CHECK THE MAGIC, CHECK THE WORLD
During the writing, it's quite likely your concept of magic and the structure of the world you built shifted from your original concept. This is good — ideas need to grow and change organically. However, changes mean the magic you're using in chapter twenty may be rather different than the magic you started with in chapter one, and I've harped on keeping your magic and your world consistent so your readers will come along with you. During the revisions, make sure your magic and your world remain consistent from beginning to end.
MORE CONSISTENCY
Double-check your characters. As we mentioned in chapter six, supernatural characters oft en have odd names, so make sure you keep them the same. While you're writing those early draft s, it's very easy to accidentally change the spelling of an odd name, or change it on purpose and then fail to catch all the incidences.
The same goes for changing background and characterization. Characters change and grow in a book — and in the writer's mind. When you're rereading your own work, keep a special eye out for people who act out of character.
THE GREAT EXPOSITION
Letting your novel sit for a while first will allow you to come to the rewrites pretending to be a new reader, someone who doesn't know anything about this supernatural world or these supernatural characters. This is good for checking your exposition. Have you overexplained? Underexplained? Did you delete a scene that also had some necessary exposition in it?
As an example, I realized I had started my novel The Doomsday Vault too early, so I scrapped the first several scenes I'd written and jumped ahead to a more action-based scene for the opening hook. The new beginning was much tighter, with a faster pace. Perfect! However, when I was going over the rewrites, I discovered that along with those early scenes, I'd inadvertently cut the introduction of an important character. As a result, this character just showed up in a later chapter, with no rhyme or reason. Oops. I had to sneak him into an earlier scene during the rewrites.
AND DON'T FORGET
These apply to anyone and everyone, but it's amazing how few people bother with them, so I'm giving them their own section.
SPELLING
When you're done, run a spell-check. No matter how good a speller or typist you are, you will make some errors. A spell-checker won't catch all your mistakes, but every one it does catch is one fewer mistake an editor will see.
GRAMMAR
If you know you're prone to mix up its and it's or their, there, and they're, beg someone who knows better to go through your manuscript for grammatical mistakes. Because every editor and agent in the world has his or her grammatical pet peeves (such as starting a sentence with the word because), and you don't want to look like an idiot in front of someone you're hoping to impress.
CHAPTER 13: The Real Challenges
Now we come to some of the hard stuff — and some of the most valuable. It's the stuff that separates the good from the great, the decent from the powerful, the fine from the freaky. We're talking about theme, symbolism, and voice. This is where your true power as a writer lies, so let's dig in.
THEME
There are different ways to define theme. One way to look at it is as what your book is about, and I don't mean the plot or the story. The story is what happens, one event building on another. The theme is the idea your book explores. It can be a big concept like love or death or war or choices, or it might be more specific, like defying authority or loss of love or restriction of choice.
Once a big idea appears, it usually needs to be narrowed even more. This is what the book is saying about the big idea. It can — should — be extremely specific, like No one finds his dreams or Death finds everyone or Everything has its opposite. J.K. Rowling and Christopher Moore both write about the desire to avoid death, for example, but their actual themes are much more specific. Rowling wrote about the search for immortality. Lord Voldemort wants it in a literal sense. Harry and Dumbledore gain it in the metaphorical sense. Harry's parents give their lives to deny it to Voldemort and ensure it to Harry. On the other hand, Moore writes about the futility of fighting or avoiding death, and how by giving in to it, you conquer it. Charlie loses his wife to death and tries to fight death. He ends up fighting death gods quite literally. He tries to avoid becoming death, and only wins in the end when he gives in not only to his role as death, but embraces death itself.
Narrowing the idea, having something to say about it, is what separates the ordinary from the extraordinary. It's easy to claim your book is about life and nature. Heck, just about every book in existence talks about one or the other. Exactly what is your book saying about those two concepts?
These ideas are abstracts, something that readers can't see or hear. They touch emotions and spirits and resonate there. A powerful theme stays with the reader after the book ends, and makes the reader want to return to it. A masterful book has themes woven into many layers so readers can read the same book more than once and discover something new about the themes — or maybe find an entirely new theme the second time around.
THE NECESSITY OF THEME
Actually, you can get away without putting a theme in your book. But your book will be the poorer for it. It's like making a cake entirely out of frosting — it might look good, but there won't be much substance there. Theme shows deeper thought, richer layers of reading. Even if readers aren't fully aware of all the themes, they'll be still touched by them on other levels.
A theme holds a story together on a more abstract level. When most — or all — of the plots and subplots and images work toward a single theme, the book comes together more powerfully than does a book without a theme. Theme unites the book.
