Regular readers of our recent posts will know the answer to this cry for help already. Theme. Theme is a golden highway to a great title. Consider Brooklyn, starring Saoirse Ronan. The story is about a young Irish girl who emigrates from the Auld Sod in the early 50s and winds up in Brooklyn. After a period of struggle and assimilation she starts to find her way professionally, meets a wonderful young guy, accepts his proposal of marriage. Wow, things are going great! A family tragedy compels her to return briefly to Ireland. Once there, her newfound American self-confidence…

  A couple of friends have written in: “I know what my theme is, but I can’t figure out how to get it into my story.”

  Picking up where we left off last week … I’m starting a new fiction project, very heavy with Resistance, self-doubt, doubts about the viability of the project, etc. I decided to keep a dream diary. Last week I posted the first two dreams. Here are the next two. This first one comes about a week into the work (3/28/16). Self-confidence in very short supply. I’m committed, but still feeling extremely tentative … I was a pilot. I had somehow gotten the training and become qualified. I was traveling via ship and train to Antarctica with my friend David and…

I’m gonna take a break this week from our series on Theme (we’ll be back) to address an issue that’s happening with me right now. Dreams. I’m just starting a new fiction project that’s overwhelming me with Resistance, and my dreams have been really interesting. I’d like to share a few of them—and the whole interactive process between waking, working life and nocturnal who-knows-what—over the next couple of weeks. Maybe this will ring a bell with your own psychic adventures. Here’s the backstory: About two months ago I had an idea for a story. Immediately I was swamped with Resistance.…

  My answer will not surprise you. Theme. Theme is what makes the specific universal. Remember the first post in this series? I was relating a conversation with a friend who’s a literary agent in Hollywood. She represents screenwriters. She told me that she had read 500 screenplays in one year and couldn’t find a single one she wanted to represent. Why? “Because so many of them were not about anything.” What she meant, in crassly commercial terms, was this:   I can’t sell a script unless the reader (studio, director, production company, actor) can either identify with it or…

    “Help, I can’t find my theme!” We talked about this a couple of weeks ago. What if you discover yourself in this situation: You’re three-quarters of the way through your novel (or maybe you finished it three weeks ago) and somebody asks you, “What’s it about? What’s the theme?” — and you find yourself staring blankly. How do you identify your theme if you still don’t know it even after you’ve finished the book? (Trust me, I’ve been there too. More than once.) Here’s one way: think of your book as a dream. I mean really. Imagine it’s…

  We’re now eight posts into our series on Theme. I confess I have the queasy feeling that our concept remains slippery and elusive. So let’s attack it from a different angle—from the idea that the protagonist embodies the theme. Rocky. The theme is “A bum can become a champ if he’s just given the chance.” See how the character of Rocky embodies that? Casablanca. Theme: “It’s better to act for the greater good than for our own selfish ends.” Bogie’s character, Rick Blaine, embodies the clash between self-interest and self-sacrifice. When he acts in the climax, his actions become…

  [This is the seventh post in our series on Theme. Special thanks to Joe Fontenot, who asked the question above.]   Answer: Absolutely. Maybe even more so. Lemme offer an answer based on my own process in structuring and writing The Lion’s Gate. The Lion’s Gate was published by Sentinel/Penguin in 2014. It’s a narrative nonfiction book about the Arab-Israeli war of 1967—the Six Day War. Theme was everything in my process, not just in researching and writing the book but also in writing the Book Proposal. A book proposal is that essential 50-page document that agent and writer…

Don’t worry, it happens to me all the time. It took me ten years to figure out the theme of The Legend of Bagger Vance, and five before I could articulate what Gates of Fire was about. It’s a running joke between me and Shawn, in his role as my editor, that he’s the one who has to explain my stuff to me. “Oh!” I inevitably exclaim, “so that’s what it’s about.” Then he gives me eight more pages of things I’ve got to fix because I was flying blind and operating entirely on instinct. That’s what great editors do.…

  [Continuing our series on Theme in fiction, nonfiction, and movies … ]   I’m a big fan of Blake Snyder. If you haven’t read Save the Cat! and Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies, please rectify that oversight at once. One of Blake’s lasting legacies (he died tragically in 2009 at age fifty-one) is what he called BS2, the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet. The beat sheet is an all-purpose template for writing a screenplay. It breaks down a movie story into fifteen structural beats, e.g. Catalyst, Debate, Break Into Two, Midpoint, All Is Lost, etc. Number Three, following…