Develop Story Themes

1. About the Workshop: Hi everyone, my name is Barbara events and welcome to this workshop on how to design really compelling themes for your stories. I am so excited you are here. Things are such an important part of a story. They bind the story together. They help give you these through threads that the reader can make connections with or the viewer can make connections with. Their. One of the things that really does actually help with plot development, because you can have a lot of ideas for your plot and your story in your head. But when you really call them down to the ones that are important, themes will help you do that. The INS help with character development. They help with the reader getting in depth with your story and connecting with it on a, on a deeper level. So this workshop is designed to help you just bring all of that designing of your theme to life. We're going to look at what really makes a good story theme. And then we're going to look at how you, how you start to solidify what my themes are. How do I choose my themes? What are the kinds of themes that I might have? And then how do I still solidify the message behind that theme? Because there's much more to it than just say, pick a theme. You need to pick a message that goes with that theme and then use that as you go through the story itself. So we have to choose the planning of that theme, the message of that beam. And then we have to say, well, how do I either build a story around that theme or work that theme into a story idea that I already have. We will then look at how you use them to go forward in designing characters and how you use themes to develop characters, and then how you use those themes to develop your plot. We're also going to look at symbolism and motif because those two things are different. And we want to make sure that you're using and choosing them properly for your stories will also look at how you can manifest that theme through things like dialogue. Themes really are such a critical and exciting part of the story there. One of the things that have you think about talking with people and falling in love with books where you debated about things, whether it was in a classroom or just with friends. Themes often come into things. You use C nuances of things. And as a writer there, so important because you are telling your story for a reason. And it could be that you're telling that story because it seems like a fun story. It could be that you're telling that story because you have a message that you want to tell. But when you start to write, even if you're just writing by the seat of your pants. What you find is that the story that you are telling, certain themes can present themselves to you even. Then as you go through it, you end up realizing that through the writing of your story, you are not only expressing your thoughts, your beliefs about the world to other people, but you are learning what you believe about them as you go. And that's one of the really exciting things for me about this. I personally love this very much because it's very, very much. A lot of the inspiration that I get when I'm doing writing is based on themes and based on concepts that I want to play with in my head. And so I really do think that thinking about the themes that you want to write is so critical because it helps you so much. Really does help you develop the characters, really does help you develop your plot because you're playing with these ideas in your head and you're working them out. So it's a remarkable how much this workshop actually will help you with your character and your plot development. As usual, it comes with class notes that you can follow along with all of the video lessons. It also comes with extensive workbook that will help you immediately put into practice the things that you learn here. You know me. I don't want to just teach you concepts. I want you to just hit the ground running and get your stories designed and written. So this workbook will really, really help you with that. I'm so excited about this workshop is a really fun one for me to teach. I hope that you'll sign up. And I can't wait to learn about the wonderful things you right. 2. How Theme Affects a Story: Alright, before we begin, just a couple of thoughts. If you've watched any of my courses before, you know, I believe in guidelines, not rules, anything. Anytime you find a rule about writing, I assure you there is a great example of literature that totally breaks that rule. So these are guidelines to help you, But don't get stuck on the rules. The other thing that I would say is that while this course is about planning your themes, and I think that's a very helpful thing to do. Don't get so hung up on it and caught up on that. You can write your stories. If you get stuck on that, Don't stop. That's part of what people get into the issue with, with writer's block. Keep going, write your story a bit, brainstorm, think about plot and then you can come back to thinking about your themes. It isn't uncommon for a theme to emerge in your first draft yourself, when you're writing a novel or a screenplay, you're writing more than one draft. So if you don't feel ready to think about your theme, if you like, gosh, I just don't know. I know what my story is, I know what my characters are, but I'm still not sure after this course about themes, don't stress about it. Work on your story. As you do that, keep these lessons in mind. You will probably start to see a theme emerge. Then when you go back on your second draft, you can really think about how you're going to be intentional, putting theme into your stories. I do have class notes for you to download for this course, and I think it will help you so much if you have those in front of you as we proceed, It's going to enumerate a lot of the specifics that we'll talk about in this course. So it's good for you to have them in front of you. If you haven't downloaded those, please take a moment to take a pause and go over and download them. If you're not sure where they are, please read the course description because it will tell you where to find them. Very often if someone asks us, Oh, What's your story about? We might say something like, Well, it's about a very wealthy girl who goes off to a boarding school and then her father dies and she becomes a pauper. So that's a surface level action. If you've watched my plot 101 course or any of my plotting courses, you know that there is a surface action that's the literal action that's going on. But then there's a story under that. There's an understory. That understory is more about the character transformations. It's what the story is really about. And this is also true of themes. Themes is what your story is really about. So for example, in a little princess, the surface plot is that a wealthy girl goes off to a boarding school. Her father dies, she becomes a pauper and she is now at the mercy of a very unkind, unfeeling woman who runs the boarding school, who absolutely hates her. But the plot itself, if I were to say what's the story, rarely about what the story is about what it means to be a lady. And if that's connected to wealth or if that comes from something else. It's a story about that. Here we have a woman teaching young women how to be ladies. There's a girl who she deals with when she is wealthy. But once this girl becomes a pauper, Ms. Mentioned, the woman running the boarding school is absolutely terrible to her. Ms. Mentioned doesn't behave like a lady at all throughout many parts of this story. While Sarah, a lady when she is wealthy and she is a lady when she is not. So this is all about what it means to be a lady. What it means to be someone who has royalty. What is royalty is royalty about money, whereas royalty or demeanor, it's all about behavior and status. That's what the story is really about. And those are the themes of the story. Let's look at another example and please forgive me if I looked down. I do teach from notes. In the case of Tequila Mockingbird, someone might say, Well, what's your story about? The author might say, oh, it's about a girl growing up in the South. Now that's very surface level, right? That is a surface level statement. It's girl growing up in the South. That actually doesn't tell me very much as a reader. I don't know the plot from that. I know there's a character and I know where she is, but that doesn't tell me much. So then you might get more specific with how you try to describe your story. And you might say, well, it's