Hello all! Alayna again!
Last week Emily talked about how to incorporate your theme into your plot in order to increase the cohesion of your story. This week, I’ll be continuing the series by delving more deeply into how to connect your theme to your worldbuilding.
Creating a Thematic Setting
As I said in my initial post Exploring Theme: Character and Questions, theme is ultimately about the questions you and the characters are trying to ask about human experience and the world. These questions are generated by character experience and perception of the world and work to create tension and nuance in the plot.
The world is the ultimate origin of character and plot questions. The characters are in a specific setting which prompts specific issues which prompt specific questions. In order to have a cohesive story, not just on a thematic level, you need to logically connect the world the characters exist in with the story you’re building around them. This is why worldbuilding is such an important tool for storytelling as a whole and for incorporating themes specifically.
The world you place your characters in shapes their ideals, their perspectives, their lived experiences, and more. Further, the world shapes the way the plot is able to move both spatially, as the characters interact with the physical shape of the world; but also structurally––what specific cultural problems do characters encounter? What sort of moral quandaries do the economic systems of opposing kingdoms generate? How do these issues affect the plot?
When it comes to theme, asking these kinds of specific questions of your world can help you draw connections between the plot, the characters, and the theme. Your world is the foundation not only for the plot but also for the thematic questions you’re trying to explore. For that reason, it’s important to either cultivate or choose a world that will enhance these thematic elements in your story.
In our previous worldbuilding series, Gabrielle talked about the different levels of worldbuilding. I’ll be drawing on that framework to explore how theme can be incorporated into those different levels.
The Real World: Level 1 and 2
In her worldbuilding post, Gabrielle describes Level 1 as “The Real World.”
These are stories that take place in a real, specific location set in a specific moment of time. […] this story aims to reflect what life in this setting is like.
Level 2, on the other hand, stays in this real world setting but diverges from the strictness of facts, allowing for a less specific exploration of the setting:
These stories also take place in the real world, but they aren’t as tied to specifics as the previous level. These stories are more interested in capturing the vibe of the location and time rather than replicating it.
Theme in these settings tends to focus on real world issues both big and small, such as war or family. That isn’t to say that these themes can’t be explored in settings outside of the real world, but themes in real world stories tend to be more grounded in reality and current events.
When writing a story set in the real world, you will want to choose a setting that is inherently connected to your thematic questions. It needs to naturally raise the questions that you’re trying to ask. If you’re trying to write a story about exploring the impact of nationalism on family, you wouldn’t want to set it in a time or environment where war isn’t a factor. For instance, it wouldn’t make sense to set The Book Thief in Canada in the 1850’s–war hasn’t been an issue since 1812, and Nazi propaganda hasn’t been invented yet.
Alternatively, if you’re a pantser and don’t know what questions you’re trying to ask, try taking a closer look at the specific history surrounding your setting. If you’re writing about a particular historical moment, what cultural issues were important to people at the time? If you’re writing in a contemporary setting, how do current events influence the culture of the setting?
Ultimately, what’s most important in real world settings is to make sure you’re asking questions relevant to your setting. You can have an environment that isn’t perfectly tied to your theme or plot, but when the world itself becomes integral to the questions your characters are asking, it can make the story so much more interesting for your readers. So maybe ask yourself why this story has to be told in this specific setting, at this specific time. Or maybe explore: would be a more interesting story if it was set in post-1812 Canada, what sort of questions might that setting raise for your characters, how might it provide new and more interesting hurdles for your plot?
Using the historical reality of your setting as a tool to ask deeper questions is a great way to not only create greater cohesion in your story but also to make it more interesting for your readers overall. It’s not a story that could just take place anywhere–it has to be here.
Fantastical Worlds: Level 3, Level 4, and Level 5
While the real world is built on specific historical moments and places, Levels 3-5 diverge into the more fantastical settings of sci-fi and fantasy. While using historical research can help you develop these worlds, you don’t need to rely on specific historical times and places to generate questions. In fantastical settings, the setting can generate more diverse questions; it’s one of the reasons why writing fantasy is so important: it allows us to defamiliarize the questions of our world, allowing us to explore them more deeply.
