Deeper Stories

I wanted to write a new final chapter for my book, but I got sidetracked with Groundhog Day nostalgia. I'm not sure it fits. Let me know what you think.

A story has the shape of meaning, and as long as readers find that shape, they’ll fill it. Every choice you’ve made, from strong verbs to sentence length, will have an accumulating effect, and they fill that meaning-shaped structure you’ve developed though theme—story patterns circulating a central idea like vultures above an emaciated elephant calf, lost and alone.

Poor, poor story patterns, separated from their family and dying in the wasteland. It’s heart breaking, really.

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This article is part of Literary Salon issue #3.

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Table of Contents: The Last Temptation of Winnie-the-Pooh

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Deeper Stories

Every now and then, a writer who packs his dialogue full of philosophical or political tangents will say that his work is too deep for the average reader. Now, that kind of thing can work—though it often doesn’t—but if that were depth, we’d all be in trouble by the time we wrote our second novel. Luckily, themes come to our rescue once again.

First, your themes will keep you focused, and if you’re focused, you can’t say everything that comes to mind. Some of those ideas get saved for another story.

Second, themes grant you a super power. It’s one of the few times you can repeat yourself and sound smarter for it.

Third, those themes will take all the other aspects of prose and storytelling and use them to create depth—no philosophical treatise required.

Though we’ve covered many possibilities, the first component your theme will need is clarity. Your reader needs to understand the characters, their situation and relationships, and the action that results. It’s easy to think great writers write to obfuscate their meaning; after all, sometimes we get lost as readers, and if the writer has a great reputation, well then, to be misunderstood is to be great. No?

No. Not really.

Let’s remember why Cormac McCarthy removed all that punctuation. He thought he was bringing clarity to his storytelling. To be great is to seek to be understood.

Literary flourishes exist in literature, but more often than memory would suggest, those flourishes are used at the right moment, surrounded by passages of clear prose.

You can write in whatever style you choose, and your intent with your prose can be literary or balanced, but the writing should be free of rudimentary errors. Clean prose and clean storytelling are both aspects of clarity. Don’t get in your reader’s way.

Style and quality can give a cosmetic appearance of depth, but they can also allow you to say more than if you weren’t developing your prose so intentionally. Where these aspects create patterns, whether we call those patterns themes or motifs, we are building the structures of purpose and meaning.

With clarity, the conflicts that illustrate your theme will be understood, or at least interpreted through the mental lens of the reader, and those conflicts (those relationships, challenges, and thwarted desires) have direction. They point to something, and because of the centrality of theme, those literary arrows all point in the same direction, illustrating a point with repetition and contradiction, revealing the story’s heart.

Groundhog Day

If we wish to understand Groundhog Day as “high concept”, its central idea is that a grumpy weatherman gets stuck repeating one day, every day—Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney Pennsylvania, the worst gig in the business. (If you’re unfamiliar with the term, high concept simply means that an idea is easily summarized, memorable, and commercially appealing.) In considering Groundhog Day thematically, however, we need to ask ourselves where those ideas are pointing.

Before I continue, let me remind you that the final meaning of a story is something that the writer and the reader construct together. The writer will offer several intentional components that all work together to indicate what he believes to be the purpose and meaning of the story, but the reader will often arrive somewhere close but not exactly where the author intended.

In the case of Groundhog Day, the creative team received letters from representatives of several faiths, each thanking them for so clearly illustrating their faith’s core philosophical concept of the meaning of life. That’s an accomplishment, and it’s not a fault in the mind of the reader that he’s “missed” the intended meaning. Story patterns and the reader’s life patterns work together to create a unique reading experience and therefore, a unique meaning.

The direction the creative team gave that high concept is what focused them on the themes they chose. It’s what created the shape of meaning that their viewers filled in with so many variations, but it takes a while to get there. In the beginning, the situation is basically what one would expect, and these are the elements that get repeated in its lesser imitations: Phil gets stuck repeating the same day. It’s a situation he denies and struggles against, until he embraces the idea that he can do whatever he wants. He manipulates the world around him to meet his needs, but eventually he realizes what he really needs is Rita, the producer who came to Punxsutawney with him.

Here’s where the story finds its direction. Phil can’t manipulate Rita to get what he truly desires, which allows for the building of the love story, but just as important, when that fails, life loses its purpose, and Phil kills himself repeatedly, only to return every morning. The failed suicide attempts lead him to declare that he’s a god, and that leads into his attempts to save the homeless old man who dies that day, every day, no matter what Phil does. He’s not a god.

