her own work objectively enough to discover what themes it manifests. Critical self-assessment is almost always filtered through extraneous concerns (and the thoughts that signal them). For example, productive self-editing is often derailed by these emotions:
- exhaustion (“I’m too tired to fix that now.”)
- self-congratulation (“That was a minor gaffe, but the rest is so good that I can let this one go.”)
- fear of big changes (“Why is this passage not working? Oh, never mind; I’ll fix the typos and grammar for now and worry about the big problems later.”)
- complacency bred by familiarity (“I’ve read this so often that I can recite it from memory, so of course it’s the way it should be or I would’ve changed it earlier.”)
Those filters keep a writer from clearly seeing the themes in her own work, and that is a tragedy.
Every writer I know whose work needs revision but who is clear on what needs changing is focused and happy (even euphoric). It is when a writer feels lost and doesn’t know what needs to be done to fix the work that the process bogs down. Knowledge of a story’s larger themes provides a writer with an editorial road map—a means of identifying what needs fixing and how to fix it. This is where outside critique can become illuminating. It offers the writer insight into the larger themes evoked by the story. That insight can enable purposeful, powerful, directed revisions.
Several years ago, I read the work-in-progress of a writer who was struggling with revision following some abstract suggestions from her editor. I told her that she wasn’t writing a story about sisters, a recent suicide, and an unfinished life’s work; she was writing a story about the meaning of life and death and the struggle everyone goes through in coming to terms with it. She needed to see the strong theme that was already in her work—the road map that gave her the ability to know which scenes were off the path and which were on target.
Several days after I shared these insights with my friend, I heard back from her. She was out of the bog, seeing all the instances of how the theme played through her book and the ways she could make the whole work harmonize with that theme. They were big changes, tough to make after a series of many other big changes in the book’s life. She could make them because they made the work better. The task would not be easy, but it was no longer a black hole of uncertainty.
The goal of critique is to give a writer a deeper awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of the story and the themes it evokes.
USE THE THEME TO FOCUS REVISIONS
A critique, in the most basic sense, is an outside opinion that indicates what needs improvement and what is already strong. Thematic critiques that focus on the work as a whole rather than on story details can reveal to a writer two crucially important things:
- what themes are resonating in the work
- how and where the story does or does not stay true to those themes
Knowledge of those two things provides the writer with a focus for revision. That sounds simple enough, but in practice, getting and heeding a good thematic critique is challenging.
The same work, particularly in an early stage, can have a number of competing or incomplete themes. Deciding which theme to develop is a critical decision, difficult to make until the writer has done some hard thinking about the story and how it should resonate.
Additionally themes can be shifty: hard to get a good read on, hard to discuss in terms of pragmatic nitty-gritty editing, and easy to misinterpret or misjudge. Discussing themes is often abstract, almost philosophical, rather than a conversation about what happens in specific scenes to specific characters. Trying to rewrite a scene to draw out a theme can be like trying to pin the tail on a cloud.
Writing is a lonely, frustrating, at times bewildering task. Facing down critique, trying to understand it, and then digesting it into a new clarity is one of the most rewarding experiences in rewriting. Without that self-discovery, that internalizing and then refocusing of the work by the writer, a crucial step in creativity is lost.
FACE THE CRITIQUE, DEVELOP IT, AND IMPROVE YOUR WRITING ALONG WITH YOUR SKILL SET
Synthesizing a thematic critique improves the writer as well as the story. Thinking through the repercussions of rewriting a scene to draw out a theme makes the writer far more aware of how the details of writing influence the thoughts and feelings evoked in the reader. That skill gets easier and better with practice. It can bring the writing to a new level, where theme and details can work in harmony even in the earlier drafts.
You will know you are on the right track when the lightbulb goes on and the thought of all the revisions needed to strengthen the theme doesn’t make you tired but instead excited.
You will know you are on the right track when your path to make the work better is as bright as day, shining before you. Illuminated.
