It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Theme)

By Robert J. Sawyer

Quickly, now: what's the bestselling sequel of all time?

Here's a hint: it's not the New Testament.

Give up? The answer is The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, which has sold over eighty million copies worldwide since it was published in 2003. The Da Vinci Code is the sequel to Brown's earlier Angels & Demons, which came out three years earlier.

But when first released, Angels & Demons sold in typical midlist numbers. Why did the sequel become a runaway success when the original had only modest sales? After all, on the surface they're very similar books. Both are about Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, a character so cardboard that even the great Tom Hanks couldn't breathe life into him in the film adaptations. Both are puzzle-oriented mysteries. And both, as most creative-writing teachers will rush to tell you, are clumsily written.

The answer is that Angels & Demons is just a story, whereas The Da Vinci Code is about something. Upon finishing Angels & Demons, the reader goes, "Huh. Not bad." But after completing The Da Vinci Code, the reader says, "Holy moley, I've got to talk to somebody about this!"

That's because The Da Vinci Code is about a provocative theme, namely that a worldwide crisis of faith would ensue if it became known (as the novel proposes) that Jesus fathered children with Mary Magdalene and the descendants of those children are alive in the present day.

Plot-driven fiction is all well and good; it provides a pleasant diversion. But it's not important, and it doesn't get people talking. If you ask someone what Angels & Demons is about, all they can offer is a plot synopsis ("There's this scientist, see, and he's discovered how to produce antimatter, but then he's found dead . . . blah blah blah"). But if you ask anyone what The Da Vinci Code is about, they immediately cite the thematic statement I gave above.

Or take my all-time favorite novel, published in 1960: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. When asked what it's about, no one ever says, "Well, see, there are these two kids playing in their yard, and a little boy shows up next door and says he's visiting for the summer, and . . ." No, they say, "It's about the fact that systemic racism is so ingrained that even a provably innocent African-American can't get justice from the legal system." They cite the theme, one sadly still all-too-relevant today.

Now, you may have noticed that we're a fair distance from science fiction. True. But To Kill a Mockingbird does precisely what much ambitious science fiction does: it appears to be a story about something else--kids having summer adventures, in that case--to suck readers in before pivoting to what it's really about.

Most creative-writing teachers tell their students to start with a character, and, yes, Harper Lee did start with her own father, but that rarely works for creating thematically driven fiction. Instead, I suggest you start with a topic: something you want to write about (justice, in the case of To Kill a Mockingbird.) Next, research that topic thoroughly, ideally without any preconceived idea of what you want to say about the topic. Why? Because confirmation bias--only researching aspects that support what you think you already know or believe (such as, for instance, that the courts are the great levelers, a line stated ironically by Harper Lee in her novel)--might lead you to a banal, rather than a provocative, theme.

For example, compare the theme of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (a play we've been performing for 430 years now), namely that love is the most dangerous of human emotions, to the pablum of formulaic romances that assert little more than love is nice.

To make sure you don't give the reader pablum, keep researching your topic until you find a provocative theme, and only then develop a cast of characters that let you explore the ramifications of that theme.

Starting in 1974, there was an hour-long TV show called The Six Million Dollar Man, about an astronaut who crashes an experimental aircraft, losing an arm, two legs, and an eye in the process. The government rebuilds him with super-powered bionic replacements and sends him out on secret missions. In nearly all the episodes, the main character has no feelings whatsoever about being a triple amputee or about anything else, and you can only summarize the episodes by giving ho-hum recitations of their action-adventure plots.

But there's one notable exception, an episode called "The Seven Million Dollar Man," written by Peter Allan Fields, and brilliantly guest-starring Monte Markham as an all-new character, Barney Miller (yes, the same name as the TV cop), the world's second bionic man.

Fields thought deeply about the topic of the series he was writing for (futuristic human enhancement) until he found a non-banal theme (not that souping up your original body makes you more than human but rather that doing so makes you less than human), and only then did he develop the character of Barney, who he pushes to the breaking point to illuminate this theme. Barney says:

"Valuable? Let me tell you what value is. I drove the fastest race cars in the world, and I did it better than anybody else. Indy, Le Mans, I won it all, everything. That had value--because it was me doing it: me, normal flesh-and-blood Barney Miller. Man, I do anything now, it's not me. It's just a bunch of wires and nuclear muscles, right? I don't know. I have a crash that should've killed me, I don't even die like I should. I wake up and I tell Oscar, I don't care what it is, go to it! The next time I wake up, I find I've been rebuilt . . . very oddly. And I don't like it."