We don’t know what happens in Phil’s mind because of that, but we see him inspired to learn the piano. And ice sculpting. And if he can’t save the old man, he does what he can around town to help people in whatever little ways he can. He doesn’t become a god, but he becomes a better person. That’s what wins Rita’s interest and then her love.

The high concept is that a man has to relive the one day he hates most. The thematic direction is that he hates the day for shallow, egotistical reasons, and by reliving this one day, his god-complex is magnified and then shattered, leaving him humbled and able to become a better person—a lovable person.

Your reader doesn’t need to be able to articulate all that, but they’ll sense that the meaning is there. They’ll know you’ve given them a story with meat on the bone, something they’ll be digesting long after the final page is turned.

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Fiction, Analysis, and Lessons on Prose Style and Literary Theory

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Avatar

I’m not breaking down Avatar.

I bring it up because a comment about the movie in Notes (Substack’s social media platform) reminded me of a story, and that story gave me the final inspiration I needed to write this essay.

There’s a story-process expert on Youtube whose method focuses on having every character represent a different approach to the central theme. It’s an interesting concept, and I’d listened to several of his videos by the time he realized that Avatar was written like it had followed his program.

He kept pushing that the story was really good actually because every character represented a different take on the themes of environmental protection and imperialism. The effort to celebrate the script in order to justify his process fell flat and, instead, demonstrated the limits of how far such a program could take you.

My mother loves Avatar. I want Zoe Saldaña in all the roles. As I told someone recently, the movie is fine and the effects were groundbreaking. What it isn’t is an example of a great script or even an original one, and it certainly isn’t a shining beacon of what we hope our stories to be.

The expert always pushed that if a character didn’t represent a different approach to the theme, the character didn’t belong in the story, and I could make an argument for that being true. To do so, however, we’d have to stretch farther than simply compiling all the possible attitudes one could have about the central theme of Groundhog Day and assigning one to each character.

Rita tells Phil he’s not god, but the character who represents that facet is the homeless man, and the question is never raised. His death is a foil to that reasoning. The bowling buddies (I’m doing all this by memory) introduce the concept that Phil can do whatever he wants. The question is literally raised and answered. The cameraman, played by Chris Elliott, becomes an example of a man who hasn’t changed, the contrast highlighting Phil’s journey. The insurance man, Ned, highlights what a horrible day this is, as does Mrs. Lancaster. (“Oh no, there wouldn’t be [any hot water] today.”)

Nancy… Nancy Taylor!? represents how Phil can manipulate to get what he wants but not what he truly needs. Phillis, the waitress who wants to see Paris before she dies, and the gay waiter represent the unfulfilled desires carried within all of us, desires that won’t be met if we don’t make a change. The Groundhog Day head honcho (whose name I don’t recall but who was played by Bill Murray’s brother, Brian Doyle-Murray) and others represent Phil’s transformation by the change in their reaction to him.

In Avatar, the characters literally have the different attitudes toward the theme that the Youtube expert demands, and for some stories, that’s fine. More often than not, however, theme is expressed not in a character’s philosophy but in their relationships and actions or just how they confirm with or contrast against the progression of the protagonist.

We aren’t writing a round table where people take turns stating their arguments. Theme is less often expressed through opinion than it is through action, and by action, I mean the living out of one’s life in the moment and in the context of the other characters. Earlier, I used the word conflict, and by conflict I don’t mean battle but confrontation between opposing desires, even between people who are attempting to cooperate with one another.

And finally…

Meaning isn’t found in saying something profound in one line somewhere in your story. It may be a great line, but it will feel out of place unless it’s part of the story’s thematic pattern; it’s those patterns that give a story a sense of meaning and purpose.

—Thaddeus Thomas

PS. — This bit of trivia I had to look up to keep my facts straight. In 1990-1991, Brian Doyle-Murray and Chris Elliott starred in the sitcom Get a Life, and when Charlie Kaufman talks about his early days as a sitcom writer, Get a Life was the first of these, for which he wrote two episodes. The first is Prisoner of Love, which I’ve included here. I saw the show (if not the episode) back in the day and remember it as surreal. Today, I think it would be called intentionally cringe.