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Zachary Dillon's avatar

A lot of story-craft writing attempts to reverse engineer stories, which leads to ideas like "each character must represent a facet of the theme." I admit to having thought this way, and it's an especially easy conclusion in a movie with a clear system like Groundhog Day.

Another example that comes to mind is The Lobster, which also takes place in a closed environment with a set of strict rules, and each character seems to represent a different flavor of yearning and panicked effort to achieve the universal goal of connection (or at least a facsimile thereof). It's hard to know how much of this was explicit in the writing process—a need for concrete examples to teach specific rules to the audience—or the result of organic imaginative exploration. From the interviews I've seen, I'd say mostly the latter, but maybe a bit of one, and then a bit of the other in revision.

Thaddeus, you effectively confirm my suspicion (in a way I haven't seen elsewhere) that these reverse-engineering techniques are misleading. A more ubiquitous but less pernicious case is all the talk about three-act structure. Craft essays often use Coen Bros. movies as examples, but every single time the Bros. themselves are asked about three-act structure, they stare blankly and say, "No, we don't really think about it that way."

In my own work, thinking about theme at any point before finishing the first draft is a death sentence. It traps me in the tiny scope of what I think the story should be instead of discovering what the story could be. I'm convinced the only reason I finished my debut novel was because it's based on real experiences—I could focus on describing what actually happened without thinking about "what it all means." I also didn't think about structure until draft 2, and only then to keep myself from wandering too far afield from the vague guide hinted at in draft 1.

Conversely, if I'm writing something wholly imagined, it could be about anything, could be any pace/length, and so the desire for some semblance of a "unified vision" leads to a comforting (but poisonous) thematic/structural pareidolia.

My next book won't be so explicitly autobiographical, so I have to kick this habit if I ever want to finish anything else.

Three-act structure and characters-as-facets-of-theme are great ways to examine stories, but for many including me, they're clunky ways to tell stories.

I love your craft articles for this reason. A running theme is: "I've tried using [universally touted storytelling technique], but it may be fundamentally broken…"

So refreshing.

The question is: did you consciously decide to write each article as a different facet of this theme? 😉

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