Finding the deeper themes in your stories can solve both the "too much" and "not enough" problems in storytelling. So let’s talk theme! Also, while I illustrate how to use “theme” as an editing tool, I'll share a magical coincidence I experienced a few years ago that fully justified my obsession with time travel.
Finding the deeper themes in your stories can solve both the "too much" and "not enough" problems in storytelling. So let’s talk theme! Also, while I illustrate how to use “theme” as an editing tool, I'll share a magical coincidence I experienced a few years ago that fully justified my obsession with time travel.
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(00:01):
What do 12 Monkeys, The Fifth Element and my solo show have in common? The answer is Bruce Willis. And time travel. I'm Micaela Blei and welcome to The Story Letter, the podcast about telling better stories. I'm so glad you're here. So last week we talked about social drafting and the value of telling your story out loud sooner than you think. And this week I have another very simple tool for you, and it can solve two opposite problems. We're really getting two for one today. So either when you have too much of a story or when you feel like you don't have enough of a story, this tool is theme. Theme can help you focus. It can tell you which details to include. It can help you answer “So what?” and elevate a story from “this happened” to “this is why it matters.” So by the way, I'm not thinking about theme the way we did in English class, those one word themes like power, love, death, good versus evil.
(01:04):
So instead, I'm thinking of theme as in the “what is this story really about? Beyond what happens in the story?” Because yes, events happen, but you're telling the story for a reason beyond just this happened, hopefully. And I'd argue that it can be a sentence or a phrase. So is there a question you're trying to answer? Is there an argument you're trying to make or a learning about life or relationships or yourself that you want to share? Here's an example. I have a story that I tell about joining German folk dancing in high school, and the theme of that story is pretty much: I didn't understand my parents until I was a grownup. That's not everything that the story was about, but that's kind of the point of the story. And another example, I have a story I tell about falling in love with a boy in college who came out as gay, and I sort of agreed to pretend to be his girlfriend.
(02:00):
The theme there is probably: I had a hard time distinguishing reality from illusion when I was younger. There are a million different themes that a story could have. They are really individual, so it could be “we sometimes do shitty things to people we love,” or “people are never all good or all bad, and I have a hard time remembering that,” or “I didn't appreciate my youth when I had it.” It's just a point to the story. And it's not exactly a moral, right, but if you wanted your story to have a moral, it would be the theme. Actually, let's talk about morals for a second. We often don't know the theme of a story before we tell it, but sometimes you have a theme you know you want to tell a story about. You're looking for a story to fit the point you want to make.
(02:44):
Telling stories at work usually works like this. Anytime you're trying to do something with your story, have an impact, you might be thinking of the theme first. Back when I was a classroom teacher, if my third graders were being terrible to each other and I wanted to tell them a story, to sort of help the situation, I basically wanted it to have the theme of “we don't have to be best friends, but we're still not going to be jerks to each other.” So I looked for a story from my life that could illustrate that idea. And actually I should admit, I sometimes made those stories up. I mean, you do what you can in times of war. Okay, so how is this helpful? This idea of stories having a theme? There are lots of things you can do with it, but in particular at this stage of the game, as you're thinking through the story you want to tell, there are two problems you might be having that theme can really help with.
(03:32):
First problem. Maybe your story feels too long and you don't know which parts are important enough to keep in. You don't know how to edit it down. Every time you try to tell it, you feel like you get lost in the details. I hear this from a lot of storytellers, and my example for this is: every time I try to tell people about this one relationship I had, I feel like there is just no way to do it justice without narrating every single date we went on, every single time a red flag went up. I know I'm talking too long, but I can't stop. It's like I watch myself from outside my body and eventually I just trail off. It's very annoying. Another problem, maybe the opposite is true. Your story feels way too short. The thing you want to talk about is one moment or one single experience and you're just not sure it's enough to be a whole capital S story.
(04:24):
You can't tell why anyone would be interested, or how to make them see how interesting it is. My example for this is this one time a really good friend came and visited me in New York while he was on leave from Special Forces training, and we lost his car somewhere in the city with all his equipment and his service weapon in it. We couldn't figure out if it was towed or stolen or what. It's such a dramatic thing that happened, but it has just never felt like a story because I've never landed on what the point of the story would be. I don't know why I would want to tell it. So both these situations can be helped so much with theme. In the first case, where the story is too long and too detailed, a theme can be such a helpful editing tool because you can decide on a theme for the story, how you want to tell the story for now, and then once you've decided what that story is about, you'll see which details belong with that theme and which do not.
