Theme As Emergent 🍷

Most writing advice would have you first define your theme and then build your story around that, but what if you have a definite sense of story without a clear sense of theme?

Should you put off writing something only because you can’t articulate what exactly you’re trying to say yet?

Of course not. Whilst having a good handle on the major theme(s) in your novel is important, you don’t necessarily need to dictate them first and try to force a story around them. More often than not, I’ve witnessed theme rising from the weave of the story itself as it unravels. In my earlier works I only had a vague idea of what the themes might be at the onset, but as I dove deeper into the story, so deepened my understanding of its thematic glue and fundamental propellers.

You begin with ideas, concepts, character sketches, vibes.
You explore them, writing them down.
Connections begin to form, consciously or unconsciously.

The story enters a feedback loop of self-iteration: because character A chose this in accord with their values, problem B now needs to be solved, and circumstance C stands in its way. When everything happens in a logically organic way, patterns tend to emerge. These patterns lead to themes that emerge from the story itself, through the subconscious arranging of building blocks around the invisible gravity of an idea that begins to spin the visible around it. Instead of being a fundamental force, like the strong force that keeps particles (story elements) together, it can be more like temperature, which isn’t a force in itself but a phenomenon emerging from the agitation of masses of particles within a system.

The underlying tapestry that allows the driving of characters and events could be compared to the Higgs field that gives particles their mass. It assigns separate story elements their proper weights and delineates their relationships while remaining invisible, in the backstage itself. It’s the thematic undercurrent which, whilst subtle or not immediately obvious, grounds the story in something beyond itself.

The Fundamental Forces

In physics, both fundamental and emergent phenomena exist. The four forces are fundamental, at least according to our current mainstream understanding: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. Fundamental in this context means that they can’t be reduced to any more basic forces or interactions, whereas emergent denotes phenomena that arise from the interaction between these. Gravity and electromagnetism don’t need an introduction, but the strong and weak force aren’t that talked about on the daily. To put it very simply, the strong force glues together the particles in the atomic nucleus and the weak force facilitates specific particles changing their properties, leading to eg. nuclear decay processes. These represent some of the main “elements” that turn the engine of the world, and without each the universe wouldn’t function the way it does. Now, to all the actual physicists out there, I am aware that the full truth is far more complex and the understanding of these phenomena is constantly expanding and debated, but this is not a physics lesson so we shall be moving on 😛

These four could be compared to fundamental elements of story:

Character, Setting, Goal and Point of View.

These cannot really be reduced to anything, nor do they arise from anything outside themselves. With any one of these missing, the story loses its structure and cohesiveness. (okay: technically, you could make the case that Goal arises from Character, but let’s just…keep the four going for the sake of the illustration.)

No character: There’s nothing to move anything. You end up with a vacation ad in the best case, and even a good ad has a character: the hypothetical you interacting with the environment it advertises. No character leaves beautifully described places as just that: descriptions. Even an earth worm poking its head above the dirt in the morning is a character – it’s something moving, something dynamic that has at least a basic form of desire or survival instinct.

No Setting: Things happen, but they mean nothing because everything floats in a meaningless void. (Technically even that could be considered a setting). You might have a character’s rambling stream of consciousness, but you’d be hard pressed to not have them mention anything that is grounded in an external space outside their brain. And their brain can also be a setting.

No Goal (or Drive, Desire, Motive…) : Things happen, but they mean nothing. It’s an art house reel of disconnected vignettes that might look stunning but create no meaning, because there’s no reason for them to exist and no context to exist in. Characters amble about set pieces but none of it matters – they have no reason to do anything, whether internal or external.

Point of View – This one’s interesting, since it doesn’t seem to be as directly a “building” block of a story as the other three, but it nevertheless has a huge effect on how the story is narrated, and it also doesn’t emerge from the interaction of any other elements. POV is the frame that all the other elements play in and affects the way they’re represented, but they don’t affect it back. It’s a choice made at the beginning, like choosing to make a charcoal drawing instead of an oil painting, and becomes the specific lens(es) the story is viewed through.

Theme, then, emerges from the interactions of these forces in the same way that temperature arises from the quickened movements of molecules. Temperature itself is not a ”thing” apart from the constituents that enable it. The kinetic movement of atoms creates heat, and their slowing down becomes its absence.

