3 Steps to Develop your Story Theme

if you're going to write a book or Nolla or even a short story you have to know the why behind your entire story without this fundamental thing you're going to struggle to figure out how to put your story together and why it's even worth the reader time to read it in the first place what we're talking about here is your story's theme this is a through line that holds your entire story together helps you make decisions while you're writing your story about what goes in and what doesn't go in and it's the thing that's really going to connect you to your reader so that they'll read it all the way to the end and it actually makes a difference in their life so I'm going to walk you through the step-by-step process we use at story grid to discover and lock in your theme and how that's going to help you write a much stronger better book so grab a piece of paper and a pencil or your favorite note taking app and we're going to work on this together and if you're wondering who I am my name is Tim Gro I'm the CEO of story grid and I'm the author of your first 1,000 copies the threshing and the shitthead my partner Sean coin is the founder and creator of story grid and he's been in the publishing business for over 30 years as a writer editor and researcher and everything we teach in this video and everything we do at story grid is based on his experience developing writing editing and Publishing bestselling books and so let's dive into this together let's start with what we call it story grid the non negotiable this is the core of your story this is what everything comes back to and I have a formula I'm going to show you that you're going to fill in in just a minute but first let's talk about how to get there and to do that we're going to start by talking about the most painful moments in your life seriously this is where we start because when we're talking about a core message in your book we need to start with something that is a deeply held belief for you and so here's some questions I want you to work through so on your piece of paper or in your note taking app I want you to actually work through these questions and answer them what do you think is the source of the bad stuff that happens in the world what causes the most pain for people what causes the most pain for the most amount of people you only have so much ability to actually pursue and Achieve goals that will create change in the world so how do you want to spin that you only have so much time and effort you can put into something so what is something that it's worth spending that time on you also have limited control to solve problems so what problems do you dare to confront another way to think about this is what would you die for where is your Line in the Sand where you say here and no further here's another angle I want you to take on this was there ever a time in your life where you had a very tightly held belief that you thought this is something I believe until the day I die and then you were forced into a place where you you had to let it go maybe you were in a marriage and you thought that if I ever lost my husband or my wife that I would never be able to go on and then you got a divorce maybe you had a belief about a certain group of people whether it's a certain class of people or race of people or nationality or even a different religion you had this belief about another group of people that then once you confronted that you had to let that go maybe there's a deeply held belief you have about yourself that you had to confront and let go this is what it was for me I grew up in a very strict religion where I was taught basically that I was an evil sinful person everything that I do is evil and sinful and anything good comes from outside of me specifically from a particular God and so this is what I was taught from a very young age and what I believed and this was eating my soul throughout my life the older I gotten the harder I clung to this the worse my life got until I reached this point where I was going to lose everything that I actually cared about if I kept holding on to this belief and I was forced to confront it and let it go I had to switch that thinking from believing that I was fundamentally an evil and sinful person to switch over to fundamentally believing that I am a good and perfect person and act from there now this sounds relatively straightforward but this was a big thing for me when I look back over my life there was lots of times where I had to let go of beliefs but this was a fundamental one where letting go of this belief risked a lot but then looking back it changed my life for the better and so looking back on your life what are tightly held beliefs that you once had where you were forced into a corner and you had to risk letting go of that belief and living a different type of life so these types of questions and thinking through your life are where you find your not unnegotiable you find the thing that you care the most about and this is what I want you to write your book on and here's the formula I want you to think about so your non-negotiable is structured like this I want to move the reader from believing blank about themselves the world or themselves in the world to believing blank about themselves the world or themselves in the world so for me those blanks were filled like this I want to move the reader from believing that at their core they're an evil and broken person to believing that at their core they are a good and perfect person this is your non-negotiable this is the thing you're going to keep coming back to that you want to tell a story about is you want to take the reader from believing one thing about themselves or the world or themselves in the world and moving it to believing something else you want them to see themselves or the world in a different way from the beginning of the story to the