(05:19):
So in the case of my endless boyfriend story, I might just decide to talk about how I figured out how to say what I wanted. And now I'm going to know which parts to say and which parts to leave out. So how does theme help when you don't feel like you have enough of a story? Knowing what it's about can help you decide what else might belong in there, help you add scenes or details. So here's what you do. You can ask yourself a couple really simple questions. First, what else was going on for me at the time this story was going on? What else was feeling important? What was I wanting or fearing at the time? And how do those things relate to this moment? And talking about this lets you kind of widen the lens on the time of your story, and that in turn can help you suss out a theme. Chances are you find some patterns, some common threads, and once you do, you can thread those things together into a more developed story. Let me give you an example. In this week's story, this story all kind of revolves around a single event. It wasn't a story though, until I widened the lens and I started to see what that single event was all about.
(06:33):
In the summer of 2019, I was really doubting everything I was doing. I had just left a full-time job, and I wasn't sure I was on the right track, and I felt huge pressure to be absolutely perfect in whatever it was I did next. And I got a fellowship that summer to go spend five weeks at Skidmore College, to work on anything creative I wanted. It was this institute that was artists and undergrads working together. So I showed up really unsure what I was going to do exactly, and worried I wouldn't be good enough. But something very magical happened at Skidmore. I immediately felt like I was back in college. It genuinely felt like time travel. The visiting artists and the undergrads all became friends, and I lived in the dorms and ate in the dining hall and stayed up very late. We bought Lotto scratchers and did literal pranks on the creative writing fellowship people who were living in the dorm next door.
(07:29):
I mean it was undergrad. And one of my new undergrad friends at the institute was just graduating and he did comedy improv, which is what I did in college. So we did bits all day long just like when I was 19. He was like every improv boy I'd known in undergrad, except more enlightened than my generation. And he convinced me to try standup comedy. So I did an open mic in town, which was terrifying and I was terrible, but it felt great. And I started writing poems again, which I hadn't done in 20 years. I was experimenting with all these things and so much less worried about perfection. So when I got back to New York City, to my actual middle aged life, I decided I wanted to try to keep some of that feeling. I signed up for a standup comedy class and I actually ended up writing a solo science fiction comedy show about time travel called Causality: or the Single Ladies Guide to Time Travel on a Budget.
(08:28):
It was about an alternate timeline where time travel is commercially available and in this world, my college roommate is the one who invented time travel. So I go back to college and end up having adventures with my 19-year-old self. And this show was very trippy and extremely medium in quality, but that was part of the magic. I didn't stop myself from doing it just because it wasn't perfect. I wrote it anyway. And I even applied to a solo comedy festival and I got in, I got an 11:00 PM slot on a weeknight in the basement of the pit theater. This is amazing. Okay, so the night comes when I'm going to do this show and my parents are actually coming to see the show, which is very nice of them, especially since it's in the middle of the night in a basement in New York City. And my dad on the phone on his way when he is coming says, you got some mail to the house, I'll bring it to you tonight.
(09:19):
And I figured it's from the alumni fund of my college. That's the only mail you get to your parents' house. And so they show up, and before the show starts, I'm sort of milling around greeting people before the show so I can say hi, because everyone in this audience is someone I know with very few exceptions. And my dad says, do you want the mail now or do you want it later? And I was like, sure, I'll take it now. It's 10 minutes to the start of my time travel show. So he hands me the stack. It's three pieces of mail. Two are from the alumni fund, just like I thought. And the third one is an envelope addressed to me in my own handwriting. And he says, do you know what this is? We didn't know what this is. And I said, I do not.
(09:59):
But I looked, and the return address is my summer camp from high school. And I open this envelope and there's a cover letter and it says, “dear Camper, oops, you wrote this in 1994. You were writing a letter to yourself four years in the future and we forgot them. So these all ended up in the back of a filing cabinet in the camp office for 25 years, and we just found them and we're sending them now– better late than never!” And by the way, now that I'm telling you this, it feels exactly like that moment in Back to the Future when the guy from Western Union shows up with the telegram from 1860. So this letter, it was like a leadership activity. You're supposed to write your goals, like dear 22-year-old Micaela. And so behind this cover letter is a letter from 18-year-old Micaela to Micaela in the future.