Community Conversation
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Susan Setteducato: “Facing down critique, trying to understand it, and then digesting it into a new clarity is one of the most rewarding experiences in rewriting.” Yes! This is so beautifully said. As a fine arts major, I sat through many critiques, both useful and horribly destructive. What I learned was that finding someone who really sees what you are trying to do engenders an extraordinary kind of trust. Trust is big. Trust in one’s teacher, one’s editor, one’s beta readers. I guess this came up for me as I was reading your essay because there’s a kind of alchemy that happens with a good editor and a receptive writer. The first time someone pointed out the larger themes in my story, I did feel that light go on. I felt it in my body like a buoyancy or a giant inner yes. The Japanese have a word for this that translates loosely to “belly art.” In working with my present editor, who has helped me pin down the point(s) of my story, I’ve gotten to feel that amazing entrainment. Not all the time, but enough to know that it’s real. And I’ve certainly experienced it in other books, and as you say, those are the stories that stick. Thanks for this.
Jeanne Kisacky: Susan, as a fellow fine arts survivor, you clearly know of what you speak! Trusting your critique partner is a crucial aspect of being able to get past the criticism and to the inspiration. Trust defuses defensiveness, and no matter how scary it is to make yourself vulnerable to a critique, the joy of that moment when you see the potential in your own work is worth it. May you continue to find those moments where you feel it in your body “like a buoyancy or a giant inner yes!” What a fabulous way to describe it.
Tom Pope: Jeanne, I love how you have verbalized the ineffable. And to reply, I must grope through a dark realm.
Theme may become apparent only late in the process, but doesn’t it arise fused with the character and her objective? Shouldn’t it be so? After all, art comes from the author, who breathes theme every day. And if that’s true, theme has the same force and perhaps point of conception as do backstory and character challenges.
Peering into that first inspiration of story, I sense all the elements of the finished work present, though at best only in molten form or as vibration. That’s what’s so exciting. When I start writing, it seems that theme is part of what charges the expressive drive and shapes the work unseen. Later, if my first draft is going well, somewhere in the second half, I start to relax, and away from the text I conjure ideas about what lies deep. (Note to self: Trying to label things hinders the muse.)
Looking forward, my standard for a great work is one in which the thought, speech, character decisions, and narration on the page are rooted in theme but never declare it, throwing its discovery into the readers’ lap. Critique partners, beta readers, and editors are invaluable because they feel theme and note points of a draft’s disconnect from it. Their feedback clears this author’s plaque. With their help and with time, I’m better able to go back and revise the words, staying true to the template the theme has laid.
Jeanne Kisacky: Tom, trying to come at theme head-on never does seem to work, does it? Your description of process is beautiful, and I agree with you that in a great work “the thought, speech, character decisions, and narration on the page” will inevitably carry theme … and yet still only hint at words, “throwing its discovery into the readers’ lap.”
A story is a ground-level view—a walk with a character through a sequence of landscapes and events where the present details loom large and immediate, and the horizon and obscuring elements limit awareness and vision. A theme is the sum total of what all of those experiences evoke, a sense that there is something larger underlying the immediate details. Joy to the writer who can sense and evoke elements of theme as the first draft is written, but joy doesn’t come to all of us easily. There are times when the walk with the character gets confused—when the story gets lost and the writer struggles to discern the false trails and dead ends. In that case, an awareness of theme offers a sense of the through-path. A thematic critique does not release the writer from focusing on story nor give him carte blanche to succumb to the direct and overbearing statement of the point of the work. Rather, it provides an awareness of what needs sharpening. A thematic critique should lead the writer to fix the story, and in doing so, the theme shines through.
Theme does indeed “arise fused with the character and her objective.” A thematic critique is an affirmation that the character and her objective are in sync and meaningful.
Natalie Hart: SOLD! As a writer who also edits, I’ve always known the value of an outside eye and always been glad for the feedback—although that pin-up process sounds super-brutal. Brooding in private or ostentatiously refusing to open the critique e-mail for two days is sometimes part of my process. But I’ve never had a thematic critique, and now I have to have one for every manuscript. I know the theme I’m going for, but whether I’ve maintained a good, rich focus on it is so difficult to grasp. Since I know what I’m trying to say, I can (and do) fill it in, even when it isn’t on the page. Your essay really made me excited, which isn’t usually the attitude one associates with critique, but I can’t wait for my current manuscript to be ready for a thematic critique—I’m excited enough that I may resume truly regular work on it. Thank you, Jeanne!