It's actually not difficult to include theme. In fact, it's almost impossible not to include at least one theme in your writing. You can't avoid the “big idea” ones — any book with human beings in it will at minimum discuss the themes of life and humanity struggling to survive physically or emotionally.
Sometimes the difficult part is actually noticing the themes in your own work. Even experienced authors can miss them. I once interviewed award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer Octavia E. Butler for a magazine, and I asked her about a recurring theme in her work — the idea of people being forced to make tough, rock-or-hard-place choices. The idea appears in nearly all of her work, both short and long. She blinked at me in surprise for a few moments, then answered, “Well, we don't always have choices…. And all too oft en even when we do have choices, they're not necessarily the ones we want.” In other words, the idea was part of Butler's worldview, and she had never noticed she had incorporated it as a theme into the body of her own work. (I feel I should point out that Butler, a master of the craft, also inserts a number of themes into her work on purpose, which makes the appearance of an accidental theme all the more interesting.)
This has happened to me, too. One of my books was reviewed in the Library Journal, and the reviewer pointed out that the theme of the book was loss and reconciliation, since several characters in the novel came from broken families and were trying to reconnect. I stared at the review and realized she was right, even though that hadn't been on my mind at all when I was writing. I'd been thinking about escaping physical and emotional slavery, and of the relationship between the real world and the world that makes up dreams. However, I'd written the book just after a tremendous upheaval within my own family, and the loss and reconciliation idea had clearly crept into the story as well.
I wish I had noticed this theme myself — I would have changed parts of the story to reflect it more powerfully. It's overall much better if a theme is developed on purpose. That way, the disparate elements in the story will point toward the theme in a more unified, careful way instead of by accident. It's also one of the better ways to help your book get published — as a new writer, you need a theme to help your book break in. Your book needs to be better than normal to get an editor or agent's attention, and a powerful theme that stays in
the editor or agent's head is the perfect way to show your book's worthiness. If the editor can't get your book out of her head (for good reasons), you've probably got a sale.
Usually it's a matter of whether you want theme to be under your control or not. And you do want it under your control. An accidental theme is a kid learning to ice skate. His main goal is to make it across the arena without falling over, and he doesn't notice the patterns he draws in the ice as he skates. Once or twice, he skitters sideways and wrecks part of the pattern, but his parents still applaud when he arrives. Such a good boy!
A controlled theme is an Olympic skater, leaping and spinning with precision, and leaving exact swirls and cuts on the surface of the ice. He goes exactly where he wants to and concentrates on both the individual moves and the overall pattern. When he's finished, a stadium filled with people thunders in appreciation and the judges award him a medal. Both skaters have accomplished something worthwhile, but the second touches more people and has a better chance of being remembered. Even if you feel like a kid learning to skate, aim for the Olympics.
THEMES AND THE PARANORMAL
Paranormal books have the power to explore themes that “normal” books can't. Normal books (i.e., books that have no impossible elements to them) are locked out of a number of themes. Werewolf novels often look at themes of controlling that inner beast, or about forces of nature and their inescapable impact on our existence. The better novels about vampires explore a number of themes — the downward spiral of the dead feeding off the living, the living world's dual fascination with and fear of the dead, the war between light and darkness, faith and skepticism, domination and submission. Octavia E. Butler's final novel Fledgling delves into the relationship between vampire and prey. Is it domination and submission, or symbiosis and interdependency? This theme isn't something easily explored outside the paranormal genre. Philip Pullman explores several themes relating to humanity's fall from grace and the desire to redeem itself, as well as the more down-to-earth theme of using knowledge to gain freedom. Although the latter theme can appear in any book, the former is particularly well-suited to a supernatural setting.
Paranormal novels can also explore normal themes using supernatural means. This harkens back to the ordinary subject matter with a supernatural twist added to it. The children of Edward Eager's Half Magic feel their family has been split in half after the death of their father, which has also left them with only half a mother. The book explores their attempts to create a whole family again, with and without a half-magic charm. This theme allows the book to transcend its 1920s setting and resonate with children and adults decades after the book was written. Terry Pratchett puts a con man in charge of the Ankh-Morpork mint in Making Money to take a hard look at how frighteningly ridiculous — and delicate — our own entire banking system is, how much of it is based on con games and illusion. In the end, he uses an army of solid gold golems to show how money can really work for you, something you couldn't really do in a novel set on real-life Wall Street.
You have the power to use any number of resonant themes in your own book, whether they're supernatural or not. To make your good book great, you need to keep theme uppermost in your mind.
NOW OR LATER?
So this brings up a big question: Do you start with a theme or add one later? And the answer is: whichever one makes you happy as a writer.