Level 3, “Magical Upgrades,” can still draw in specific historical environments to generate their thematic questions, but it exaggerates them with a fantasy twist.
These are the stories that still take place in the real world, but there are fantastical elements. This could be magical realism, a secret second world, superhero fiction, or urban fantasy, but regardless there’s some level of fantasy or science fiction layered onto the real world.
Leve 4 generally pertains to real world environments gone haywire, like dystopian or apocalyptic novels.
These are stories where we’re technically still on Earth, but the world has been so thoroughly warped by time or by catastrophe that it’s functionally a different world from the one we live in today. […] The ecosystems and landscapes are still the same, but the fingerprints of the future are clear.
Characters in fantastical worlds face more complicated problems than real world settings, but they share many of the moral quandaries of our own day and age. However, while historical specifics can be a good tool to generate thematic questions in real world settings, fantastical settings offer another tool for creating cohesion. While in real world settings the author is relying on facts and questions that might already exist, in fantastical settings they get to create those environments for themselves. The new elements you’re adding to the world are naturally going to lead to more question and because you’re introducing them yourself, you can control what sort of questions they prompt.
A good example of a fantastical environment that generates thematic questions is The Giver, which we’ve talked about in our previous posts. This dystopian setting is the only reason that Jonas even has questions to ask. If the community wasn’t created to eject chaos from society, Jonas wouldn’t have asked so intensely whether or not beauty or freedom from pain are more valuable. This question, however, of the value of beauty at the price of pain is a question that we can ask in our own world. Lowry increases the impact of the question by setting it in an exaggerated dystopian world, allowing the reader to see the value of beauty through its absence. Could the theme of beauty at the price of pain be explored through other methods? Of course, but the endurance of Lowry’s story proves that there is some merit to the fantastical approach.
The flexibility of fantastical worlds is most apparent in Level 5: Starting From Scratch.
This is a unique world to fit a fantasy or science fiction story. […] The first four levels had the benefit of having the real world as a framework. That’s not so much the case here, but creating a world from something is incredibly difficult. So the best way to start building is to create a framework for yourself. Your goal is to evoke an experience, and that’s easiest when you have a concrete starting point.
So how do you incorporate theme into a completely fantastical world, one that isn’t in any way connected to the real one we live in? As Gabrielle argues in her post, using the other four levels as a framework allows you to create a more realistic fantasy. The same goes for thematic questions. While you might not have a real historical moment to rely on to generate questions for your fantasy world, you can still ask what sort of questions would arise from the specific time and place of your setting. And if you’re a planner, you can even intentionally pick questions from our own specific times and history and transport them into your fantasy world to see what new truths you can expose by exploring these questions more deeply in a defamiliarized setting.
If you want to create cohesion between your setting and your theme in any story, whether set in the real world or high fantasy, what’s important is to make sure you’ve chosen a setting that enhances the themes of your story. You can do this by choosing a specific historical time, either from our own history or one that you’ve invented. You can create society’s that revolve around specific moral quandaries. You can have your characters push the limits of your magic system. And if you’re not a planner, if you like finding the theme along the way, then look for the questions that naturally arise from your setting: what specific issues and tensions are the characters encountering? How can you use them to enhance the theme?
Conclusion
Not every setting needs to be inherently tied to the theme, but if you want to increase the overall cohesiveness of your story, then creating settings and world details that connect to your themes will create a greater sense of connectedness for your readers. Again, exploration is the key to great theme integration. Push the boundaries of your worldbuilding, ask questions of everything and use your world to initiate those questions.
~~
For more detailed areas where you can incorporate theme into your worldbuilding, check out our Crafting Your World series where Emily and Gabrielle explored some of the key concepts and provided some great tips for worldbuilding.
Till then, bee brilliant!
Comentários