(10:47):
She thinks she's talking to 22-year-old Micaela, and it's pretty adorable. One of my goals as a leader in the next three months is to make a movie– just like a whole movie. One of my goals as a leader in the next four years is to quote, make a difference in my college's comedy improv troupe, and to direct a full length play. And then I have a list of longer term goals: to publish a book, to write more poems, to start a theater company, to find friends that share my values. And I'm reading this right before I go on stage and do a play about using a time machine and meeting my 19-year-old self. I cannot tell you how wild it felt to hold this letter in my hand with her talking to me right before going on stage for a show where I talked to her.
(11:38):
And thinking about it now, I'm just so glad this letter showed up. I was doubting myself so much that year, and then I got to be 19 again at Skidmore. And then her letter arrived and it felt like it was there to remind me that I was doing okay. In fact, I was living her dream. I was in a theater doing a show I wrote myself, with new poems on my computer, and I did have friends who I believed in, who believed in me. She helped me get out of my big doubts and into the next part of my life– right after I performed a very mediocre comedy show.
(12:18):
So the moment that I knew I wanted to tell a story about was that moment of getting the letter from Baby Blei, right before my time travel show. But it wasn't until I asked myself what else was going on that I figured out what it might be about, that I realized it was all right after my own time travel experience at Skidmore. And I saw that I was having all this self-doubt about my life at the same time. So widening that lens helped me find a theme for the story and helped me figure out what that letter actually meant to me. I don't know if you've heard this quotation from Milan Kundera. I was super into it actually when I was an undergrad, so it seems appropriate to bring it in now: human lives are composed like music. The idea is we sometimes unconsciously live out themes in our lives.
(13:07):
We decide on a pattern and we live that pattern. So we're choosing themes for our stories, but sometimes the themes are choosing us. And that's the trick about theme in personal stories. It's not just about figuring out the story. It can also feel like you're figuring out your life. We have an opportunity for reflection, for finding meaning in our lives and for drawing a thread through those lives and going, how do these things connect? What has been going on in my life? What are things about for me? This is where storytelling work starts to feel like soul work. This is getting into some of what I call the off-label use of storytelling. In other words, this has implications for you beyond how to tell a better story. Because being a more reflective wholehearted person does make you tell a better story, but then you're also just understanding yourself a little better.
(14:00):
So your homework this week is to find the themes in one or two of your stories. Ask yourself, what is this story really about for me? What am I trying to ask and what am I trying to say? And here's a bonus prompt for you. This is a time travel prompt. If you could meet 18-year-old you, what would they tell you? By the way, are you subscribed to my substack? It's also called The Story Letter, and you can leave your reply to these prompts in the comments of this episode on Substack. I cannot wait to hear your themes.
(14:34):
This episode was written and hosted by me, Micaela Blei. It was produced by Laura Boach, and theme music was the Duke of New York by Adrian D. Walter. I'm Micaela Blei, and this has been the Story Letter Podcast. I'm so glad we're doing this.
OUTTAKES:
Do you think it's bad that I always eat a taco right before we record? I don't really do that. That's not true. I mean, genuinely that show was one of the weirdest experiences of my life. Also, I should tell you, because my brother is a statistician, like a computer scientist, but he does statistics. He's a statistics guy. And I made him explain the concept of time travel causality to me. I made him teach me the math for this show. And we sat on a train and he just showed me all the things that statisticians are interested in around time travel and why statisticians would be excited by time travel, what it would do.
(15:45):
And so there was a part of my show where I do on a piece of Post-It paper, I explain the math to the audience of what's going on, why these bifurcating timelines are important and all this stuff. I get very wild-eyed about it on purpose. Unbeknownst to me, my brother brought his grad students to the show. And after the show they came up to me and they were like, it was a great show, but also you did the math exactly right. And can we keep that piece of poster paper in our lab? And so they took the poster paper as a souvenir of this time travel comedy show that their dissertation advisor's sister had done. And they were like, this is so great. I was so fucking proud of myself for no reason.