Salutations, fellow readers, writers, and
killers of time on YouTube.
My name is Martha Jones, and I would like to use the androgynous sounds of my
voice to share with you a few words
about
Storytelling and the Importance of
Themes.
If you listen to composers talk about
their craft for more than, like, a minute,
you will likely hear them discuss the
many virtues of themes.
Unlike a novelist or a screenwriter, the
composer is writing a story in a
language that is not reliant on words.
When they do their jobs well, composers
do more than enhance the characters and
ideas of a movie, play, TV show, or web series.
They tell the story via the language of melody.
You could wear welding goggles to
the movie of your choice
and let the music tell you whether the
villain just made his entrance
or whether the actors are playing out a
love scene or an action scene.
Therefore, because the concept of musical themes exists,
it is not merely unusual for a composer
to write music from scratch for each and
every scene in a given piece of visual art.
It's also kind of the dumb person's way
of doing things, because once you have a
set of themes for your characters and ideas,
you can play variations on those themes
which saves you a ton of work and helps
tie the scenes together in such a way
they become a more satisfying story.
Now, modern movies are big enough
business that it is unusual to find a
soundtrack among their ranks with no
music in it, but if you happen to see
such a movie, it is agonizing! When I was about 15 or so,
my dad told me about a movie called King
Solomon's Mine featuring beloved pulp
literary icon Alan Quartermaine,
and he described it to me as kind of
like proto-Indiana Jones.
We had a copy of the 1950s version
laying around the house,
so I watched it.
And I hated it.
But it took me about halfway through the
movie to figure out WHY I hated it:
The soundtrack was almost entirely
random jungle noises.
So it turns out, it does not matter how
much swag you cram in your treasure room,
or how exotic your locations are, or how
red Debra Kerr's hair looks in beautiful Technicolor.
If you don't have that triumphant, unmistakable
Bup-bah-dah-dah! Dah-dah-dah!
I cannot connect as strongly to your
adventure story as you might want me to,
Mr. Director, Sir. Anyway, by now you might very well be thinking
"Okay so music has themes. How does
knowing this help me write better books?"
A good question that, because
storytellers have wildly different ideas
about how blatant or hidden their themes
need to be,
or even if you need themes at all.
I would argue that absolutely, you can
write a story with no themes,
if you're okay with the storytelling
style that is both sucky and
unsustainable.
As some of you will no doubt recall,
within the last couple of years, a writer
of some renown became infamous for
uttering perhaps the worst writing quote
in all history, which of course is
"Themes are for 8th grade book reports."
Yes, I know. I'm like the million-
billionth person to claim i know what
went wrong with Game of Thrones, but
consider the anticlimactic shambles of
that show's legendarily bad ending
as though it had been a musical
soundtrack. Expansive ideas with no
direction end up feeling aimless and
disconnected,
not unlike a composer of an epic score
who is trying to write every note from
scratch without building on the skeletal
framework of a few solid themes. Like,
don't even try to imagine your favorite
books as though they were written with
no themes in mind.
Try to picture what would happen if one -
just one - of their tidy collection of
themes was
not there. Can you envision an alternate
reality in which the Narnia series has
no theme of redemption?
How about The Lord of the Rings with no
theme of corruption?
Similarly, an alternate history in which
some of our favorite musical themes were altered or absent would be pretty upsetting.
Imagine if one - just one - of Howard Shore's
amazing musical themes were missing from
Lord of the Rings. How many fans would
feel differently
instead of "Dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah! Dah-dah-dah!"
we heard silence. Or maybe random forest noises.
So that's all very well for C.S. Lewis or
J.R.R. Tolkien, but
what about our books? How do we proceed to incorporate such themes?
Well, it kind of depends on your writing
process. Writers the likes of Aesop and
Orwell, for instance, had their themes in
mind first, then wrote stories that
revolved around those themes.
William Faulkner, by contrast, famously
had no themes in mind per se when he
started writing The Sound and the Fury,
just a picture in his head of a little girl
of a tree and dirty underthings.
His themes of renewal and --
*sigh* "...corruption of southern values"
(Really Mr. Faulkner?) were incorporated
later as his story took shape.
Unfortunately, my ability to guide you on
your journey to meaningful themes in
your own writing is
limited. I'm still learning how to
reliably incorporate them into my own writing.
And this is where editors are the
blessed-est blessing that ever blessed.
If ever you suspect that your themes
could use some outside help,
ask an editor. They are great at
macromanagement
and seeing the whole picture that is
your book long after you've devolved
into a nearsighted, micromanaging crazy
person obsessed with individual brush strokes.
So to sum up, themes are great tools for
telling better more cohesive stories,
and when in doubt, ask an editor. And you
know what? That's good advice for
any point in the writing journey, themes
or no themes. When in doubt ask an editor.
Your future self will thank you.
As always, thank you for giving these
videos a shot. I post whenever the day
job allows. In the meantime,
take it easy.
Loves you. Bye!
Like my channel, buy my crap.
Doo-dah, doo-dah!
There's no time to take a nap.
Oh, the doo-dah day. Hey!
Not to date myself too completely, but
when I was small, this is what the Dawn
Treader looked like, as opposed to
this. And who's to say which is
objectively better?
Me. Right now. This one is better. I'm
sorry to say that with the last round of
Narnia movies, I did not connect with the
music as strongly as I have with other
movies in the past or even other Narnia
incarnations.
I will admit here and now that that
might have been user error, and the music
might be perfectly nice. I just
didn't grow up with it, so I don't care
as much. However, I connected with the old BBC version so completely
that I do remember some of the musical
themes in there, particularly the melody
that played
over the title sequence and the end
credits, which went like this:
*melody plays*
You don't have to analyze the music in
order to enjoy the story. However,
they chose to play this gentle, flowing
melody on the --
french horn question mark (?) a choice that lent them
the credence and the gravitas of a brass instrument
but also the gentleness of that flowing
melody, which I feel like was done on
purpose. I think someone
had the character of Aslan in mind when
they were constructing that melody.
Also, it's not totally the same at the
beginning as it is at the end, because at
the beginning it is--
Minor key, unresolved as opposed to the
end where it is--
resolved and in a major key, signaling
the start of the conflict
in the end of the conflict. And it's
fantastic.
It's like the magic trick where you know
how it's done, and it doesn't get lamer.
It's awesomer because you know how much work and thought went into that.
Again, you might rightly be asking, "What
does this have to do with my writing
better books?" and I'm glad you asked!
The tie that binds this all to the
writing of better books
is a loose one, and if you think it is
too loose to actually connect,
please talk to me about it in the
comments. As you know, you have a
responsibility to make me smarter and
change my mind.
But going back and finding something to
analyze and appreciate is not unlike
a novel in which the writer has assembled
an elegant story into which you can read
some groovy subtext,
because you can absolutely take stories
like Gulliver's Travels, The Picture Dorian
Gray, and Orlando at face value, but the author
has left subtext for you to find in case
you want to think deeper about it,
the likes of which you can go back, and
you can reread that, and you can go
"That's what they were saying?
Neat!"