end of the story so I actually believe this I think that if everybody would actually move their belief from believing they're fundamentally broken or evil or imperfect in any way to believing that they are fundamentally good and perfect that generally the world will become much better now you believe something else you might believe something on a societal scale you might believe something on a cultural scale or even an individual skill as well but it doesn't matter it's the thing that you believe causes the most suffering in the world and if people would understand something different the whole world would get better this is your non-negotiable so we're going to decide on what that is and it's in that formula that I gave you now the non-negotiable is just the first piece of your theme and if you just stop there and start writing a book about that particular thing you're going to end up writing a book that is flat onedimensional one-sided very preachy instead of an actual full threedimensional story so we have to take that non-negotiable and we've got to work on it some and to do that we're going to talk about the double Factor problem so what is a double Factor problem to answer that let's start with a single Factor problem so a single Factor problem is a problem that always has the same answer so 1 + 1 is always two so no matter where you are or the context or the world you live in 1 + 1 = 2 single Factor problems are also problem problems that almost always have the same answer so for instance if you have a job and you have to be there at 8:00 a.m. and each morning when you wake up the question is should I get to work on time the answer is yes you should get to work on time it's almost always that answer right that's a single Factor problem but now let's add some complexity just into that one question so what if you wake up in the morning and you're really sick or what if you wake up in the morning and while you're getting ready your long lost child knocks on the door and introduces themselves for the first time or what if 20 minutes before you're supposed to be at work you get invited to go interview for a much much better job but that also starts at 8:00 a.m. well now we've added some other factors into the problem and it's kind of a what if problem and this is what you see about double Factor problems is the answer to every double Factor problem is well it depends these are real life problems questions like should I get divorced should I have a child should I move to Wisconsin should I take this job all of those questions if you ask people in general they're going to say well it depends and they're going to need more information about the context before they can give you a straight answer and a double Factor problem is always weighing two options and they're usually weighing options between internal things for your character and external things for your character the pros and cons are very much in Conflict so for instance let's say that you live at home with your family in the same town you grew up in and family ties are really really important to you but then you get offered a job in a different city and you have to move to that City to take the job but it's a job you really really want how do you make that decision well you start weighing the pros and cons and there's a lot of conflict there because you want to be loyal to your family and because you care about them and you want to spend your life with them but at the same time there's this other thing that you really want that will give you really important things to you as well so how do you make those decisions it's a double Factor problem there's so many things that go into this problem to help you make that decision so what we want to do is we want to take that non-negotiable that we have and we want to find a double Factor problem that addresses that non-negotiable now that's easy to say but it's a little harder to do so let me walk you through what I did for my book so I have my non-negotiable if I want to move the reader from believing that they're an evil broken sinful person to believing that they are basically good and perfect well one of the problems with believing that you're evil and sinful is that you have no real sense of self which means it's hard to make decisions so what you end up doing is you start looking around for people to tell you how to make good decisions and and the problem that you run into is you're not sure who to listen to because you have no sense of self you don't really trust anything that comes from inside of you so you're constantly looking around for the right people to trust so when I was looking at the book that I wanted to write this is the problem I wanted to address so the double Factor problem is when do you listen to other people and let them make decisions on your behalf and when do you trust yourself and make your own decisions now you can see that sometimes answer a is the right thing and sometimes answer B if you're going to a doctor and you trust your doctor you pretty much need to just do what they tell you it doesn't really matter what you feel same with maybe a lawyer but then at the same time there's times where you need to go against your doctor and go against your lawyer and you need to trust yourself to make the best decision for yourself well again if you have no sense of self how do you know when to make those decisions and so this became the double Factor problem there's pros and cons to both s side there's pros and cons to letting other people make decisions on your behalf and pros and cons to making those decisions yourself so this becomes something you could actually write a book against because you could have a protagonist that's constantly making the wrong decisions they keep trusting people they shouldn't trust and not trusting people they actually should trust and fundamentally they're making those wrong