Trusting Readers To Figure It Out

Once again a novelist, a person I respect, said in essence that intentionally incorporating a theme in fiction makes the story preachy. This position, while widely held by Christian authors, is far from the truth. Anyone who can remember back to high school or college literature classes knows this. The classics we studied in those days, and that many students still study, are far from preachy, yet one of the points of analysis teachers emphasized was what the author was saying in the story — his theme.

In truth, theme does not equal preachy. It never has. However, a poorly crafted theme might indeed come across as preachy. The way to eliminate a poorly crafted theme, of course, is not to eliminate theme, yet that’s what many writers seem to advocate.

Some, of course, suggest that the theme will naturally form itself because the author has deeply held beliefs. By that reasoning, then, there is no need to carefully craft our characters since the author himself is a person, and there is no need to craft the plot since the author himself lives life.

Perhaps most inconsistent in this movement to downplay theme is the idea that it is right, even necessary, to carefully craft each sentence so that the prose sparkles, but not necessary to craft the ultimate meaning behind each sentence that gives the story significance.

In the opposite camp from those advocating theme-less fiction, however, are those who believe in their theme more than they believe in their reader’s ability to understand the theme. These writers, in fact, do turn their theme into an essay or a sermon, largely because they want to be sure the readers “get it.”

Photograph by Andrew Dunn

I remember struggling with this in my writing. Shortly after one of the Lord of the Rings movies released, a group of self-proclaimed pagans gathered in England for the celebration of a pagan rite, and they referenced J. R. R. Tolkien as their hero and Middle Earth as their hope. Since I write epic fantasy, I tried to imagine what it would feel like to have my writing so thoroughly misunderstood and misused as these people were doing to Tolkien’s work. Wouldn’t it be better to spell things out and to eliminate any doubt about what the author means?

Actually not. Fiction isn’t about the author. It’s about the characters. As soon as the author intrudes, he pulls down the curtain, and the reader is no longer lost in the pretend of the play. Instead, he might well feel as if he’s been manipulated into listening to the equivalent of a commercial, when he thought he was getting an ad-free story. Consequently, the author, rather than making his point and having his reader think deeply, has lost the reader who may also vehemently reject the point out of hand.

In short, a writer committed to saying something important in her fiction must do so with intention, weaving the meaning into the fabric of the story. What happens to the characters and how they grow or change ought to tell the reader far more than what the author states plainly. Symbols sprinkled throughout can reinforce the main point, and will add artistic flare that make the story far deeper. But just as a magician doesn’t reveal how he performed his tricks at the end of his show, an author shouldn’t tip his hand at any time and explain what the story was all about.

Will some readers misunderstand? Possibly so, but even if this is the case, they will think a great deal more about the theme than if the author intercedes to tell them what they should think. After all, no author can force a reader to believe as she believes. It’s really up to the author to paint the picture with words, then trust the reader to get it.

To come full circle, no reader will get a theme that’s not there, so an author first needs to give attention to what precisely he wants to say through the vehicle of story. He needs to weave it well into the story, then trust the reader to make sense of what he has read.