a girl growing up in the South whose father defends a man on trial. Now you've told me more. You've told me there's a girl who told me where they are and you've told me this thing that's happening or fathers defending a man in a trial. But that still doesn't really hint at what's the story about. So let's try a little bit more detailed synopsis of To Kill a Mockingbird. See if we can get more at what it's really about. We could say that it's about a girl whose worldviews are challenged when she faces the racism of her town as her father defends a black man wrongly accused of rape. Now I really have a sense of what's going on. I can read this and I know the surface story. It's about a girl in the South. There's a trial. Her father's defending a black man who was accused of rape. But it also tells me the undercurrents of the story. I can tell from that description that this is a book about race. This is a book about human rights. This is about family. There is in that description a universality of topics that I can connect with and relate to and understand that here's the depth and the meat of that story. Even if you write your stories first and you put theme to them after that first draft, your story is about themes are stories about universal experiences. These are the things that make your readers connect with your characters and with your plot. Much of the problem is that people often think of theme as an add-on. They're like, alright, I wrote my story, I have my characters now I've just got a sort of throws and theme in there and then we'll be good. That's not how it works. Theme needs to be interconnected. You can't plot your novel. Your character is properly without your themes and the end of the day, it must be woven into the heart of it. If you're having trouble thinking about what you want your theme to be, always remember this. The theme is a bit of the why, why are you writing this story? What is the message you're trying to send? If the plot answers the who, what, where, when of your story, the theme answers the why, what's the purpose, what's the meaning behind the story you're trying to tell? Sometimes when we write a theme, it includes a very distinct moral that we're trying to pass along to our readers. A very distinct lesson that we're trying to get them to learn. But lest you fear that you are going to run into something very didactic when you do writing, know that themes don't necessarily mean you're incorporating some hard and fast moral into your story. For example, you could have a story about family. And you could have in that numerous aspects of families and what families look like and what makes a good family. And in the end, it could still be somewhat nebulous to the reader, or that there are such nuanced aspects of family that it leaves readers debating about what was it good family and what looks good and who had the best family's situation. You don't have to have a hard and fast moral if you've ever watched the film Casablanca. One of the themes and Casa Blanca is luck. People talk about luck all through that story. But the film itself doesn't offer us some kind of moral or rule about luck. You have people who say I make my own luck. You have people who don't believe in luck. You have people who think things are random, all kinds of things, but there isn't some sort of definitive moral about luck. So don't worry that you're going to necessarily run that direction. You don't have to be that moralizing as you write these. 3. Solidify the Authorial Message: Now when we think about theme, there are really two components to it. There is the thematic idea that's very general and broad. And then there's the thematics statement, which is you as the author, what you are trying to say about that theme. Now, if you read articles or books or things that they talk about theme, a lot of people will address theme and story as the thematics statement. So don't get hung up on those terminologies. But I want you to understand that there is a difference because I think it helps you in the planning your themes. For the purposes of this class, I want you to think about theme as a central idea that's discussed in the book, separate from any kind of commentary that you as the author are making about that theme to go back to, To Kill a Mockingbird. Themes in that book include education, social equality, racism, bravery, the law. All of those things are thematic throughout that story. But those are broad, you know, to say this is a book with a theme about racism that in and of itself doesn't say my commentary about racism. You then have to go into find what that is. Well, that's helpful to you down the road as we will see to be able to break it down that way. Now the thematics statement is what gets closer to a moral. But again, you don't have to moralize as you do this, but it's the message that you want readers to take away from your story. So how do you feel about race, the Tequila Mockingbird? Certainly you don't walk away from that book thinking that racism is a good thing, you walk away with this idea that racism is certainly can be connected to a lack of education, but it doesn't have to be because we see people who are very educated, who are racist, and we see people who are not educated, who are racist. We see the damage the racism does to children, societies, to families. So we're looking at very specific lens of the awfulness that racism is. That's her commentary on it. One of the most important things you want to remember about your themes is it is far less about what you put off onto your readers to believe. It's four or less about you just pressing at them saying, This is what I believe, this is what's right. And it's far more about drawing, drawing those feelings out of the reader. And you do that by letting them experience, experience the story, and learn lessons from that. Just like we would in life if when we were children, our parents always said, Don't do that, do this, don't do that, do this. What does the child do? A child gets rebellious, a child gets frustrated. A child says, I'm going to do it my way. I don't care what you say. Children and adults, people at all ages, but we have to learn things for ourselves. We have to go through an experience and say, Oh, that didn't work, and then we try something new. This is what you want to do with your readers rather than saying racism is bad, racism is bad. Show them how racism was damaging over here. Show them how racism damaged something over here. Show them how racism can be as much for someone who's wealthy as someone who is poor. Let them experience the consequences of racism through your story. This is what makes it engaging. This is what makes the reader feel like they come, they came to conclusions themselves. That's what you want to weave into an build into your story. Now when it comes to quantity of themes, you can have more than one theme. Many, many stories do, but usually there is one or two predominant themes in the book. If you have too many things going on at once that you're trying to all keep it the same level, it gets to be too much. It's just too much happening in the soup and then people can taste the individual flavors. In the next video, I want us to look at how do you actually go about choosing themes for your stories. 