choices because they don't trust themselves at all and you can put a protagonist in that position at the beginning of the book and then you can have the reader follow along as the protagonist figures out that's not working and they have to learn to trust themselves and how that shows up in the world and then all the other things that go into making that a really compelling story but that's a really strong Foundation that you can write a story against and so this is what you've got to do you've got to take your non-negotiable that thing that you decided you want the reader to learn by the end of the book and then you find a problem that you can put your protagonist in where there's clear pros and cons and they're struggling which which side of that equation to deal with and this is also why there's other characters in your book is we want to see people deal with that same double Factor problem in lots of different ways and we want to see the pros and cons showing up for them so then we can start looking at Great Masterworks and seeing how these things show up in those books so if we look at Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin we could say that Jane Austin wants the reader to move from conforming to society norms for marriage to Holding Out for true love for marriage that that's the transition we want the reader to make so once that set we could start saying well the double Factor problem is when do you conform to what the culture expects of you and when do you break out of it and hold to your own ideals and you start seeing that this is showing up in every character every active major character in Pride and Prejudice is dealing with this problem Elizabeth Bennett is dealing with the problem but so are are her sisters and so is her father and so is her mother and so is Darcy and so is Bingley like everybody's dealing with when do you conform to the culture and when do you stick with your ideals so if Jane Austin had just written a book about how you should throw off the culture and just cling to true love and that was the only message in the whole book well that would be a flat one-sided story but once you introduce the double Factor problem then you start weighing both of these options and you can see how for some characters they should cling to the culture other characters should stand out and then there's middle grounds as well and we get to see that by looking at all of the different characters so how do you use your non-negotiable and your double Factor problem to create a theme that will be the backbone the through line of your entire story well here's the formula for that you can only solve the double Factor problem once you have made the change in the non-negotiable so for mine it would be something like you can only learn to truly trust the right people when you believe that you are fundamentally good and perfect person and you can trust yourself so With Pride and Prejudice you could say that the theme is the only way to know when you should conform to culture or to your own ideals is when you realize that love is worth sacrificing everything for if you want to write a story that connects to readers that makes it something that will stick with them and change the way they see themselves and the world around them and write a book that is truly worthy of your legacy and standing the test of time you have to have a strong theme that is connected to something you deeply believe a deeply held belief and this is the process you can go through to discover what that is for you think through your non-negotiable the thing you want the reader to learn by the end of the book that will change them in the world for the better and then develop a double Factor problem that allows your protagonist to confront that non-negotiable in a true and odest way and it creates a well-rounded story that you can create other characters to show different parts of that double Factor problem and then take that non-negotiable and that double Factor problem and create the theme for your book now once you have the theme you've got to develop that out into an entire writable plan for your novel and that includes genre conventions and obligatory moments developing each of those characters the world the setting there's a lot that goes into that and I touch on a lot of that in all of the different videos on this channel so make sure you go back into the archive and watch all of those but of course it comes down to this fundamental skill of being able to write a great scene because a book is just a collection of scenes that tell an entire story so if you can't consistently write great scenes that keep the reader engaged in turning Pages then there's no point in trying to write an entire book either now in our six- week scene writing workshops we walk through how to do this and I have a really cool download I want to share with you we have a 13-point checklist that we use to analyze and evaluate scenes to see if they're working not working and how they can actually get better we also have a step-by-step process of how we apply this checklist two scenes to see what's working what's not working and I want to share this with right now if you go to story grid.com checklist you can download this exact process and checklist that we use as story grid and I have a walkthrough showing you how we use it and how you can apply it to your own writing so go to story grid.com checklist the link is down in the description if you want to click that instead and download that that's my gift for you I hope you take advantage of that you're going to learn a ton just from going through that one video and checklist but as always thanks for being a writer thanks for being a part of our community here at story grid and I'll see you next time

Channel: Story Grid

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Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2024