Just thinking about THEME

blogged by JULE SELBO

This week I was a guest on Steven Jame’s podcast: The Story Blender. It’s a weekly podcast for authors, storytellers, comedians, actors and filmmakers. I met Steven at ThrillerFest, we were on the same panel, assigned to talk about STORY.  He’s written over a dozen crime/mysteries, including the Patrick Bower series and the Travis Brock thrillers – as well as two books on the ART of writing fiction.

What writer ever tires of talking about construction of STORY?  And talking about if PLOT and STORY are totally different animals?  Or talk about what – in crime mysteries –  is most “wanted” by the reader – a CHARACTER ARC or focus on the ENGAGING PUZZLE of clues and red herrings, obstacles, dead bodies and danger.

Like a lot of panels at the writer conferences, there were four us talking about the subject. Tom Straw (famous for the Richard Castle series (which he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Castle and then there ws the tv show  – he’s written other books also) joined us too

and Boyd Morrison (he writes novels solo – as well as with his sister Beth – as well as with Clive Cussler) and we danced around personal definitions, how we make sense of STORY in our own heads, how aware we are that it’s often semantics and not disagreement of how to use STORY while preparing or executing a crime/mystery.

 

Steven and I realized we were two birds of the same feather. We both have a deep love of movies, tv series, have written screenplays – as well as love to talk story, plot, characters and  nitty-gritty things like sentence structure, paragraph structure, length of chapters, theme, dialogue,  minutiae and the big picture. So when he invited me to be on his podcast I thought – great – a place to continue our conversation.

During the podcast, Steven and I got on a micro-tangent about THEME in crime/mysteries. For some reason (in the semantics lightbulb going off in my head), the exploration of theme began to line up with the idea of DILEMMA. I tend to appreciate stories with small or large character arcs – (some coming-of-age component, some tiny or massive maturation) – and when Steven and I discussed DILEMMA, we circled around how THEME might have a correlation to the interior dilemma the protagonist is facing – and how facing the dilemma can lead to that interior growth (character arc).

Yeah yeah. More semantics. But no matter if we landed on the absolute correct words or if the off-the-cuff connection we explored might hold up in a longer examination – it’s been helpful to me as I navigate through the final chapters of 7 DAYS, A Dee Rommel Mystery (4th in the series). And as I re-read the beginning and middle chapters of 7 DAYS to make sure the through-line of the main investigations and the personal stories were holding together I kept that word in mind: Dilemma.

I don’t know about you, but THEME rises to the top for me as I work on a project. I can’t write to theme. I don’t have a sermon inside me waiting to come out. But as a Dee Rommel book progresses, I start to realize that my private investigator Dee (a woman who needs a lot of coming-of-age moments to (hopefully) realize her full potential) is taking the events of the plot and internalizing them in relation to her most recent and prevalent character dilemma. Just this morning I realized (yeah, like I said, I’m in the final chapters) that her fear of not having family, of losing someone very important in her life, is affecting all the past and new relationships she deals with in the investigation. Almost like she’s pushing people away to prove to herself she doesn’t need anyone. Or is it that she’s pushing so hard because she wants deeper commitment, but can’t help wondering if anything will be deep enough to replace the significant losses in her life?

7 DAYS, still in progress. But I love this moment. When I can go back through the pages and shape the STORY just a little bit – to allow THEME to be hinted at. Keep it always subliminal – but let it be there.