4. Choosing and Planning Your Themes: When it comes to choosing themes for your stories, the first thing I want you to remember is that your theme doesn't have to be original. I have seen so many people torment themselves to come up with some kind of original theme. But the truth is that those great universal themes are the best. They're universal and lasting and they turn up in literature all the time for a reason. What's going to make your story unique is your take on that theme, your voice, your characters, your plot. There are countless stories of love wins, love, love triumphs. That's a theme, a theme in a lot of works, and they're wonderful. We don't get tired of a love triumphs theme. And those stories can seem as different as night and day to one another because of the characters, because of the way the story is told, because of the authorial voice. So don't worry so much that you don't feel you have a totally unique theme. Now, as I've mentioned, there are various ways to go about finding the themes for your stories. If you're feeling pressure, especially after you've read a bit about it and thought on it and watched this course. And you still just don't really know what themes you want for your story. As I mentioned, don't get caught up on that. Go ahead, work on your characters, work on your plot, but keep these lessons in the back of your head and start to try to ident, make, make identifications, make connections across your characters and across events that happened in your plot. Because very often, even if you have some of these questions that we'll go over it in the back of the back of your head. As you're writing, you'll start to go, aha, that's a theme. So that's one way to do it. But what I want to focus on for most of this class is actually what you would do if you are taking more time to plan your theme out in advance. If you know your character or your story and you have a strong sense of that, but you're not sure about your theme. There are specific questions that you can ask yourself to help sort of find your way and I'd like to go through those. Now, the first question that you can ask yourself is simply, what is the lesson that you want people to take from the story? Very often, you have something that you want to say, even if you haven't necessarily thought about it, you take a little bit of time to sit down. And if you think about the events of your plot, that there's, there's very often a lesson there. If you had been writing Lord of the Rings and you said, well, my, my story is about this habit with this seemingly impossible mission to get a ring to Mordor and throw it in and save, save the world. That is the surface of the story. If you were to look at your plot points as you went through out that story, you'd say, well, you know, this, this story is actually quite a lot about heroism and what it means to be a hero. And is a hero necessarily someone with a big sword? Or could a hero be a little hobbit who doesn't believe he can do it. That's a theme in that story is very strong one. So you can generally start to identify things when you look at those. So consider what you, what you see when you're writing these things. Where, where are the lessons you're seeing as your story goes? Or if you're writing characters, you generally know, this is my protagonist and I gave her these traits that I think our character strengths. And I gave her these things that I think our character weaknesses. Well, why do you think those things are weaknesses? What are you trying to say by giving her those weaknesses? What are you trying to say by giving her those strengths? You know, it's a matter of questioning the decisions that you made for plot and character. Why did I give those things? Why, what was I trying to say in making those choices for my plot and my characters. This is one of the best questions you can ask to find your theme because you're already doing all of that character and plot development. So it's just a matter of sort of getting metta on yourself and watching your decisions and why you're doing them. The other question that you can ask yourself is, what is the emotion that you want the readers to take away from this story? Do you want your readers to be hopeful in glad and full of optimism at the end of the story. Do you want them to feel sad? You know, and this doesn't go for the story as a whole. It can go for a specific scene. What do you want the reader to feel at the end of this scene or at the end of that scene or the end of this chapter where I want my reader to feel tense. I want my reader to feel sad. Okay, well, why, why do you want them to feel tense? If you've just had a girl who failed her test that she's trying to get into university or saying something there. We're saying something about that. If you've had a girl who's having a fight with her mother, and they've had a terrible route. And the girls now often her room and she's debating, crawling up the window and running away. What are you saying about family or are you telling me family is important? Family is not important. Well, that's going to be related to the emotion. If you want your reader to feel sad that they had a fight, then you're telling me that you think family is very important and that it's a shame when it isn't working out. But if your messages, families actually not necessary. Family isn't about blood relations, It's about other things. Then you might have a different emotion you want the reader to feel. Always be asking yourself, why am I making the choices that I'm making? And what is the emotion that I want my reader to feel? It's very helpful to have a list of universal themes in front of you. There are many available online for you, but just to run through a few so you understand that things were talking about some of the most universal themes in literature include love, death, good versus evil. Trust. And trust could be a lot of things. Trust could be coming of age. Coming of age stories are often about trust. Trust in other people, trust in yourself, trust in the unknown. So each of these universal themes we are looking at has a lot of nuance, a lot of potential sub-themes takes on that theme that you could go and use. Power and corruption, survival, courage and heroism, prejudice, war, individual versus society, fear, responsibility, redemption. All of these are universal themes that you could think about including. And so if you are not sure what you want the themes to be for your story, just go online, Google list of universal themes. There are loads and read through them because chances are some will really strike it or hot very quickly and you'll say, yes, my story is about that. The other thing that you can do when you're looking at those universal themes, start to tease out, pick several. Don't limit yourself. Be broad. It'd be like, well, why stories about love? But it's also about courage and it's also about bravery, and it's also about survival, and it's also about power. I mean, you might very well find that you feel like a lot of those themes hit your story. So in that case, just choose those, start broad. That's alright. But then when you have that list of themes, say you chose ten, tenths an awful lot for your story. But say you chose ten, start there, and then you'll put those into columns. And there's a worksheet to help you do this. But you'll put those into columns. And then under it you will say, alright, how and where does love show up? How and where does power and corruption show up? We'll start to write these things down. As you write them down, you will actually, you'll find, you'll get brainstorm ideas for your plot and your characters. But you'll also find that some are weightier than others, that some you have more to say about than others. And when you do that, those natural ones that are your most important themes can very well emerge. Additional questions that you will want to ask to help find these themes. And again, all of these questions in the chart, there are many ways to go about finding that the aims of your stories. So this class is designed to offer you a variety of ways to come at this. Some work better for some, some work better for others. You'll find some of these questions you have lots to say about. You'll find other questions you really don't have much to say. That's alright. Just work through them and see which ones work for you and help inspire you in the themes that you want to write. One helpful question to ask is, why do you want to tell this story? Now this is different than the lesson you want to read it to take away the Y is, what made you want to tell this story. What made you want to tell an adventure story about a girl on a new planet. You know, and often you'll find that it wasn't just, oh, I think science fiction is interesting. You're like, well, I've dealt with difficulties in my life with survival and getting by and feeling like I don't have the resources to write this with a creative and fantasy way to address what it feels like to survive in real life, in the life that we're living. Well, that statement right there tells you what your theme is. Your theme is about survival and you're writing it because you think survival can be hard but doable, and you really can't survive if you don't find some other people to help you or whatever your lessons are. But asking yourself, why do I want to write this? Very often help you come up with what your theme is. Another question that can help you as simply asking what you think are the most important things in life and why. Some of these questions are really just about getting to know yourself better. Because when you know your own values and your own beliefs, you often find that those are exactly the things that you're writing into