Distilling the Themes of a Story
Cardinal fire: prismatic storytelling, intensity, wholeness
When I work on story architecture with writers, we take some time to distil the themes of the story.
It doesn't matter whether the project is genre, literary, or memoir because this process is not to do with genre tropes (though they might colour or flavour the distillation process). It is about the deeper aesthetic, emotional, social, and moral questions that the book engages with.
The themes might be abstract or concrete. They might be legible to the reader directly, or be submerged deep in the narrative. The most important thing is that the writer knows what they are, and can see that each scene, each character, and each moment is connected in some way to these deeper themes.
A wonderful example of an artwork that showcases distilled themes is Oz Perkins’s film I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. The film is a Gothic horror about a nurse providing live-in end-of-life care in a New England mansion for a famous midcentury novelist (who recalls Patricia Highsmith or Shirley Jackson).
The ending is given away right at the outset as the nurse narrates that at the film’s opening, she is twenty-eight, and she will not live to see twenty-nine.
Yet this is a film full of dread and suspense. There is a deeper mystery that involves a woman who died in the house many years earlier, who was the subject of the novelist’s most well-known book.
The film is formally beautiful. Long, slow takes. The drama of light through a circular window. The harrowing beauty of autumn leaves against a whitewashed exterior. Mortality is conjured in the changes of seasons, and the gradations of light.
There is a monologue, near the end, where the main character narrates the strangeness of the seasons in her last year.
I had arrived in the first few days of August, hired to care for Ms. Blum.
The winter of that year proved to be unseasonably warm, and by February, all that was left of the snow on the sides of the highways had turned mostly black.
It rained too much in the spring, and the fruit in the trees hung heavy at the ends of bent branches.
The sun in the summer months was unseasonably hot and stung my bare shoulders whenever I let it.
I remember thinking that fall would never come. And then it never did.
The major themes of this story are distilled in the monologue: mortality; unnatural death; excess and decay; the cutting off of a life in midseason; beauty and horror; premonitions of disaster.
These themes are not rendered directly but through image and metaphor. There are visual cues too (a gory spill of fresh blackberries, mould creeping on the walls).
It is possible to convey your distilled themes through action, dialogue, reflection, and description, but they can also be worked with obliquely, as in this film.
The benefit of knowing your distilled themes is that you can create a powerful work of art that has an internal logic, and an aesthetic beauty.
Perhaps you work similarly already, or perhaps this might be a pleasurable experiment to try with a work-in-progress. Or you could consider a favourite artwork and try to decipher its distilled themes.