So theme cannot exist in a vacuum without the parts that built it, but emerges from their interactions and patterns thereby created – whether intentionally or not. Conflict, like plot itself, is another aspect that behaves similarly: any conflict is directly created by the elements fundamental to the story, and without them it ceases to make sense. Other important aspects of storytelling are things like voice, tone and style, but they function more as the icing on the cake than the batter. You could tell the exact same story and change all three of these, but the fundamental character motivations and sequences of events wouldn’t change. But if you changed the POV, especially to an unreliable narrator, the frame change could intensely affect the story being told.

Goals drive conflict drives plot, and if the fundamental elements stay true to themselves, theme can naturally emerge. If person A is jealous because of B’s success in life, the theme might center around reclaiming happiness by learning not to compare yourself to others, or being freed to pursue a different path by overcoming the blockage of envy. In any case, the root of the jealousy will inform what the story itself revolves around, what it’s fundamentally about.

Eg. The jealousy-provoked actions by A towards B don’t exist without A & B (Character) and jealousy (Motive). The conflict becomes the consequence: what is A going to do about this jealousy, and how will it manifest, ie. affect/create the plot?

If character A is jealous about B’s looks, but the story is about a cattle driving competition, you don’t really have a coherent thread going on. Of course it could be used as an aspect of petty rivalry, but it would be far more powerful if A is jealous of B’s fortune in acquiring the best calves from the market. Now A has to confront their own actions, beliefs and mindsets that resulted in this situation.
Is A only jealous because B worked hard and deserves their success?
Is this a place of growth for A, to identify their own weaknessess and do better?
Or has B cheated to get ahead, and A comes to realise they have a different problem on their hands?

And thus, theme emerges.

Handling Theme

All this is not to say you shouldn’t pick a theme you want to explore and construct a story around that. In fact, that will probably give your story a more robust throughline and ensure it resonates with audiences on a deep level. The point is that writing without a pre-set theme can also be rewarding and make for a great story, as long as you pay careful attention to theme the moment it breaks through the chrysalis.

As an example: in writing a new series of mine, I had lots of disparate ideas and a general direction where I wanted to steer the story, but in the process of creation I was surprised to find a strong theme popping up all on its own: duality. I’d never paid it much heed except vaguely, as a sort of necessary function of some of the story’s elements, but eventually I noticed more and more emergent material that manifested aspects of ”duality”. From a statue on a character’s table to major forces at play in the story universe, duality had established itself as something to pay attention to – and the more I paid attention to it, the more I began to discover aspects of the world that perfectly reinforced that idea and worked with it so well I could not have shoehorned it in if I tried.

If you power through your story with the untethered glee of a structurally challenged pantser, you might end up with something brilliant, but it’s more likely that you’ll have a load of river rocks in a sieve with some nuggets of gold throughout. Whilst the major theme(s) don’t need to dictate every single scene, their presence will help drive the point of the story and give the reader the sense that the sunny vacation story is about something more meaningful than a random cruise with the family. Instead, it might be about the family rediscovering their relationships after an event in the past that forced them appart, or grappling with issues of loyalty in the face of oncoming changes.

Stories don’t have to be heavily thematic in order to be enjoyed, but which of the following is more appealing?

I. A living room where everything is haphazard and messy: a pink sofa from the street, a soulless white IKEA coffee table, yellow wallpaper from the 70’s, Japanese silk screens and clashing art prints all over. You simply struggle to understand the choices made here.

II. A room designed around a harmonious color palette, a specific vibe or design inspiration, where each piece adds to the effect or creates a pleasant contrast. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but it’s full of vision and intention.

Even the clash of multiple styles can work when it’s intentional, when that’s the whole point and message. A story without any sense of theme can tend toward the hotchpotch room: it might have fun things to keep your attention occupied, but you’re not really sure what these elements are even doing together and what the narrative is meant to be.
Whereas the intentional room, whether minimalist or maximalist, just…makes sense. It knows what it’s about, and has a voice coloured by the confidence of deeply owning yourself.

When writing without a pre-set theme, you must simply pay close attention to the patterns that emerge from the story as you write it. Now the subconscious is running the show, and trusting that power can feel shaky. It can be unpredictable and feel uncontrollable, but with the right approach it can be the most powerful engine at your disposal.

So how do you know if a theme will even emerge?
If your story is deeply driven by a central idea(s) and felt from the inside, it will.

Slapping together some derivative plot points with cardboard characters and calling it a day might work for the cash, but does not layered storytelling make. Yet even ”easy” literature can have surprisingly deep themes, and they can emerge just as organically. I’d argue that many examples of such books could be improved by utilising the themes they’d naturally facilitate.

No matter your story, the main thing is to listen to the themes as they come to you, and run with the material they bring up.


Thematic writing,

x. Foxglove Scribe