your stories. So what do you value the most? What do you think makes life the most worthwhile? And why do you think that? You can also ask yourself the same question about virtues. What do you think are the best, most virtuous traits a person can have, and why do you think them? And what do you think society d values the most in virtues, not just what virtues do you think are the most important, but which ones do you think society ignores? Because very often there's a gap there and you're trying to send a message about that in your writing. What do you think the best strengths a person can have are, and what are the worst vices? And that is different than virtues because a strength could be, I'm great at running, but that's not a virtue. If you're not sure about virtues and strengths, I have courses on character strengths and character values and beliefs. Both of those actually get into differences between virtues and strengths and I recommend those. You could also asked yourself that if you could change the world and make it a better place, what would you change? And the last question you can ask that will help you immensely as just issues, whether they're political, social, religious, all kinds, but what issues most touch your heart, most get under your skin and bother you. It could be things like child welfare, the environment, infidelity, homelessness, politics, human rights, all kinds of things. But what are the issues that most get under your skin and you want to find answers to, okay, so now having reflected a bit on the sorts of questions you can ask yourself when you know your story and you know your characters, but you don't know your themes. Let's take just a brief moment and talk about how you go about finding your story and your characters. If you rather know what your themes are. 5. Building a Story Around a Theme: When you know something that you want to write about, but you don't yet have characters, are stories fleshed out to do so? One of the most helpful things that you can do is come up with a map and outline a mind map for yourself in which you just do a lot of brainstorming about those themes. So what you would want to do is go okay, I know what my theme is or I know what my themes are. Now let's now just start to go. How could this be manifesting itself? Brainstorm all kinds of situations. If you generally know a character you have in mind, put that character in different situations if you're exploring the theme of family, say, well, how would I explore that theme of my character had a big family? What if my character didn't really have a family? How would she feel then put your character in a lot of different situations as they relate to that theme. You might have just bits of dialogue that pop into your head. Just things that are very abstract. You might think of a setting that you're suddenly like, well that, that setting people, that people around a table at Thanksgiving, that's very, That's very family to me or whatever it is, you're going to get lots of random ideas. She's want to put those down, get those down. You'll start to see connections emerging. When you do, you'll start to winter these things out. But first, just get them down on a brainstorming page on a mind map where you can then start to go patching them out further. So if you're starting very broadly and you all you know is I want to write about family. Then you want to ask yourself things like, well, what do I want to say about family? What's my opinion about family? And then you want to look at what those opinions are and take them. And then you want to construct characters who embody that theme or whose behaviors or life situations addressed that theme. So if you are writing a story about family, you might have a character who has a large, warm, conversational, happy family. And you might write another person who was an only child and whose family doesn't talk and they don't communicate, but they love each other, but they don't talk, they don't communicate. You might write a character who's an orphan and doesn't have a family and doesn't understand what that is because they've not experienced it. You might write people who are independent and feel like they don't need family, and other people who rely on family too much. So what are all the kinds of characters you could use to say something about family? You won't necessarily use them all, but you're just brainstorming at this point ways characters could manifest family in a story. Well, once you've done this, you want to then go in and hone in on the ideas that mean the most to you, the characters who stand out the most to you and then start to construct a plot around them. Plot is all about characters encountering obstacles and overcoming them. So when you're thinking about what the obstacles for your character would be, you want to say, what are the obstacles that relate somehow to family? And it doesn't necessarily always have to be something totally obvious like, okay, well, all my obstacles have to be when protagonists dealing with their family members or something. No, it could be other obstacles, but they still somehow come in contact with family. For example, if you have a character who has that big joyful family and she has a job. She's really trying to get ahead on her job, so she starts to not be able to attend family events, which impacts her relationship with her family. Now she's having to navigate and learn a new way of being a member of her family. It's alright for her in your authorial perspective to want this job and to work at this job, and to pull away a little bit. But you don't want to ignore your family. Here we have a protagonist who's learning through the plot, through maybe pulling away too much or through maybe pulling away not enough and missing opportunities, or through getting a boyfriend and spending time with her and not with her sisters anymore, whatever. Through these experiences, you have a character who's learning what it means to renegotiate and find her relationship with her family. That's why knowing that theme in advance can be so helpful with your plot. So that's a way for you to start going about thinking of your theme and then working that into a story. In the next video, I want to touch briefly on genre fiction and themes. 6. Theme and Genre Fiction: Another great way to come up with themes for your stories is simply to consider the genre fiction that you are writing. Now, if you're writing a more literary style, the world is your oyster. All kinds of themes in literary, but when it comes to genre very often, by definition, genre addresses certain kinds of themes that are many lists out there that will tell you a bit about the kinds of things that you find in different genres. So you'll want to make sure you understand the rules and the ins and outs of the genre in which you are writing. Because that will help you sort of provide you with a list of themes that were really suit your genre well. For example's sake or romance genre often has the themes that are about love, friendship, intimacy, human connection. Whereas something like a Western is very much about freedom and survival, good versus evil, right versus wrong. War stories are very often about courage, honored, Safety, survival. So those are just the frequent themes that come up in those genres that's going to really help you narrow things down for your stories. So I recommend taking a look at those lists so your story might not fit into genre. But if it does take advantage of that, you are not being boring adhering to your genre. That's the whole point of genre fiction. In the next video, I want us to talk about theme and developing your characters. 