In Search of Substance: Themes in Writing
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Substance vs Escapism
Substance is important to me in any media. Books, films, theatre, fine art - even music, to a certain degree. Anything that teaches me something new about the world earns both my gratitude and respect.
But I also love comic book films (though they aren’t all entirely substance-free!) and absurdist, irreverent comedy like Taskmaster and Vic & Bob. I often prefer staring at landscape paintings rather than more “meaningful” art, so I can daydream about being in them. I’ve even been known to read Matthew Reilly books and James Patterson (though the latter only for researching pace-writing). Purely hedonistic – even consumerist – entertainment. The need to escape from our world and how we live in it, rather than try to make sense of it (though arguably, the act of engaging with such media only plants me more firmly in our consumerist world!).
This article by Chris Angelis does a good job at unpicking the uneasy relationship between “art” and “entertainment” (or the prosititution of art, as the writer would have it), and the reasons the two are so frequently seen as being at odds.
Substance in a consumerist world
But I don’t believe substance and entertainment (or escapism) are mutually exclusive. It’s just that our society tends towards whatever media make the most money, and appeal to the most consumers – people with busy, stressful lives who want to squeeze a little escapist pleasure into their leisure time. I know because I’m one of them.
But for the decision-makers holding all the money – the ones who control what creative media gets commissioned/released and all the messaging around it – that often means substance drops way down the list of priorities. In fact, more often than not, it gets completely flushed down the loo and given a good plunging to make sure.
In this post I’m going to concentrate on substance in written works specifically. Mainly because I’m a writer, but also because I try to ensure all my stories contain substance (regardless of how successful I might be in achieving that!).
What even is substance…?
…and what gives writing substance? Essentially, we’re talking about what the story is about rather than what happens (plot) or how it’s told (narrative). We’re talking about themes.
A theme is more than something that happens in the story that can be linked to wider isues in the real world. You might have a police thriller that is completely unrelated to, say, religious tolerance – until it emerges that the killer happens to be murdering Amish people. Does that make religious tolerance a theme of the story? The writer might claim it does if they’re looking to justify their otherwise shallow but fast-paced romp of a thriller. I’d say it’s a bit more complex than that.
Themes, when properly deployed, are intrinsic to all other parts of story: characters, setting, events, imagery, and even details can (and arguably should) all reflect and have a relationship with the main theme(s). Themes are the fine meshwork lying beneath a story, holding all the other parts together. They are the skeleton of a story, without which everything else falls into a fleshy mass indistinguishable from all the other fleshy masses out there.
Substance in Catch 22
Let’s take an example – a perhaps very obvious, extremely unsubtle and overly-broad one: what makes Joesph Heller’s Catch 22* such a meaningful and long-lived novel? Well, somewhat ironically, it’s death. Death and how humans deal, or fail to deal, with it. As a theme it’s a biggie and wholly universal – we all have to face it throughout our lives, both our own and other people’s deaths.
Sure, you could argue, isn’t death a theme of many, many other books too? After all, you don’t get a murder mystery without death. Or a police procedural without death. Or, usually, a spy story without death. But in most Agatha Christies, for example, death isn’t a theme. It’s just a crucial device for advancing the plot.
In Catch 22 everyone and everything has a relationship with death. Its presence is a constant (perhaps the only constant!) all around them, and one that affects all their behaviours and motivations. The descriptions of place:
“The Pacific Ocean was a body of water surrounded on
all sides by elephantiasis and other dread diseases…” (p47)
“His office was in Staten Island in a two-family firetrap…” (p56)
…of character:
“Havermeyer had grown very proficient at shooting field mice…” (p44)
“Dunbar liked Clevinger because Clevinger annoyed him
and made the time go slow” (p29)
… the imagery:
“Hungry Joe was a jumpy, emaciated wretch with a fleshless face
of dingy skin and bone and twitching veins squirming subcutaneously
in the blackened hollows behind his eyes like severed sections of snake” (p.70)
“…he found his wife lying vanquished beneath the blankets
like a dessicated old vegetable…” (p. 108)
…and the details:
“The crawlway was a narrow, square, cold tunnel hollowed out
beneath the flight controls…” (p65)**
“He manipulated boxes of chocolate soldiers until they
melted in his hands…” (p96)
…all reflect the constant proximity of death. Every aspect of the story begs the question: How do you live when death is always so close? The book’s answers are many, varied, and usually morbidly humourous (humour being one of our most frequently deployed, if ultimately ineffectual, weapons against death).
In fact, it’s so ridden with death I found it hard to source quotes that weren’t an overt reference to it – particularly examples of metaphors and similes. (There’s a lack of figurative language throughout the book, perhaps to ground us firmly in the “reality” of its world.)
Themes don’t need to be subtle or cleverly crafted. Sometimes the need for a writer to get their substance across to a wider cross-section of readers means, like Heller, they might prefer more overt methods. Or sometimes it could be down to generic conventions, which rely on an understanding of the intended audience. Even if a teen vampire thriller contains themes the author is unlikely to cloak them in cunningly crafted metaphors that only a literary critic can unpick.
Are all themes created equal?
So what gives a theme substance? What makes for an effective theme, and what doesn’t? Firstly, like death, it needs to be universal – at least for the intended audience. (With the immense diversity of human culture and experience, you can’t expect to hit on something that everyone will relate to). But it is broadness rather than specificity that defines a theme. “Death” rather than “death of a great grandad”; “motherhood” rather than “being a mother in 1920s Chicago”. It’s about looking at a universal subject from different angles – some of which the reader might not relate to, even if they can relate to the theme itself.
Most crucially, it’s about discovering and exploring the experiences of other people, in different situations with different perspectives, and relating them to things that we ourselves have experienced. That’s such an important way for us to better understand the world, other people, and our own place among them. And that is real substance.
Secondly, it needs to be affective. Something that actually has weight in our lives, that changes how we behave and how we think. Shoes are pretty universal, but giving everyone in your book a relationship with shoes isn’t going to give it more substance. Not unless you’re really writing about the shallowness of consumerist behaviour, or perhaps extreme poverty (in which case, those would be your themes, not shoes – shoes would just be one possible touching point among many other details).
How to approach theme as a writer
As a writer you never know what’s first going to inspire you*** – a title; a scene; a conversation; somewhere amazing you visited; a news story – but sooner or later, as you develop your major events and turning points, you start to pick up on the greater meanings in what you’re writing.
That’s when themes come in. And when they do please don’t ignore them or assume they will fluorish naturally. You need to research them, understand them, then cast them like a net around all the other parts of your writing until what seemed like discreet elements are pulled together into a wholly unified and satisfyingly substantial story.
That moment, when you understand what your story is really about and give in to it, is a truly magical one for any writer – and something that will give your readers much more to think about, long after they’ve temporarily sated their needs for escapism or consumerism.
It might even change their world.
*The 1990 Corgi edition reprint, for anyone following along at home ; )
**A metaphor for the grave, the key motivation for Yossarian’s fears and behaviour
***Of course, it could be the theme itself that inspires you to write, as it was for me in Revolution of the Mind after hearing the fascinating conversations about free will between the likes of Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Robert Sapolsky and other scientists / philosophers.