Class 6 - Thinking More About Theme

Welcome Back

Last time, we explored how human lives are messy and complex. All human lives are like this, when you start to look beneath the surface. Last time we talked about those “Great Lives, Great Deeds” memoirs. Two things make these memoirs boring. One is that they ignore the complexity of human life. And the other is that the author assumes that an account of their life — sanitised and freed of this complexity — is going to be fascinating to the reader. But even if you are interested in the author, this is not enough. There are two things we want to make the story compelling.

We want:

1. An insight into the complexity beneath the surface.
2. A story that has a central topic of theme (or a set of closely-related themes).

Readers want complexity, in other words. They don’t want everything tidied up and sanitised. But they also want the author to guide them through this complexity.

The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard said that one of the paradoxes of life is (and I’m quoting from memory here) that it is lived forward, but understood backwards. So when we are living life, we can’t step outside the present to understand the forces that are shaping our life. But in retrospect, we can start to pick apart all those dynamics to start to understand what was happening, and its significance.

Themes: Discussion

Let’s get into breakout groups. Thinking about Eberstadt’s piece, what are the main themes that she addresses? How does she address these?

Topics (or Themes), Scenes and Forms

In her book The Memoir Project (2011), writer Marion Roach Smith gives the following ‘formula’ for understanding the art of the memoir.

It’s about x (a topic) as illustrated by y(scenes) to be told in a z (form).

This feels a little abstract. But what Smith is saying is that a memoir needs the following:

1. A theme, topic or thread running through it.
2. A series of scenes, stories or incidents that throw light on this theme.
3. A way of ordering these scenes or incidents into an overall shape or form.

Let’s look at these in turn.

1. Themes

The theme (or as Marion Roach Smith says, the topic) of your memoir is what it is about. Your life in general is not an ideal theme for a memoir, for all the reasons we have discussed: it is too big, untidy and unordered to engage the reader.

So what does make a good theme? You could see a good theme as one that has two poles:

• There is a universal pole, something that other people can grasp hold of and make sense of.
• And then there is an individual pole, which is about how this theme plays out in the specific circumstances of your life.

Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (2015) is about grief and the loss of her father. That’s the universal pole, something that all readers can relate to. But the individual pole is what makes this such a fascinating book: it is about how Macdonald works through grief by learning how to tame a goshawk.

A good theme, then, is something that people can immediately grasp and understand. It is the kind of thing that can be summed up in a sentence. “A story about how a writer works through the death of her father by taming a bird of prey.”

2. Scenes

Once you have a theme, you can think about the best way of exploring it. What many memoir writers do at this stage is to gather notes about specific scenes, incidents and stories that relate to this theme.

Memoirs are made up of multiple stories and scenes which relate to the central theme. So what are the stories that speak about the theme of your memoir? What are the scenes or the incidents that you remember vividly, that you return to in your imagination again and again?

By scene, I mean accounts of things that actually happened, written with care for the specifics and the details, so that readers can experience them (live forwards through them) as they unfold.

3. Forms

Finally, there’s the question of form. How do you want to put all this material together? How do you want to shape it? Memoirs may be chronological and orderly. They may be complex and disordered. They may be told with all the close, focussed intensity of a 19th century novel. Or they may be more spacious, made up of hints, fragments and clues.

There are no rules (other than “does this work?” — the hardest rule of all to follow, because you don’t know until you try — and sometimes not even then!). Memoirs don’t even have to be prose. Maybe you want to write a series of poems, or produce something collaged with words and images.

Making a Soufflé

Let’s take an example. Imagine you want to write a mini-memoir about how you came to understand failure through trying to bake the perfect soufflé.

The theme here has a universal theme or topic (failure) that will interest readers, and an individual pole (your disastrous attempts at soufflé-making).

Once you have this theme or topic, you can think about the scenes that you might write about. You can even make a list, for example:

1. The first soufflé you ever ate
2. How you cried when you burned the almost-perfect soufflé you made.
3. How you fell in love with soufflé (and fell in love with X at the same time)
4. Your fear of failure in school cooking classes
5. How your parents instilled the fear of failure in me
6. The time when, having given up on your ambition, you ate a soufflé prepared by an expert, and realised at last you were okay with failure

You can start writing these one-by-one, exploring these aspects of your experience.

Finally, you can start to give these stories an overall form. How do you want to piece these scenes together to tell an overall story? Do you want the writing to be chronological? Fragmentary? Do you want to start at the end (with failure) and go back to the beginning? Do you want to write it in prose, in poetry, as a graphic novel?

Homework Assignment

There are two pieces of homework this time. The first is also your first mini-assignment, and that is to write a mini-memoir.

Start with a universal theme that interests you: something that all human beings, or almost all human beings, might experience at some time or other. Here are some themes that, if they are not universal, are very close to being, so start by choosing one of these!

• The experience of social awkwardness.
• The experience of grief.
• The experience of failure.
• The experience of desire.
• The longing to be somewhere you are not.
• The desire to find a place where you belong.

Now think about between two and four scenes (memories / stories from your life) that throw light on this theme. What are these stories? What do they tell us?

Finally, think about the form of your piece. How do you want to write it? In what order do you want to tell these individual scenes or stories? How will you tie it all together into a satisfying whole.

When you’ve had a think about all this, then you are ready to write your mini-memoir. As you write, make sure you keep your plan on hand, and resist the temptation to wander off the point. Keep the focus as tight as possible.

If we get time in the session, we’ll start working on the writing now, to give you a head-start!

Homework

1. Write and edit your mini-memoir, then upload it to Canvas by the end of Sunday ICT.
2. Read the introduction to Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place before next week’s class. I will share this on Canvas.
3. Post one question on Canvas that you would like to ask Noreen in response to her work.