7. Connecting Theme and Character: As we mentioned earlier, theme is so deeply connected to your character. Your characters are characters development. So it is very important that you take the time to understand how your character growing in relation to the themes you choose when you build your character arc in relation to your theme. That's one of the great ways that you really intimately connected the character to the plot. So for example, Casa Blanca. You want to think about your characters and think about that arc. Say you have someone like Rick from Casablanca. And he's bitter. He's resentful. He's looking out only for himself. He's at a troubled, frustrating experiences in the past relating to love and that sports that's made him just lock himself inside of himself and not really care about with people. That kind of character lends itself to themes of sacrifice. And someone who has a need for human interaction and love. A theme of letting go of the past. And so you have to say, well, look at my character, look at that arc. These are themes that I see in that. So let me think about developing those themes through his character arc. When you plan your stories in that fashion, you will find that developing your themes is totally connected to developing your characters and vice versa. So how do you go about choosing the best themes for your characters? Several ways, you can look at your character's goals. So in that situation, which you'll do is you'll sit down, you will list your character's core goals, their motivations for the story. In Rick's case, it's things like keeping to himself, earning a lot of money and surviving. That's, those are his goals at the beginning of that story. So what are my character's goals? You then want to list themes that connect with those goals. So his goal is earning money. So themes about what money buys you or what money doesn't buy you, would matter survival. What does it mean to survive? What does it mean to live? What keeping to yourself? Is it better to keep to yourself or is it better to be vulnerable and have relationships? All of those types of themes are connected to your character's goals. So you want to look at a character's goals. You also want to look at a character's flaws because our flaws are as a character, one of the things that we're grappling with throughout the story. Yes, you want your character has strengths, and that's great. But that's not what makes an interesting story. What makes it interesting story is a character who has to overcome obstacles, physical obstacles, but obstacles also within himself that he's battling through inside of himself. And he must overcome those obstacles inside of himself if he wants to overcome the obstacles out there in the world. So you want to also think about your character's flaws. How your character changes is what's going to be deeply connected to the thematics statement of your story. When you think of a story Pride and Prejudice, you think of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Dorsey, both of whom have their prejudices, but Elizabeth Bennett in particular, thinking that Mr. Dorsey is prejudice, but she's not. And of course then she has to go through experiences to learn that she indeed has prejudices of her own and what prejudices are and how to see them. So through Elizabeth Bennet finding her way internally, we have the story's main theme itself. To that end, there are specific questions that you can ask Related to that character arc, related to the overcoming that your character has to do that will help you discover and write your themes. These include just asking, who is my character at the beginning of the story? Because again, if you've watched any of my character developing courses, and in fact, I have a character course all about writing a character arc that I recommend watching. If you've not watched that, if you watch this course and then you watch that course, that's going to really help you craft not only a great character, but themes that go along with that character. But you want to know who is your character at the beginning of the story because we want your character to change. Who is she at the beginning of the story? Then you want to know what, how do the story events that are happening shape my character for better or for worse? Sometimes, a story event makes our character take a step back or characters don't always do the right things. So how does my heart on my plot events shaped my character, turning them into a better person or a worse person in some ways. What are my characters strengths, because your themes can also address character strengths and saying, Look, there was this very noble person. I think nobility is a good thing. See how his being noble resulted in these other good things. That's part of it. What floors do your character has, as we talked about? What are my character's values and the lies that my character believes. Your character flaws are directly connected to the lies that your character believes if you have not watched my character's flaws course or my course on character values and beliefs. Both of these courses, we'll get into this, but our characters make bad decisions because there are things they believe that aren't true. And when you know what those are, that will help you find your thematic statement. If, for example, Frodo, frodo is given a ring and he's going to try to get it tomorrow. But in truth, in the beginning, he doesn't know that he can do it. He thinks I'm just a habit. I can't I can't get the ring to mortar. That's a lie that Frodo believes. And what does he find? He finds actually know you can, you can get it to Mordor rig in Casa Blanca, says and beliefs, if you are vulnerable, you're just gonna get hurt. And it's better to live not in relationship with people, and not get hurt. But what does he learn? No, it's better to be vulnerable and to get hurt. That hurt makes you more full human being. So what are the lies that your character believes? Just as you want to know who your character was at the beginning of the story, you want to know your characters at the end of the story, because that's what's going to change. Rick goes from being who's very someone who is very closed off to someone who is open to relationships, again, emotionally vulnerable again, and because of those things, willing to go fight for people again. So what, what are you saying, that story you're saying, well, it's better to be emotionally vulnerable. And when you do that, you actually make yourself more available to help the world, to help people, and to live a fuller life. So again, you find your theme by looking at this character arc. When you look at your character, the end of the story, you want to ask yourself, what does my character gained or lost? What has Rick gained? He has gained personal relationships. He's gained a stronger sense of mission. He's lost their depression that he's had. He's lost some of his armor that he's put up around himself. He also loses his love and has to live with some heartache again over that, but there's a pride in it. He's also found his love again because he has understood better why she made certain decisions she made that hurt him. What does my character gained or lost? When you start to delve into these nuanced questions, you will find the meaning and the themes that emerge for you. Another way that you can look to characters to find theme is to look at a character's wants and to characters needs. Characters have both wants and needs. Often in a story, sometimes those things are the same, but very often they are different. In Casa Blanca, rick wants to make money. He wants to be left alone. He wants to just stay where he is and make a profit off of people. What he needs to be a more full human being is to become emotionally vulnerable, to forgive, to open himself up again, and to start thinking just of himself. In this way, what you see when you identify a character's wants and then what a character actually really should have a needs. You will see that the ones are more of the plot. The wants are things that the character is grabbing for to move forward with the plot, but the needs, the needs or your theme. This is a story about a man who needs to forgive, who needs to be vulnerable, who needs to care about other people and not just himself to get over his depression. That's what, that's what this story is really about. So look at your characters wants and your characters needs. And that will also help you come up with themes. Again, just a variety of different ways that you can go about trying to discover what your themes are. You find what works for you. And everything we're talking about here is just as germane for your protagonist as it is for your other characters. If you have a theme about forgiveness, then show me numerous characters who embody or act upon the concept of forgiveness in different ways. That's what makes a story Rich. When you just give me one character with one perspective about forgiveness, it's when I see different facets of forgiveness, different interpretations of forgiveness, different kinds of forgiveness manifested in your story through different characters and through different plot points and plot events. That's what makes this notion of forgiveness nuanced. And this is in part, what will keep you from having a didactic, moralizing plot, because I'm seeing all the nuances of the concept of forgiveness. Even while you as an author have an overarching lesson, you're trying to teach me about forgiveness. I'm seeing a lot of nuance in the forgiveness. That's what makes me go Well, it's a little bit of this and it's a little bit of that. And I'm not sure if I agree with this and I think for giving us a little bit of that, you get to these discussions with your friends over a book and the big aha, but you remember that scene in Chapter two. That's the kind of thing you get into when you start to waive the theme into all of your characters. So you want to go through the things that we're talking about with all of your characters, even your minor characters. You don't have to spend as much time on them, but you should know how they're embodying that theme. Alright, in the next video, I want to touch on symbolism and motif as they relate to your theme. 