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Emil Ottoman's avatar

I'm REALLY big on theme. One of the best workshops I ever took was in 2017 with Sarah Gerard through Litreactor called "The Alchemy of Theme" (It was expensive, most of the class were severe dilettantes, and I was just there because I wanted HER opinions on theme, I already had all my own. Also, I really liked her work and wanted a crit from her.)

On the second assignment of a four week workshop when I broke down the possible thematic elements of a story so hard her only response was to the tune of "I don't know if ANYONE has ever looked at it that way, or that deeply" she pegged me as a semi-pro, or at least someone who was not fucking around (tm).

The interaction in most of the workshop was so bad (Rob Hart was still running the workshop coordination program for Litreactor at that point and I even brought up the lack of interaction with him, most of the class I felt like a man screaming alone into a void) I'm pretty sure it helped hasten her divorce and at the same time she was writing a series of articles about herself and her relationship with food, et al. for another lit site, and had started drinking a bunch of bourbon, which given how this workshop was going, I could see why. (She never did another workshop with Litreactor, she divorced her first husband, and I believe she teaches at The New School now) But anyway, the first embryonic draft of my short story Our Year came from that workshop.

She professionally ripped it to pieces in a way she did NOT treat anyone else's in the workshop (Someone pays you 500 bucks for 4 weeks of tautology you have to hedge or else it can fuck you. This is a problem with both paid independent editors, and people leading workshops, the workshop leads, the name draws, often pull their punches. A few negative student reviews can shit on your life), because I'd already signaled being there in a professional capacity. It took me from 2017 until 2024 to finish it, finally giving it a much deserved spit shine of an ending on a final sectional rewrite when I posted it to Substack (after reading her crit about fifty million times. I noted when final crits dropped for the final week that I was the only person she ripped to shreds in a field of, I will not lie, really shit stories, but I was also the only person she punctuated the gang fucking of my short story with "I look forward to seeing this in print."

Your breakdown here is excellent. I believe that theme can be baked in (but you have to know what you're doing) or it can be emergent. (Notice how in the last abusive parenthetical I say "you have to know what you're doing." What I mean by that is YOU REALLY MUST KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING AND BE VERY INTENTIONAL ABOUT IT.) And there are shortcuts, dirty tricks, I'd know, my bag is full of them. The only problem is, you also have to know HOW TO USE THOSE AS WELL.

So there's no easy way around it.

My personal way of working usually starts with either an idea, a sentence, or a bit of imagery. Sometimes it leads somewhere, sometimes not, but a plot is just the causal chain of your story, and if you plot too tightly, you're going to find yourself at some point having veered off track, something will almost inevitably go wrong, and you've stifled the discovery process.

I do believe in form. Genres and stories have forms and expectations. We've sublimated those things to the point of knowing whether a story "works" or not, just from reading it. We're that media and narrative saturated. The issue is these expectations aren't all written down in some book somewhere (sorry anyone looking for the magic solution) but they're what we figure out the hard way. One issue I see with a lot of writers starting out is they want to immediately go into something that is on the surface simple (genre, pick one, external arch plot genre, say, basic hero story, it pops up everywhere) and try to subvert it off the blocks. The issue is 99% of the time, they're trying to subvert something done so often it's already HARD to write in an innovative way, and not only, they're also trying to subvert something everyone knows. (I wish for all beat sheets to burn eternally) So, good luck, better hope you're the literary equivalent of an undiscovered Van Gogh.

But after I have my bit of imagery, scenes I want or events I want will start to cohere, what I want is a topology of the general form and shape of the story, not a paint by numbers. I'm almost never thinking more than 20-30 pages ahead unless I'm hitting an inflection point soon and I know it. And that inflection point may turn out not to be what I thought in the first place.

(Read the Hotel pieces on my Substack. Yeah, tight zero drafts. Before the before. That was all on the fly, as I went, a year and change later, I know the topology and there is more input from things written in the inbetween, now I know I'm going to have to completely rework the story from Point A to X, but some things will remain generally in some sort of form as they have already, mostly key events, King of Killers HAS to happen, the Lobby Assault HAS to happen, Introducing The Heavies and the Russians coming to the hotel mysteriously HAS to happen, but now I know part of WHY they're there, and how they came to be there. But this requires rewriting a lot of what now reads as clunk to me in those six pieces on my Substack.)

Or, closer to the now. I wrote My Name is My Name, based on a three word prompt. Barley, Replaceable, and Banter, were the words. It took me a MONTH to get to sitting down to bang out the story. But the very first image I had in my head was actually the last scene of the story. I knew I wanted to keep that scene, specifically the last sentence, because I took it to my moms (English lit BA) and we both agreed that it sang. It was short, but it sang. Another framing came into view though, and I was able to create something more interesting in the completion of it than I would have without that scene, which, if you read the story closely, is PACKED ON WITH THE THEMES OF THE STORY in one way or another.

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Jenean McBrearty's avatar

Best lines of the essay:

"Until you know your story’s central theme(s), you don’t know your story.

It’s not the plot. Your story is never about the plot, but once you know the pattern that’s key to your story, then you can do something amazing. You can answer the question: what’s your story about?

It’s about abandonment and learning to trust again when the opportunity for love arises.

See that? See how neat and tidy and inviting that description is? That’s not what writers usually do. Their minds are stuck in the plot..."

EXCELLENT recap of theme. (posted on EKU Facebook page) However, would people read a book with the tag line:

The story is about a man who learns it is impossible to act nobly, or shamefully, without power.

Such simple words that obscure their complexity. (What kind of man, power, and definitions of nobility and shame are we talking about?) Yes, the writer should be able to answer the question, but the average reader describing the book to a customer who doesn't want to pay for a headache? Maybe not. The reason people hold on to emphasizing plot over theme, I suspect,is the inability of people to be objective; they'd rather hold onto stereotypes, and emotionalism because its safer and more comfortable. And that's probably best because, to destroy the moral universe of the average person is to destroy the pretenses they maintain in order to function is an irrational world.

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