Jeanne Kisacky: There is such a joy in feeling on target with writing and inhabiting that place where the doubts fade away and there is no such thing as writer’s block. The best word I’ve ever found to describe it is flow, where the words just come onto the page as if by magic. I’m so glad that this piece may have helped put you back on that path.
The best advice I’ve ever been given regarding critiques for the critique-averse is to read the comments all the way through when you get them and then put them away and do other things for a day or two—go for long walks, clean the house. While you do this, a part of your brain is chewing on the comments. Then when you get back to the comments, they’ll spark inspiration rather than doubt.
Donald Maass: Jeanne, thinking about theme tends to lead authors to abstractions. While that is not wrong, I suspect that it doesn’t help develop story. To opine, “What my novel is really about is …” doesn’t by itself make a novel more meaningful.
What does help is turning that abstraction into story events. To put it differently, an identified theme can be a prompt, a spur, an imperative. How can I make my novel fulfill its theme more deeply?
Theme isn’t an end or a summation; it is a beginning and a prod. It can generate more story and enrich the journey of a novel’s characters.
The more that theme is embedded and hidden in what happens, the more we readers will recognize it. That in turn starts with the author recognizing it and then building in enough clues for us to get the point.
We can’t talk enough about theme, so thanks!
Jeanne Kisacky: Donald, I agree we can’t talk enough about theme and that the best strategy is to use the theme, which is “embedded and hidden in what happens,” to strengthen the story rather than the reverse. Abstraction is definitely both an opportunity and a danger. I think that talking abstractly about a story’s theme can pull a writer to the next level because the theme acts as a prompt, but it also presupposes that the writer, the writing, and the story have reached a stage of formation that allow for turning abstraction into solid story details. You are right: The danger is that after an abstract critique, writers may turn to abstract writing. And while a story with a theme about ending poverty could potentially be incredibly rewarding, a story that talks directly about ending poverty could be misery. Trying to tackle theme directly inevitably ends up sounding like preaching; maybe that’s why it works so much better when embedded in a story.
Valerie P. Chandler: Thanks for such a thought-provoking article. I needed it. (Isn’t it funny how we have to be reminded of things at different points in our writing?)
I have a theme throughout my book, but it’s been tricky not to hit the reader over the head with it.
Whack! Whack! This is the theme! See?
It’s been a balancing act in making it apparent yet subtle enough that it doesn’t pull the reader out of the story. So I’ve used allusions and literary references to add some depth.
I’m currently in revisions, so I have some cloud-pulling to do, too.
Jeanne Kisacky: That direct approach sometimes seems so simple, so much easier than figuring out how to get the reader to pick up on theme based only on story details. But it never works (except for maybe Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). So you have the reverse problem of most writers: You have a good sense of the forest, and now it’s up to you to lead the reader, tree by tree, through it in a way that gives them a sense of the larger shape and importance of what they are walking through.
LJ Cohen: In my own writing, I’m rarely conscious of theme at the first-draft stage—at least not at the start of the story. I think theme is the thing that emerges when the conscious and the subconscious minds are working in concert. While the conscious mind chases after story—plot and character and setting—the subconscious mind is quietly mining perceptions and experiences and layering the evolving story with elements that link all the disparate parts into a greater whole.
That is, when it works smoothly.
When I hit a wall in the drafting, or if something isn’t working in the revision process, it almost always needs to be fixed on the theme level first. Otherwise I end up making blind, random changes that don’t touch the core issues.
Of course that means, at some point in the process, I have to understand and clearly see the themes, which can be hard to do. I’ve never formally received a theme critique, but a good beta reader—and I have been fortunate to have a bunch of them—can lead you right to the heart of the problem.
Jeanne Kisacky: LJ, what a perfect way to say it: “… theme is the thing that emerges when the conscious and the subconscious minds are working in concert.” You hit the nail on the head.
Pro Tip
Does critique evolve the story or further illuminate a character’s motivations or a theme? Making a change might also develop your instincts and skills as a storyteller.
FAQ
Should agents and editors replace other beta readers after publication?
No, no, no! More voices mean more story, more depth, more sales. Many full-time authors I know continue to work with their critique partners. I know best-selling authors with teams of beta readers. Every reader misses things, so cast a wide net to make sure story opportunities don’t get away.
—Donald Maass