8. Symbolism and Motif: Very often, as we are writing, we also have symbols or motifs that occur in our writing and those things connect with our theme. So I wanted to take just a little bit of time to touch on those to make sure that you're weaving those properly into your stories. It can very often be helpful once you've chosen what your theme is. To choose symbols, to choose motifs to something that represents that theme. You don't necessarily have to do that, but this actually really will help you in the writing of your stories. So it can be a person, it can be an object. You think of Lord of the Rings. There's this theme of power, and you have this ring. This ring represents power. It represents a corrupting force in the world. So that's one way to think about it in To Kill a Mockingbird. There's a theme of innocence, and that's the theme of a Mockingbird. So while the Mockingbird itself, we don't see mockingbirds like flying around the story. The Mockingbird is a symbol of innocence and we learn that through dialogue in the story. Briefly, what's the difference between a symbol and a motif? A symbol is something that can be shown just wants, it might just be this one thing that's a symbol and you're writing it shows up one time. You know, a rose that represents time or something, a decaying rows represents time, we see it. It's a symbol for something, but it might just show up once in your story, a motif, It's a recurring element in your story. And that motif could be something like an image. It could be something like a rose. Rose, roses might just turn up again and again in your story, you think of the film American beauty. Roses really sort of represented his wife. They reminded him of his wife when she was young. And so roses kinda turn up and turned up in the story. Motif can be something like that. It could be a phrase that comes up again and again. It could be a situation people continually find themselves in. So you might have someone who is going through numerous trials. He's on trial. He goes to one trial, goes through another trial. He's being judged to left and right. It's being judged by people who's on trial with his judged by his family because they don't like his behavior. He is judged by his brother. All these forms of judgment without that becomes a motif because it's a situation in which a man constantly finds himself being judged in the story. So it's something that is turning up again and again and again. And your work, sometimes a motif is something very broad, overarching, if you think of George RR Martin's, a Song of Ice and Fire, seasons play into that so much winter, spring thing that he has going on and those, it's very broad theme. But some themes and motifs are smaller than more nuanced. They're more seemingly trivial. And that could be just something like, you know, if you've ever watched Looney Tunes with the roadrunner and the coyote, where the Roadrunner always gets the best of the coyote somehow, that's a motif. We just know it's going to happen. The coyote is going to try something and instead of hurting the Road Runner, he's going to hurt himself. That's a motif in that cartoon. Symbolism and even motif. But a symbol of something is a way of using an object or an entity or a person to represent something much broader. So if you think of say, example for a fairy tale, the woods in a fairy tale often represents something very like mystery. And what's going on, like when we get to the woods suddenly we're not sure. It's all mysterious. If you're in the town, It's not particular to the woods. It's like what happens the woods in the wilderness as it were. If you think back to the Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald, a lot of symbolism and motif into his writing, The Great Gatsby being no exception. And if you remember that story, there's that green light that's at the end of the Buchanan's doc. And it's much more than just a green light for Gatsby, he sees that green light and he's thinking of wealth. He's thinking of society, being a member of society. The American dream, which he imposes all of those beliefs in fact, right onto Daisy Buchanan. But, but that's what the green light, green light is. It's a motif and the story because the green light keeps coming up. But it's also a symbol in the story because it represents something else for Jay Gatsby. So do you see the difference? The green light in The Great Gatsby? It comes up again and again. We see the green light. He notices the green light, so it's a sort of green light, green light, green light. It comes up a lot. That makes it a motif. Just literally seeing the green light without it representing anything at all. Just a motif because it keeps coming up. But it's also a symbol because for Gatsby, it represents that American dream. It represents wealth, status, all of these things that he's been working to achieve. So in that book, the green-light serves the function both of motif and of symbol. Now a repeating motif can certainly be assemble if it's something that is representing something else. So if the woods keep coming up in my story, but you're using the woods to represent the wilderness and mystery and the place where you go, where there are no rules, then what your motif is, is also a symbol. So it's up to you. Sometimes you'll just have motifs that you think are pretty interesting and you just want them in your story. Sometimes you want symbols, but these are the things that make your story feel cohesive throughout. It isn't just that you have a great character and plot, although that's essentially you can't do without it. But also it's all these nuanced little decisions that we see these through threads happening. And that's what makes your story feel connected and rich. Then what's, what makes your viewers or your readers want to delve into this meat you've given them and say, What's going on here? What do I think of all of these nuanced ideas? So how do you go about developing these symbols and these motifs in your writing? I have some questions you ask, true to form. The first thing that you want to think about is the theme. What is the theme that you're symbol represents? So we've already been talking about themes. You know what your themes are. When you choose your symbols. How do those symbols relate to your theme? They should be connected. So you don't want to just choose a random symbol. It should connect back to your theme. You also want to think about the form of that symbol. Is that symbol an object? Is it a person? Is it the weather? Is it setting? What form is your symbol taking? What's the significance of that symbol? Some symbols are more important than others in a story. That's alright. They shouldn't all be on the same level. Just like if you were baking something, you would put in exactly the same amount of ******. Every kind of spice, you'd have more sugar, you'd have less salt. You have different levels of your spaces. Well, the same is true for your story. So, you know, how important is this symbol? Is it a symbol only for the protagonist? In the case of The Great Gatsby or American Beauty, where the rose is really our symbol for the protagonist, the green light is really a symbol for Jay Gatsby. He sees it as something, or is it a symbol that represents the overarching world? In the case of say, Lord of the Rings, that ring is a symbol for everyone. It's not just that Frodo sees it a certain way. Everyone does. So you want to think again, what is the theme that my symbol represents? What's the form that it takes, its significance or who it applies to? You also want to look at the frequency of that