Craft Skills

By Alice M. Batzel (Author, Playwright, Journalist, Poet, Freelance Writer)

When writing a story deep in suspense or mystery, I confess that I want to block off the door of my home office with crime scene tape and post a “Do not disturb” sign. When writing a romance, comedy, stage script, poetry, or an article, I need that same level of isolation, concentration, and I would still consider using the crime scene tape to get it. I’m not unlike other writers. We know of the methodical plotter who uses a detailed storyboard or extensive collection of index cards full of plot points. We also know of the relaxed writer who sits at her desk with an iced beverage, leaning backward in deep thought while waiting for inspiration to come. And when that inspiration comes (after taking a break to make a grilled cheese sandwich), the relaxed writer constructs a story with every ebb and flow of creative impulse or vision that she receives.

I would say that I’m a hybrid writer in that I work more constructively, but I like to allow change to occur, and I do keep my beverage or snack within reach. With this in mind, it’s been my experience that writing with a theme provides a constructive, focused working format. Writing with a theme provides direction, purpose, helps define a timeline for my story and characters to reach an arc that the reader will accept and need. The thematic influence also allows my creative process. But what you might not expect is that writing with a theme also can direct our lives and our goals. 

To illustrate this, here is a recent personal experience. Shortly before Thanksgiving 2019, my stake music program director asked to come to my home and meet with me. That was perplexing enough, but during that home meeting she also asked me to participate in the annual Stake Christmas music program. I was stunned. I don’t play a musical instrument, nor do I sing. I was relieved to learn that my invitation was to contribute as a writer. An invited award-winning composer/pianist would be participating in the program, and he, along with a guest vocalist, would be performing one of his latest compositions. I was provided with the lyrics and asked to write a narrative story that would introduce the concluding number in the program. I reviewed the words, felt that I could provide what was needed, and accepted the invitation.

In the following days, amidst the typical holiday preparations and festivities, I began working on the story I needed to write. I had several ideas, though none came together as hoped. I realized at that point that my approach was wrong. I was trying to create a story, and that was not what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to tell the story that the Lord wanted. I prayed and asked the Lord to help me know what story it was that he wished for me to write, and I would do so. Weary from much, I then retired to bed for rest. While sleeping, I had a vivid dream as if in real time, including place, names, circumstances, characters, plot points, story arc, theme, and purpose. After awakening, I immediately went into my home office, turned on the computer, and transcribed the story as I had seen it in the dream. During the writing, I developed a couple of additional complementary points to facilitate a good flow of the story. 

In the days before the submission deadline, the story underwent five rewrites and extensive line and content editing. I worked closely with the narrator to ensure time compliance for the program. Interestingly, to meet the program’s time parameters, I ended up deleting the additional points I had previously inserted. The completed story was an accurate representation of the dream that I had received in answer to my petition to the Lord for help that I could tell the story he wanted. I felt pleased that the final edition of the story supported the lyrics of the music composition. Furthermore, the story’s message also invited the audience to come unto Christ, provided testimony of the Savior, and gave hope for eternal happiness—each point I had hoped my work would be able to achieve. 

The program narrator read the story at the appointed time, and the audience received it favorably, as did the composer/pianist and stake leadership. Since that time, the spontaneous local response has been positive and heartfelt. A similar response has been received from readers as far away as two thousand miles across the country due to sharing over the internet. Souls have been lifted and invited to come unto Christ, a testimony of the Savior shared, and hope for eternal happiness—all because I asked God for help, listened to the Spirit, followed divine direction, and used my skill and talent to support the theme. 

Having a theme can provide a vital constructive framework and anchor in all genres yet still allow the artist’s voice to be creative, authentic, and unique. It’s also applicable to music composition and performance, vocal performance, film production, visual art, graphic design, and marketing. Having a theme can also direct our lives, our goals, and reaffirm the purpose of our work. An artistic expression that reflects a particular theme and or mission statement is a powerful voice, the equivalent of a signature. 

You can read the story, “Once upon a Christmas Time,” at this link, https://www.alicembatzel.com/once-upon-a-christmas-time. This story was written as an introduction for Garth Smith’s “Heaven’s Hallelujah,” performed at the Brigham City Utah West Stake Christmas music program on December 15, 2019.

By Josi Kilpack

What Is Theme and Why Does It Matter?

Theme can be a difficult concept to pin down and is often explained as “what the story is about.” It’s a fair enough definition except that it can confuse theme with the subject or genre. For instance, it’s easy to say your romance novel is about love or your mystery novel is about justice. That’s true, but those are not the deeper truth, which is how I define theme. Theme is what stays with the reader after the story ends; it’s what makes them look at how that deeper truth plays out in their own life or understanding of the world.

For writers, especially those starting out, theme can be a difficult concept to grasp because theme is abstract, vague and, to an extent, subjective, as opposed to concrete concepts like character, plot, rising action, or resolution. The writer could write to a theme that a reader may not see. Or the reader might see a theme that wasn’t the writer’s intention. The disparity of interpretation can make the writer ask after the point of caring about theme at all when there are so many other—easier to understand—concepts that require our attention. The reason theme matters, however, is because writing from the place of deeper truth on the part of the writer leads to a place of deeper truth on the part of the reader. Even if the theme does not translate exactly, the depth does. To write without theme is to write without the depth that leads to the resonance of your story. 