Really. It may sound counterintuitive after that long harangue about having theme under your control from the start that I'm now telling you that theme can show up early or late in the process, but this is indeed the case. It's because everyone's writing process is different. Some writers can start with a theme in mind while others need to wait for one to show up. As long as it's there and under control by the time the book is finished, it doesn't matter how or when it arrived.
I've actually done it from both ends, myself. The story “Thin Man,” which I've mentioned before, has a theme that showed up late. The story was nearly finished when I realized I had a recurring theme, the idea of people being tricked into believing they had no choices when actually they had several. I also saw that I had the ideal vehicle for this theme — the chimneys that Dodd is forced to climb into and clean every day. The chimneys give Dodd only one way in and one way out, with hard, unyielding bricks on every side to enforce the singleness of the direction. Once I realized this, I was able to go back and ensure that the events of the story and the settings and even the dialogue tilt toward this theme. I'm convinced the presence of this theme is the reason Marion Zimmer Bradley bought the story for her magazine, even though she specifically stated in her guidelines that she didn't want dark fantasy or stories with child protagonists. She broke her rules on the strength of the story's theme, a theme that showed up late in the writing process.
On the other hand, when I wrote the first word of my novelette “The Soul Jar,” a sequel to “Thin Man,” I already had the themes firmly in mind — every person and event has multiple parallels, and every choice destroys a thousand pasts even as it creates a thousand futures. When I started the story, I had only the idea of a set of identical twins who perform in a clown act by mimicking each other on either side of an empty mirror frame. I also knew that one of the clowns was going to die, unbalancing the mirror gag and destroying everything the surviving brother knew. But as I wrote the story with the themes in mind, it changed. I saw that I was also exploring the idea of the foil, a character's opposite, and I wove that into the story as well. I saw that I needed to kill another character, one who had survived in my original concept, which changed other parts of the story. A caged mechanical feline that I'd thrown in for background color became a central focus of two key scenes — and turned into a parallel for Schrödinger's cat. The themes became more and more intricate as I wrote, and made the story far more powerful than I'd even planned it.
Overall, starting with a theme in mind is better for the simple reason that it's easier to incorporate one into the book as you go rather than go back and rework material to reflect a theme you discover later. (I say this as someone who's done it both ways.) But however you work it is up to you, as long as the theme is ultimately under your control.
Besides, as I've already pointed out, some themes will escape your notice. In chapter four I mentioned the saying Write what you know. There's a corollary: You may as well write what you know — you will anyway. In other words, some aspects of your worldview and real-life experiences will inevitably sneak into your fiction. You won't be able to keep them out. After a while, your readers may notice a pattern to your work as I noticed with Octavia E. Butler's. Since themes will appear whether you want them to or not, do your best to find as many as you can and tame them into serving the book instead of letting them run wild across your pages. Becoming aware of your themes will also prevent you from writing the same story over and over again.
FINDING YOUR THEME
You do have a theme in your book somewhere. We just need to find it. The first step is actually an exercise.
EXERCISE
Read the following question, then set this book aside and write down your answer separately:
What is your book about?
Now check. Which of the following two statements does your answer most resemble?
It's about an ordinary young man who trades his last possession for a magical plant that transports him to another world, where he finds wealth — and danger.
It's about how poverty creates a world in which theft and even murder can become sympathetic acts.
If your answer is more like number 1, you're thinking more about the plot. If your answer is more like number 2, you're thinking more about the theme.
If you answered like number 2, you have at least one theme. If you didn't, let's look at a few ways to draw your theme out.
First, go back and try to answer the question so it's more like number 2 above. Don't talk about the plot — talk about ideas. Love, hate, religion, nature, power, sex, money, cruelty, yearning — w
hat is your book about?
Should you get stuck, make a list of words that describe your book. Use free association and let your mind wander within your story. Generate a list of twenty or thirty words. Using that list as a starting point, see what sort of theme you can generate.
Themes can also ask questions. Perhaps your book asks questions about the nature of life or human nature or God. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do smart people make stupid choices? Is there a plan behind the universe? You don't necessarily have to posit an answer, either — the fact that the question has no answer can itself be a theme.
YOUR COMFORT LEVEL
Themes vary wildly along the comfort continuum. Some themes are safe, some are risky, some are frightening, and some are taboo. You'll need to decide where your book will land on that continuum.
Safe themes abound in fiction. Good triumphs over evil. The son becomes the father. True love wins in the end. Safe themes produce safe books. They make readers feel good, and no one challenges them in school libraries. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, and you can make a decent living writing safe books. The danger is that safe themes have been so widely explored, you run the risk of boring yourself. Safe themes don't go anywhere new — if they did, they wouldn't be safe. It's difficult to challenge yourself as a writer with nothing but safe themes, since you have thousands of years of examples behind you.
Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. Page 22