#theme and sub-theme

A few years ago, I wrote a short story for an anthology on the theme of Escape, published by the Northwest Independent Writers Association (NIWA). My story was titled “View from the Bottom of a Lake.” The genre of that story is not fantasy, although it is a dream, a memory of a time gone by. One of the requirements for that anthology was that all stories must be set in the Pacific Northwest. I…

Two months ago, we began our series, Idea to Story. The previous eleven installments are listed below. We have created a sample story, a romantasy. We have met our protagonists and the ultimate antagonist. We know what their world is like and have given them a worthy quest, and we discovered what genre we are writing by paying attention to the tropes that arose as we were laying down the…

Last week, we talked about emotions and how they drive each scene. On Monday, we talked about points of no return. So, let’s take a look at theme, the thread that binds emotions and points of no return together. It’s time to take another look at how George Saunders employed themes in his sci-fi masterpiece, Escape from Spiderhead. In 2015, I took George Saunders’ book, Tenth of December, to…

I am drawn to books where the protagonist faces their personal demons and finds a hero within themselves. I love the story of someone who meets the unknown and finds the courage to do what they believe is morally right. This is a literary theme and is known as the hero’s journey. But it is only the overarching theme. For that hero’s main character arc to work, they need subthemes. Subthemes are…