symbol. Is it something that you can show once? Or is it something you want to make into more of a motif and show numerous times? And the last question you want to ask yourself is the timing. When you choose for that symbol to appear matters? Does it appear at the right time for me to connect it to the theme it's associated with. When you look at the Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby looks at the green light and notices the green light at specific moments when he has just interacted with Daisy, where he's talking with Nick Carraway about his dreams, about his goals. He might be dialoging about loving daisy or this or that. And then we see the green light. We're not gonna be able to make the connections between your themes and your symbols. If you don't do that, if Jay Gatsby, whenever he talks about his American dream or if he's looking off into the green light or whatever. We see the green light, then we're going to know Greenlight American dream. Greenlight American dream. If the American dream, if you pick the green light to show up as the American dream. We start seeing the green light in a scene with Daisy where Jay Gatsby's not even around, then we're not going to say that's a symbol, that's for Jay Gatsby. And we're not going to say that's necessarily the American Dream. You need to specifically focus it for. It's like a light. You know, when you're focusing it on the right thing. So you have to choose when you're going to show that symbol. So again, as you design your symbols and your motifs with the theme that are attached to the form. It will take the significance or who it's important to, the frequency of it. And when you type it into your plot, if you think about all of those things, you will really weave that in well. Now when it comes to trying to brainstorm what those symbols are, the world is your oyster, but you can look at the real-world, things like, like stop signs or close read. Often means love or it often means blood and violence. Stop signs means something specific. Look at the emojis on your phone. Symbols means certain things. You can use those symbols in your story, but you can also come up with your own symbols and brainstorm things that are unique to you. The green light in The Great Gatsby, that was something very specific to that story. It made it very interesting. So you're welcome to just Daydream things that you choose to make a symbol for yourself. Now, if you choose to make a symbol specifically for your story, the thing you want to avoid is telling me like, okay, the green light means the American Dream. Don't do that. If you have to do that in your store, you have not written that symbol well, into your story, people will feel that they won't resonate with them. So you need to weave it in. You need to not tell me what that symbol means. You need to work it into your plot to your characters in your dialogue. Alright, in the next video, let's look at working theme into our stories through character, dialogue. 9. Expressing Theme Through Dialogue: One of the best ways that you can explore theme in your stories is actually through the dialogue your character has with other characters. And again, to be very clear, this doesn't mean that, oh, I'll just have my character is telling me what something is, what the theme is. No, you don't want your characters doing that. It just wants to be a natural thing that we learned. So your characters cannot sort of sideways preached to your reader through dialogue. You don't want that. And which you also don't want is your characters to sort of mimic your opinion about a theme. As we mentioned, your characters should all have different perspectives about a theme so that we get lots of ideas of different takes on that theme. Make sure that you're having a variety of there when you do this dialogue. When it comes to actually writing the dialogue, there are several components of it that will make it meaningful, will make it helpful to you. So when you're thinking about your dialogue scenes, you want to think first and foremost, of course, what's the topic of the dialogue? What are they talking about? And then you want to say, Alright, Jay Gatsby's talking to Nick Carraway about Daisy Buchanan. You want to say, what is the information that is revealed from the dialogue? We learn things about Jay Gatsby. He talks with Nick Carraway. We learn about Jay Gatsby's background. We learn about the things that he really wants, about his personality, the way he talks, and the things that he says, We get a stronger sense of who he is just by virtue of some of the opinions that he has. So we learned about Jay Gatsby frequently from these and his outlook on life when he's talking with Nick Carraway. We also learned how Nick perceives this relationship with Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, because of course, that's the main relationship that's happening. Nick Carraway, here's our narrow and he's observing this. But really the conflict relationships happening between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. We're seeing Nick's sort of interpretation and perspective of those things. We're learning as much about Nick in many ways as we are about J or about Daisy. So then you might want to say, okay, what's the topic they're talking about? What do I learn from this discussion? You also want to know the point of views about the characters and how they feel about that topic, which is sort of what I was saying. They might be talking about, for example, they might be talking about money. Does money matter? What, what does money gets? You say that's the subject of conversation. They're going to have different perspectives about that. Jay Gatsby is going to say, well, money really matters. It's going to buy your social status. That's going to buy me Daisy, who I loved the whole reason I want the money. I don't really care about the money for me. I carry it to how Daisy and the money will get me that because society values money, That's what Jay Gatsby's going to say. Nick might have a different perspective on money. He might have a different take and we'll learn about that take either through his reactions to what Jay says or about things he says himself. Or in the case of the point of view of that book, things that are going on in his head during the dialogue. The subject, what we learned through the conversation, what the varying perspectives on that subject or as they talk about them. And fourthly, the thematic concepts themselves always ask, what are the characters really talking about? Now, this question, once you've answered the first three, is what's going to really help make sure that the dialogue you're writing is in fact relating to the theme. If you have a character who's been grounded by her mother and she's having an enormous argument about being grounded and not being allowed to go to prom. That discussion is about far more than not going to prom. That discussion is about independence, is about how much independence as a mother give a child, what is a fair punishment for a child? Was the infraction worth that punishment? How much independence should be allowed to have? It's about a child trying, understanding the rules and responsibilities that a parent has to have. It could be about the fact that parenting hurts sometimes because we don't want to necessarily ground our children, but we think that's what we need to do to make our children into the best people they can be. Could be about all kinds of different things that discussion could be about so much. And you, as a writer, it doesn't have to be about all of those things. That shouldn't be about all of those things. But it should be about the themes you are choosing. Again, this is why the themes you choose matters so much. Because if you are writing that argument with a mother and her daughter about prominent, about being grounded. If your theme is about the difficulty of being a parent and making the right choices. You might write that dialogue differently than if you're. Themes are really about coming of age, story about gaining independence. That conversation is going to sound as different depending on the theme you're writing. So you want to know what that is. But that's why as you're writing your dialogue, you know, start, you can start it either way. If you say, I want some dialogue here that's about this theme, work backwards from that. Say, Well, okay, but what can they talk about? And I already know that this conversation is really about independence, but how can I show that? And how am I going to show those points of view? And how am I going to, what information should I reveal? You can work those questions from one to four or four to one depending on whether you want to, you already know the dialogue you want to have and you want to work to the theme or unit theme you want to have and you want to work in some dialogue, thank go either way. But that sort of sequence is going to help you find your way with a dialog. Alright, in the next video, I would just like to cover some best practices and sort of issues that you can hopefully avoid as you are writing theme into your stories. 