What makes a story stick?
As you walk through tall grass, burrs stick to your socks, hooking into you by a dozen, different, woody spikes; that’s what the stories do that mean the most to a reader. They hook you on multiple levels. They are the seed pods that cling to you, forcing you to carry them with you, scattering their seed whenever you tell others about this wonderful story you've found.
One of the most important words we have for those hooks is theme. Themes are the universal ideas at the heart of your story, and it is through these themes that the story conveys its truths about the human experience. You may argue that a book's humanity is found in its characters, their growth, desires, and fears, and that all of this is portrayed to us through action, dialogue, thought, and symbolism. You’re right, to a point. Without theme, all those pieces would do as well at presenting a unified message of the human experience as the social media you scroll through with a growing sense of alienation and despair, every fractured facet reflecting some universal truth, but the entirety of the experience offering nothing but chaos and noise.
No two genres have the same demands or the same strength, and each speaks to the human experience in its own way, but they all speak. A story devoid of intelligent life still reveals the human experience, as do stories about aliens, animals, or anaerobic bacteria. This will be true until it's no longer a human writing the book and no longer a human reading it.
Themes are more than the connective tissue that holds a story’s components together. Theme will be the communication of one soul to another for as long as humanity keeps telling stories.
What is the theme of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” or Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”?
What do Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” or Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” have to say about life and death?
What about identity and the self is revealed by Hermann Hesse’s “Siddhartha” or James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”?
What warnings linger with us after reading George Orwell’s “1984” or William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”? What hope, despite the darkness, do we find in Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” or Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”?
What facet of our lives is explored in J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” or Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”?
Our stories carry betrayal and loyalty. Isolation and alienation. Hope and despair. The layers run two or three deep and take some consideration to ponder out, and this is the way it should be. Our books don’t wear a name badge that says, “Hi, May Theme Is…” Revelation comes through repeated exposure in all the various aspects of storytelling; it’s a pattern, a drumbeat, the unified experience of the whole.
A dozen little hooks on a seedpod you didn’t even know was there until it had you.
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