Tag Archives: theme

Structure: Outer Limits

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If one good thing has come from a time of mass-binging old TV shows, it’s learning how to watch shows to catch their quirks and appreciate what those quirks add to the art form of the show. I’ve been working my way through the Outer Limits for a couple of reasons. First, it’s been a while. Second, there’s only so many times a human can reasonably watch Murder, She Wrote.

The Outer Limits, for the uninitiated, was a science fiction anthology show similar to the Twilight Zone, or, because I’m watching the nineties Outer Limits, like the Outer Limits from the sixties. There are roughly twenty episodes per season, and plenty of seasons to lose my time to. After a couple of seasons, I noticed (and plenty of first run viewers noticed) that each season was ended by an episode made up of flashbacks to other episodes, cut from context, and twisted to support the character viewpoints made in the current episode.

These clip shows make wonderful use of the copious amounts of material that have come before. They run like the popular montage technique – usually when a bad guy is talking about how his evil plan came to be, or the hero talks about how he thwarted the evil plan at each step.

In writing, we aren’t supposed to delete. I was told to open a new file and just dump my lesser babies there until I could use them again. Well.

The Outer Limits clip episodes ably demonstrate how to manipulate those lost bits and pieces into new works, separated from their original destiny. They also demonstrate the recycling of old work without quite plagiarizing themselves. By giving the clips new meaning, they are adding rather than taking up space with what we’ve already seen.

There are certain themes I fall back to – community, power, corrupted bureaucracy, among others. I have written about memory in my nonfiction works, over and over. I write about food as a mode of communication. I believe that we are never finished with an idea, and there is nothing stopping us from turning it on its head to look at it from another angle.

Structure: Souza Marches

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Hear me out.


I played flute in high school, in the marching band, and was soundly terrible. That isn’t the point. The point is, the one oeuvre of music I took away was the underlying structure of the Sousa march.


Every American has heard a Sousa march, and I would wager, many non-Americans have heard them, too. John Philip Sousa was an American born composer, with a German mother, who created many iconic songs that are still blasted by the barely musical and actually musical alike. Why? Because they’re fun. They have the oom-PAH feel and the typical rising action to blaring climax journey, the scattered woodwinds and the screaming brass. Every. Single. Time.


The secret to surviving the flute contribution of the Sousa march is to play the exact same part on repeat, on full blast – no matter what the rest of the band is doing. The first time, the brass establishes the main tune. You play your piece. No one can hear you. The second time, the brass plays a dissolution which feels exactly like it sounds. It’s as though the sound is unwinding itself and falling apart. In the dogfight, you (the flute) play your part. No one can hear you except for the high notes, so that you poke off the rose stem as a series of aural thorns. The third time, the brass joins in with a rising threat of imminent blare and then it’s blastoff! No one can hear you. Play your heart out, anyway.


In written form, try including the counter theme a few times. The first time, maybe it’s a conversation. Or an authority figure no one likes. The second time, maybe it’s the muddy middle with a contained sub-plot (secondary story with the exact same characters) that play out something you wanted to say about the main plot or want the reader to know about the main plot before you make your big point. The third time, maybe no one can see it. Maybe not even you. It’ll still be there.

Conversation: Bridge of Birds

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My all-time favorite trilogy took some time to obtain. The first was published in the year of my birth and went on the win the World Fantasy Award. It was the author’s first novel. Years later, it would take me three countries and four months to locate all three volumes for a complete set.


Some years after that, I found another complete set at a bookstore two blocks from my then-apartment. Go figure.


Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart has a long and storied history which I highly recommend perusing, but it is not the subject of my post today. The idea of having a conversation within a novel is not new. Normally, we call this dialog. Alternately, think of this conversation as demonstrating two versions of a topic you which to display in order to convey either the superiority of your point or to analyze many facets of the topic you are thinking about as you create.


There are a number of ways to discuss your topic in-depth. Plot and subplot are the most usual manner where the plot is the main point you wish to make and the subplot is the counterpoint played out in a smaller fashion or unsuccessfully so that your main point is the stronger contender in the reader’s mind. Think of a story where something is done twice in some scale. Odysseus is attacked by a cyclops and his men are ruthlessly murdered, after he and his men invaded the cyclops’s home. Some time later, Odysseus returns home and slaughters the strange men within. In the case of this story, the subject highlighted is perhaps when is a crime a crime, or when is an acceptable when performed by some person but not another?


In Bridge of Birds, the conversation revolves around love. Every storyline, every recurring minor character has something to say about love, though not always with words. Some are saying something about familial love, some about romantic love, some about faith which is another kind of love. What love can co-exist? What love is superior? Is any love more than another?


I would caution the writer not to assume that the conversation they put on the page is the only one the reader hears or sees. Additionally, art is accidental. Craft is purposeful. If someone sees something and you didn’t mean to put it there, a few tweaks that make it look purposeful might make you look real artistic. That someone could be a beta reader, or just your future self. Future me is one of the smartest people I know.

Mistake 7: Three Levels of “About”

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Every story that sticks with you has the same three layers. The first layer is the story the character is living. This action layer has the plot problem, the real world, face-to-face, the antagonist and protagonist locked in struggle. This layer is the action and reaction.


The second layer is the inner journey of the character as influenced by the antagonist (or any cast member, really), subplot, secondary theme. It’s the one taking place inside the character’s head, the layer where we watch this person become someone new by the last page.


The third layer is the one where you say something about the world or the reader or the way the reader sees the world. This is the theme layer, the crawls-under-your-skin layer, the connection to the conversation happening in books and media and world events outside of the world in the story.


Without that third layer, you can still have a story. I had a story. I had things that happened and a character that realized he needed to change and the change that he made. And when you finished reading, it all went away.
One of the genres that does the third layer best is horror. Really good, crawl into your skull, and whisper hello, weeks after the fact, horror. Take Hereditary, which is about witchcraft, but also saying something about families, and well trod paths and those unavoidable destinies. Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark (movie version) had a horror story around each character such that the ending of each story was truly delightfully frightening.


I didn’t understand the third layer of story until I read Lisa Cron’s works, Wired for Story and Story Genius. Though the example story she develops is a little Hallmark (in Story Genius), there’s a reason Hallmark sells. And the concepts are easily illustrated so that you can apply them to your own work, big or small.


So about 22 drafts in, I had a character. I had a supporting cast. I had a villain and a couple antagonists and a wider world. And it didn’t mean anything. I hadn’t truly nailed down the why of the story and how that why fit into the world I live in.


You ever see Buffy? I am devastated to declare that it’s a classic, because I am now old enough to call things I saw as a teenager “classics”. Sure, she’s the chosen one. In the world of Buffy, it means she protects humanity from evil monsters. But what if your hunting territory is much smaller? And no one can leave? Then we would call your territory a prison. And the chosen ones serve an entirely different purpose. That wasn’t the third layer. The third layer went a little something like: if you are going to play a game, forced or not, and you play against the gamemakers, can you ever truly win? Can you dismantle the system once you’re inside of it? Once you win enough to make real change, you’re a part of the system. And that makes you part of the problem.