10. Common Mistakes and Class Worksheet: My first piece of advice is something that I briefly mentioned before, which is avoid having too many themes in your stories. It can get quite unwieldy. My recommendation, I don't really like to see people got over five for sure. I think two to three is a good number with one primary one. But just avoid too many themes, it can really muddy the waters the longer your story is. If you've got something like Song of Ice and Fire that goes on for a long time. It's easier to have more themes. Themes can also come at different points and leave. Themes have their own kinds of presence, whether they are there for a little while or whether they're there for the whole duration of the story. But avoid having too many that you're trying to cover all at once. Because it can just be a bit much for the reader and it can muddy things up a bit. The other problem that I see people run into a lot is that they write in a way that is didactic and a bit preachy and you want to avoid that? We touched on it briefly earlier. But essentially, you do not want to hit your reader over the head with your theme. You want your readers to discover themes for themselves. Now, I have a few very specific ways you can avoid that because this didactic kind of writing generally manifests itself because of one of three reasons. So I want you to avoid these. One is that if your story doesn't have an inner struggle, if you are, characters aren't going through internal conflict that can result in preachy writing. When you have a character who isn't struggling inside, they're just struggling with things out there. That can be rather uninteresting. Because the thing that makes readers really engaged with a character is seeing him or her go through these internal conflicts. If I don't see them going through that, it can seem rather boring. And you aren't really given a chance to manifest the theme through their inner struggles. If the inner struggles or the understory, and you don't have a strong understory, then the whole question of what's the story really about doesn't exist. It's not there. You haven't put in any support structure. You've just made it these kind of surface actions. In which case I've got a story about a girl who was wealthy and became poverty stricken and everything else. But if I don't see her grappling with certain things and struggling with certain things internally, then you telling me, hey, you know, being ladylike shouldn't be connected to your wealth. And what it needs to be, lady, looks like this just feels very THE, it doesn't feel interesting because I'm not experiencing it for myself. Again, you want the reader to experience through the characters what's going on. If I can't do that, then I'm going to, I'm going to get a little bit of board with it. The other thing is that when we don't have that variety of internal conflict happening, when you make a value statement, which is really what a theme often does. A theme statement you value certain things. I think families shouldn't be this way. Or what have you when you make those values statements. And we, we don't have inner struggles are different examples of it with people struggling with it. Then it's, it's this clear cut answer. It's like, well, this is the way that it is. There's no nuance there. There's no variety of examples of family that make me grapple with it. It's just, this is what it is that makes it boring because you're just sort of saying, nope, it's this, it's this, it's this, that lack of nuance really can show up. Writing something that's a bit didactic can happen for a number of reasons. I just want to give you two main ones because these are the two most frequent problems that I see. The first is simply not showing different sides of an argument. You really just give me one side, one view of family, one view of justice. And you don't let me see differing opinions on it. When you do that, you're not writing something that's nuanced. So all I'm seeing is this one opinion of you saying families, families, the most important thing? Well, what if you're not close with your family or whatever? You don't really feel like you have a family there, all these nuances there. That's why again, you want to write that in with a lot of different characters in different plots situations. If you aren't giving me that variety, that is going to result in what feels like preachy writing because I'm only getting one take. The other problem that happens with this, and I mentioned this earlier is that you tell people what your theme is. You tell people what your lessons are rather than letting them figure it out for themselves. You want to illustrate your themes in action, in your stories. And you can relate that through dialogue throughout, but you do not want as the narrator to tell me the green light means this or what have you. And it is not uncommon for me to see characters have this soliloquy is, and they're writing where the writer will give us character soliloquy and the characteristics bounds on an issue. And in doing so, just dumps a lot of the meaning and the symbolism in there, the soliloquy, don't do that if you find any of your characters giving soliloquy. Just that should be a red light on the planet going off for you, that you are on a wrong track. That is a big problem in a lot of writing. It's one of the biggest mistakes that I see. Person make. Always ask yourself, what are the actions, what are the behaviors of my characters that show this symbol? If you've watched my course on writing a character profile, you know that we talk about internal things manifest themselves externally. If I am, if I'm angry inside, that's going to manifest itself in my external actions. And if you know certain external actions, your character makes, what's the internal thing driving that? So that's the same thing is true with themes. Ask yourself, what do the actions in the dialogue and that the activity on that surface story. How do those things illustrate my theme? If you keep it focused on that, rather than on just expounding either via dialogue and soliloquy or an exposition, then you will be weaving. You'll be forced to wave your theme into your characters and your plot. Alright, so we've looked at theme from a variety of perspectives. Again, this course is just designed to give you an understanding of how theme functions in the story. But then a lot of questions and things you can ask yourself to help you come up with. Not only watch or themes are the best ways that you can write these into your stories. The questions in this course and there on your class notes, and they're on your class for worksheet. Unlike some of my other courses, you might really find that sometimes going through these ahead of time helps you develop things. But you will probably definitely find that as you are plotting your characters and your plot points. Having these questions in the back of your head is what will make those most significant? So take these, take these questions and then as you go through and begin plotting out your narrative or building out a character arc, use these questions as a supplement to those procedures to those endeavors. If you watch any of my other courses where you have activities on how to develop a character, develop a plot. Use these theme questions, keep them near you and ask them and work them in as you make your decisions. And that's going to really help you be cohesive with it. I do have a worksheet that has a lot of questions to help you get started with theme. It's things we've addressed in this class. So I hope you'll download that and I hope it's a resource for you. I thank you very much for watching. It's always a pleasure to be here. If you enjoyed this course, please do leave a review that's so helpful for me and it's helpful for your peers. As always, I wish you the very best of luck with your writing and I will see you again soon.