Notice that Fields has his character actually state the theme directly. Some teachers will tell you never to do that, but when they do, they're ignoring millennia of great writers doing so. For instance, 2,400 years ago, Sophocles ended Oedipus Rex--the only one of his surviving plays still widely performed--with the chorus flat-out singing the thematic statement: yes, your life might seem good, but you can't be sure it really is until your final day.

And, of course, most episodes of The Twilight Zone, a show that's been constantly watched for sixty-six years now, end with Rod Serling coming on-screen and actually stating the theme.

Here's a case study, using my own 1997 novel Frameshift, which went on to be a Hugo Award finalist and won Japan's Seiun Award for best foreign science-fiction novel of the year.

All I knew at the outset was that genetics, a topic much in the news back then, sounded like an interesting thing to write about, and so I read everything I could find on that subject, starting with beginner's books (in my case, quite literally, The Cartoon Guide to Genetics) and working my way up to very technical material.

During that reading, easy themes occurred to me, as they probably did to you as soon as I mentioned my topic, such as "genetic research will cure many diseases." That's true but it's also trite. So I kept reading--and, of course, thinking--until I came up with something interesting to use as a theme, namely that in the era of predictive genetic testing, the only thing that makes sense is socialized medicine, because no for-profit insurer is going to insure you against things your genetic profile says you're susceptible to.

With that thematic statement, building my main character was easy: a Canadian with the genetic mutation that causes Huntington's disease but so far is completely symptom-free, who moves to the United States only to find he can't get health insurance because of what his DNA says his future might hold.

First topic, then theme, and finally a character put through a plot that illuminates the theme: this story-generation technique goes right back to the origins of the science-fiction genre. H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, published in 1895, continues to be widely read precisely because it is thematically driven, even though, like To Kill a Mockingbird, it doesn't appear to be so at first.

No, when you start reading it, The Time Machine seems to be a lark about a Victorian gentleman traveling to the year A.D. 802701--but it's actually a damning critique of the British class system. And note that Wells's theme isn't the trivial one that "The class system is bad for the working class," but rather is, "Yes, the class system is bad for the working class, but it's even worse for the leisure class."

Of course, it was only members of the leisure class who had the literacy to read and the cash to buy Wells's book; he wasn't preaching to the converted--the downtrodden who would reply, "Bleedin' right, guv!" if told they had it rough--but rather to the unconverted: the elite whose reliance on others for both physical and intellectual labor Wells felt was going to be ruinous in the long run. He brilliantly used science fiction's core tools of mask, metaphor, and disguise to reach audiences that would never be predisposed to read tracts on the same theme.

We can find this technique used all the way back to the very first science-fiction novel, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein from 1818. (And, yes, it is a science-fiction novel: it's the tale of a scientist conducting an experiment to test a hypothesis, namely that the real-life studies by the Italian Luigi Galvani into the effects of electricity on biological tissue might be extended to the use of electricity to revive dead matter.)

Frankenstein is widely taught as the first title in science-fiction survey courses--but it's also often taught in classes on women's studies or feminist literature. Why? Because Mary Shelley, living in the shadow of her famous husband, was chafing at the reality that she couldn't vote, inherit or bequeath property, or hold most jobs. In fact, the only thing that the universe had left her and other women, she felt, was the one that men couldn't yet take away: the power to create life. But, she said, if science ever gave men a way to do that, the result would be disastrous.

That was her thematic statement. Men, Mary Shelley was asserting, were only interested in that brief moment that sometimes leads to the beginning of life, unlike women, who carry babies for nine months and then often nourish them with their own milk. Topic: New ways of creating life. Theme: we must prevent men from getting control over reproduction. Character: an innocent being endowed with life by a man, not a woman, who suffers horribly because that man abandons him. And, of course, Shelley wrapped it all up in an evocative gothic setting that lured the unsuspecting into read her cautionary tale.

Yes, of course, it's fine to produce stories that just entertain; popcorn has its place. But if, like the authors cited above, you choose to tackle provocative themes, you might well get people talking about your stories not just today or tomorrow but for decades or even