Find a clear theme to give your words strong foundation

Writers come in many forms. Some are refined, sophisticated and elitist. Others are gruff and brisk in their manner. Some are controversial, mean and unsmiling.

Others are polished, friendly and affable. However, almost all writers somehow find publishers difficult to understand.

The visit to the publishing house can be like a frightening scene straight out of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. To many, the publishing industry is a complex maze akin to the Winchester Mystery House, the bizarre mansion in San Jose, California. Once the residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of gun tycoon William Winchester, it’s a huge, intimidating house: 160 rooms, which include 40 bedrooms, two ballrooms, one completed, one not; 47 fireplaces, 10,000 window panes, two basements and three elevators. It has “secret passageways, stairs that lead nowhere and doors that open onto walls”. 

In my decade of publishing, I have seen writers straying like a ghost ship from harbour to haven, never seeming to find a home port to dock.

Sometimes this is occasioned by lack of a clear theme (narrative), what the great modern novelist André Aciman calls “a hidden nerve, a secret chamber ... which stirs their prose and makes it tick and turn this way and that, and identifies them, like a signature, though it lurks deeper than their style or their voice...”.

Aciman writes about place, displacement, nostalgia and that search for a “true home” after being exiled from Alexandria, Egypt. He can write about a park in New York that reminds him of Rome or about little parks in Paris that remind him of New York, which ultimately reminds him of Alexandria, what he calls “capital of memory”. Place is his signature theme.

I have discovered that some writers do not hinge their works on clear themes. They let their mind run amok and then let “the pen follow” their thoughts. However, without clear themes, no matter how flowery the language, the work will be like a house without a foundation.

The problem is, whereas in textbooks themes are definite, in fiction, they are normally vague. A critic summed it up well that the “theme of a novel is the deeper layer of meaning running beneath the story’s surface”. 

There are many reasons themes are important. In stories for children, for example, it’s important to think about the “take away” or lessons for the impressionable minds.

Themes also give direction to the narrative, providing the subject (raw material for the story). Early Kenyan writers wrote compelling narratives about colonial oppression and injustice. Critics have wondered whether, after the departure of the colonialists, writers have “nothing to write about”.

However, there are many themes. In Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe anchored his narrative on themes like customs, fate and free will, domination and injustice and religion. Fear of failure is also a theme that helps us understand why Okonkwo is so tough and works very hard. He fears to turn out like his father, Unoka, a notorious idler who “owed every neighbour some money, from a few cowries to quite substantial amounts”.

Good versus evil is an old theme that readers still love. Other themes are empowerment, coming of age, love, change, war and peace, chaos and order, convention and rebellion. The theme is the first foundational item the writer should think about.

The writer is CEO of Phoenix Publishers (johnmwazemba@gmail.  com)