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What role do themes play in your work?
Ashwini Gangal:
Theme is everything. I read in one of the Paris Review author interviews (I can’t recall which one!) that an author only writes one story all her/his life. The rendition of that story may change, but we only ever write one thing over and over again.
To me, that’s theme. Personally, I am obsessed with the plague and with madness. Every century has its own plague; we had ours in the form of COVID.
No matter what I write, it’s always the same thing – disease and insanity. It’s always a macabre, morbid slice of the same pie.
By the end of my writing career, if you fuse all my work together, it’ll be one large, writhing mass of text about microbes and madness. It’s not like I haven’t written stories about other things, but the mood, colour and climate of the work always ties back to the same theme, albeit tangentially.
Trying to deviate from one’s thematic calling will yield synthetic, artificial work.
So, it’s best to stick to the subject that comes most naturally to you as an artiste. People close to me keep suggesting topics to me – “Hey, why don’t you write about this” or “that” – and I try my best to tell them that’s not how it works.
For a writer, theme is sacrosanct.
It’s an instinct. One cannot cheat on it.
Imelda Wei Ding Lo/Fortunus Games (Editor):
Theme is incredibly important.
It gives you an idea of what the end goal is and what you need to do to achieve that end goal.
Without a theme or themes, you can easily get distracted by everything you want to explore in your story, whether that's a character's inner thoughts, their romantic life, or intricate worldbuilding (especially in historical fiction and fantasy).
Unfortunately, when you get distracted, you will have a difficult time getting back on track, and your story may become increasingly bloated and confusing.
What could've been a simple 100-page novella could end up a 500 page novel with no clear beginning, middle, or end.
Even if you're writing a story that challenges the typical structure of a story (i.e., a beginning, middle, and end), you need to mould everything in your story around your theme or end goal to make it compelling and above all, readable.
Nick Young:
Theme is an intrinsic part of virtually all my work; I cannot imagine it otherwise.
So much of my writing is spurred by issues of intolerance and social justice, that theme becomes the polestar for the development of plot and character.
As an example, one of my first published stories, Migrante, deals with the exploitation of Mexican migrant workers in the Midwest, as well as the its underpinnings in
the small-town confluence of capitalist pressure and governmental acquiescence.
Another of my stories, Golgotha, again set in small-town America, examines racial and societal prejudices resulting in the suicide of a gay Black man involved in a hidden affair with a married minister.
Still another story, Boomerang, wrestles with the issue of how some women repeatedly fall victim to physical and psychological abuse by their partners yet cannot free themselves from the grip of these men.
Other pieces focus on different themes – revenge (Strop), lust and hypocrisy (Jezebel), fate (Temblor) and human existence (Colloquy and Exhibition).
Even in work with its genesis in a character or plot line, theme almost always becomes an integral part of the equation.
In short, for me writing without a theme would be akin to being adrift on the ocean in a boat without sail, oars or rudder.
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