An Idea for How to Develop Deeper Truth

That deeper truth comes from you, the writer, in that it reflects your own values or curiosity or expansion. While the author is the one to determine theme, it is usually expressed through the main character—what she does and says and wants and works toward. The first part of developing theme, therefore, is to ask what belief you want to either explore or expand on in your story; what is the deeper truth you want to tell? 

One way to do this is to brainstorm early in the development of your story. There are a hundred ways to do this, and I encourage you to try a variety of methods before choosing what works for you. For me, the method that works best so far is doing word bubble diagrams, something I learned back in elementary school. So let’s say I’ve decided to write a story with the theme “Beauty for Ashes,” which is a theme I’ve used many times in my stories. I take a blank piece of paper and write that in the center of the page, then circle it. Now I’m going to ask myself what thoughts are sparked with that phrase. I draw lines coming out from that nucleus phrase and write what comes to mind.

For the sake of our example, let’s go with a center cluster that looks like this: God, overcoming hardship, delayed understanding, personal growth. I circle all those things and use them as a new nucleus to expand upon with thoughts that I associate with those words. Let’s take the “delayed understanding” angle. I draw new lines out from it that include the following associations: tragic loss, faith, overcoming hopelessness, purpose of trial. I sit back and see that “faith” connects with “God,” so I make a line between them. I also notice that “purpose of trial” relates to “personal growth” and draw a line between them. Those are interesting connections. I already know I want the main character to be a man who loses everything—like Job did. I add “Job” to “faith,” though I could have added it to “God” too, but I’m developing this “delayed understanding” angle. I think about what I know about Job and draw lines out from that new place: faithful, rich to poor to rich, lost literally everything. I look at that last part—lost literally everything: status, friends, children, wife, home, health. 

As you can see, it’s not pretty, but it’s effective. My thoughts about how to tell a “Beauty for Ashes” story is tightening in my mind. I’m going to work this exercise until I have run out of ideas to explore. I might start new pages with “Job” as the center idea or maybe “rich to poor to rich” and see where it takes me. What I’ll find is that my brainstorming is going to come back to some specific concepts. The man I have already envisioned as my main character is going to fill out and become more real. I’m going to better understand where he came from and where I want him to go. I might determine a different theme or a more focused theme, but it will likely be some version of “Beauty for Ashes.” While I’m doing this, I’m looking for a buzz inside myself, that’s how I recognize truth (it might be different for you), a sort of electric excitement as pieces come together. The entire process might take twenty minutes and one piece of paper, or might be a few hours and several papers—it’s different for each story depending on how much mining goes into finding that deeper truth. 

The Process Continues

Once I feel like I know the theme, I put it aside and start writing the story. I might need to sit back after writing a particular scene to see if it’s reflecting my theme as well as it could, but for the most part I am done with the “work” on theme. The theme might change as the story develops, meaning I might have thought I was writing “Beauty for Ashes,” but I’m actually writing “Strength Comes from Overcoming Struggle,” which is similar but a little different. I might need to go back and test that new theme in each scene to make sure it’s still consistent, but that’s all part of the process. Change is okay if it leads to a better reflection of deeper truth.

An example of changing theme is my novel As Wide as the Sky. This is a women’s fiction novel about a woman whose son has been executed for a mass shooting he committed a few years before the story starts. She goes on a journey to find the owner of a class ring she found in her son’s belongings while trying to make sense of her complicated feelings. Throughout the initial writing, I thought the story’s theme was “There is Life after Tragedy.” The story was all told through the main character’s point of view, until I encountered a character named Coach Miller. He was an old man who had recently lost his wife, and I wrote his chapter in his point of view in order to better connect with him, planning to change it back to the main characters’ point of view later on. Through that chapter I realized how stuck he was in his sadness and how well his mourning both connected with and contrasted against my main character’s loss. I couldn’t make this a duel POV story since Coach Miller was featured in such a small portion, but I let the chapter sit in his POV while I moved forward. Then I wrote another chapter in another POV character—a love interest—who was stuck in the regret of having abandoned his family years earlier. Three characters, all of them stuck. One because her son became someone she both loved and hated, one because he’d made a huge mistake he couldn’t fix, and one because the natural order of things had taken his sweetheart. Stuck for different reasons, but all of them grieving. Grief was a deeper truth for the story I had not seen until the story was almost finished. In trying to better understand these three characters, I studied up on the cycles of grief and ended up adding additional POV characters earlier in the story to reflect the different stages of grief and how people can become “stuck” in any of them. This adjustment to the theme hopefully allowed more readers to see themselves in my story and see a bigger picture of what grief looks like in its different stages. Writing and revising toward the new theme of grief also helped me to explore the deeper truth of grief as I have experienced it in my own life. Not all of my books have such a strong sense of theme, but it was cool to see how it played out in this experience and has left me with the reminder to make sure I do the work to find the deeper truth in each book.

It Won’t Be Easy, But …

Like all aspects of writing fiction, the recognition of theme is easier for some than others. Just as some writers have a natural ability for setting, some find uncovering theme to be a more organic practice. But in the same way that a writer who struggles with setting must exert the extra effort necessary to grasp it, determining theme may take some practice for those of us who don’t come to it naturally. It won’t be easy, but then no one said that writing was easy. If it were, everyone would do it. ☺ 

Practice. Read how other writers determine and include theme in their stories. Look for it in the books you read. Find that deeper truth and write it.