Theme and intent can be interchangeable. Intent is a term I’ve stolen from screenwriters. It took me almost ten years of writing and fifteen manuscripts to realize the critical importance of having an intent to my stories, beyond simply being entertaining and having that intent in my conscious mind.
Some in the business of screen writing say you should be able to state your intent in three words.
- Love conquers all
- Honesty defeats greed
In Duty, Honor, Country a Novel of West Point and the Civil War, my theme was honor versus loyalty. Would you rather have an honorable friend or a loyal friend?
There are others who say you need to be able to state it in one word:
- Relationships
- Honesty
- Faith
- Fathers
What is my intent?
What do you want readers to walk away with emotionally when they finish reading your story? This is a question many authors don’t ask themselves and it is one of the most important questions because it’s the readers who keep coming back for more. When you consider intent, consider your readers first.
Filmmakers have to think about what they want the viewer to feel when they walk out of the theater. This is one reason there are so few negative endings in films. That’s not to say you can’t have a dark ending. It’s more to point out that you need to be aware of the effect of a dark ending.
I’ve seen some excellent films where the ending was dark and bleak– and often most realistic– but most of those films were not box office blockbusters. The original screenplay for Pretty Woman was called Five Thousand Dollars. And the Richard Gere character drives away at the end. Realistic, yes. Would it have succeeded as much as the rewrite?
I’m not saying you have to have happy endings and make your reader happy. I’m saying you have to know what feeling you want the reader to experience and make sure you deliver. Larry McMurtry is a master writer and most of his stories have rather bleak endings.
I think that the more negative the intent, the better you have to be as a writer to keep the reader involved. To take readers on a dark and relatively unhappy journey, you have to be very good to keep them in the boat.
Intent
- What do you feel?
- What do you want readers to feel?
- You always have an intent.
- Positive versus negative.
- Beware of lecturing.
- Resolution–the payoff to the reader
The more a reader feels about a book, the more he will get into it. Feeling comes out of the three aspects of a novel:
- Idea
- Intent
- Characters
If you know and, more importantly, have a good feel for each of these three before you begin writing, you increase the quality of your work.
What is your theme/intent for your book?
After a long time it occurred to me to try to do this, and I started describing my books in a single word. Unbinding the Stone is about home, its sequel A Warrior Made is about family, and my werewolf novel St. Martin’s Moon is about curses. I usually figure it out after a few years, never beforehand.
Bob, I think many write without the conscious thought that there is a central theme, intent, message … a fine silk thread that weaves so effortlessly we often don’t see it until we lay the cloth out in front of us and say … Ah, that’s what it is
I think you take that thread, a strong, unbreakable weave and create the power of your message. Thanks.
Intent or theme has always been difficult for me, until recently. I had one of those major ah-ha moments and realized the last 3 book I had completed and the current WIP are tied together by setting and character, but also by theme….hope. I hadn’t realized how much the idea of hope comes into play in all my books. The idea that as long as there is hope, there is possibility.
After that moment, I took each book and looked at the theme and how it fits into the kernel idea and I sort of feel I finally hit paydirt. As I progress forward, we will see.
Good post. I wonder, though, where the line is between having a story with an intent, and one that becomes agenda-driven…? Maybe it depends on the subject involved.
MGalloway, your literature can be agenda-driven, as you say, provided your plot is complex enough, your story well-crafted enough, so that your agenda doesn’t come across as propaganda. The best literature is slanted, as a matter of fact — in such a way that when you’re finished reading a good book, you’re not left in any real doubt about the author’s stance on the given issue she or he is addressing. For instance, Les Miserables is unquestionably agenda-driven, and no one in her right mind would argue that Victor Hugo is coming down (hard) against authoritarianism (as represented by the unforgettable Inspector Javert) and the injustices perpetrated against the poor of 19th Century Frannce. And yet Victor Hugo integrates this theme so seamlessly into his intricate plot that you don’t feel as if you’re being preached to.
The question is really a question of how seamlessly the plot and theme are integrated.
How much “agenda” you can incorporate into your story without sounding as if you’re propagandizing is mostly a question of how much of an event is your philosophy (i.e. your theme) covering. For instance, if your story is a run-of-the-mill hooker-with-a-gold story (like Pretty Woman), no amount of talking-head philosophical discourse among the characters about the injustice of authority toward the citizenry will change that storyline. In fact, such a story will come across as exactly what it is: propagandizing. In order to take it out of that realm, as Victor Hugo does, you’ll have to construct a more elaborate and more complicated plot. There is a prostitute in Les Miserables (Fantine), and she plays a vital role in the plot structure, but she’s a component in a much larger and much more complex network.
I love the way you summed this up. I’m going to write those three down next to my computer. It is a fine line between intent and agenda-driven, though with picture books in particular it is so easy to make intent fun so it doesn’t sway into agenda-driven. Probably a lot harder with novels.
Well I think I’ve always known that my Trilogy was about love, seeing as that was the first purpose of the book before I discovered the world and the underlying reason for the male MC to be where he was when the female MC appeared. All three books are basically love conquers all and good over evil, and I can probably combine them into love conquers evil.
:} Cathryn Leigh
I agree that one probably shouldn’t have an agenda. Also, theme/intent often comes out of character and story, so you might not know it ahead of time. But once it develops; can we say: rewrite with it in our conscious mind?
Sure. Doing that also opens up lots of interesting possibilities in terms of description and how the characters interact with one another.
I think the tension with the whole agenda-driven thing may come from the way readers are and how they interpret a work. Some may be looking for nothing more than entertainment from a work of fiction and find a book like “Animal Farm” a bore. Others may want a challenge from their fiction and read for a book for a completely different reason. Personally, I think fiction can be both entertaining and challenging at the same time…
Thanks for making us think, and giving us the tools to mine for the intent if we don’t already consciously know.
Theme and Intent aren’t quite synonymous, though they are similar. Theme is the core meaning that the events of a story add up to. It comes from the Greek word (specifically, Greek drama) thema, which means “proposition.”
Theme is philosophical — which is why it’s complicated.
Intent, on the other hand, is less philosophical, and concerns motivation. For instance, the theme of Crime and Punishment is this: that morality exists for everyone, even in the absence of a specific belief in morality. But you could not accurately say that that is the novel’s intent. The novel’s intent is the protagonist’s murder of a pawnshop owner, which eats away at conscience.
Theme is one of the two principle things that distinguishes serious fiction from popular fiction.