The Theme as a Seed: The How of the Theme, part 1

Last time, I told you about how important it is to have a theme to guide your storytelling efforts. Assuming that you agree and that you're excited to work on your theme-building, this time, I'll be telling you how to use a theme as a starting point. If you haven't listened to the last podcast episode, I do get into it a little at the end of the episode, if that's something you're interested in checking out. Otherwise, let's jump right in.

First and foremost, you have to have a theme. If you don't have a theme - a message, lesson, warning, or question for your readers - then think of one first. What subject or topic is important or of interest to you? Once you have one, we can begin.

Let's say that my theme is: Introducing AI to the masses without regulation is dangerous. 

That's my little seed. Now, to grow a story. 

We'll set the story in 2025. AI has been introduced to the masses, before any regulations could be placed on it. The online virtual landscape has become a cesspool of AI-generated images, articles, videos, music, and voices, used in part for entertainment purposes, but also used in large part as a weapon of personal destruction. Scammers, libelers, and other criminals are leveraging this New Wild West to take, take, and take some more. Children and adults alike are unable to differentiate truth from fiction. 

Yikes. Imagine living in that kind of a dystopia, am I right? 😬 

Okay, so that's my setting. In this setting, we'll choose a high-school girl as the main character. Her and her family will each face some kind of evil at the hands of this new AI scourge. Our main character is being bullied at school; her classmates use AI to create a range of upsetting videos using her likeness. At home, she has no respite; her mother has just been scammed out of a great big sum of money at the hands of an AI-generated voice over the phone, her father is in the middle of a legal dispute regarding the unauthorized use of his art in AI-generated images, and her younger brother is unable to do simple problem-solving or use critical thinking without the use of an AI companion. 

Wow, this just keeps getting worse and worse. So glad we don't live in this timeline. Hold on...

So, we've got our characters, our conflicts, and now we can start thinking of a plot. Remember that whatever decisions you make about plot or character actions should often, if not always, link back to the theme at hand. If, for example, my main character decides that she's going to fight fire with fire, she can create her own upsetting videos featuring her bullies and take revenge, only to have things quickly spiral out of control as the situation becomes more heated and perhaps violent. This development would show how important it is for AI to be regulated, for there to be limitations to what one is allowed to use the AI for - and for the enforcement of ethical AI use. Perhaps, at the end of the story, the staff at the school decide that the students all need to be taught AI Ethics and that personal electronics are restricted in school.

As it pertains to character development, we can consider the different ways in which unethical AI use (which the story could argue is bound to happen so long as there is no regulation) can harm a person in social, emotional, and psychological ways. Through the MC's family members, who are side-characters in this regard with small sub-plots, we can show other ways in which AI can be harmful - a real-world threat with a digital and often anonymous source.

And voila!

I've thought up a theme, and I've used it to brainstorm a story.

Now, we can think of more minute details. Things like, for example, symbols. What kinds of symbols can we use to help us drive our theme home? Well, because the story deals with how damaging AI can be to an individual through the use of identity-eroding tools, a consistent use of a mirror could be helpful; as the story progresses, how the main character sees herself in the mirror changes drastically. If we want it to feel a lot more virtual, instead of a mirror, it can be a selfie camera, to really drive home that idea of being stuck in a virtual reality, where we can never really escape the virtual world, even when we're not actually in it. There are many, many more symbols and motifs that we can find to work with.

Setting can also play a more dynamic role. I can contrast the main character's home and the outside world, such that when she walks through the threshold of her front door, she is almost walking through a portal into a virtual reality, where the advertisements that she sees, the music that she hears, the videos that people are watching on the bus - everything is AI-generated and AI-driven. At school, students use AI for almost all of their academic work. A fancy new update to the school's security system features AI video analytics tools. And so on, and so forth.

As the story progresses, this AI-infected outer world can start creeping into the main character's inner sanctum - into her home, through the issues that her family are having, and into her bedroom, as more and more videos using her likeness are shared with her, and news reports about deepfakes of celebrities and political figures become more consistent on the TV, and as more and more of her mental space is taken up by the noise of this AI scourge. 

If I want to be more ambitious, I can make this story a lot more scattered by exploring the home lives and perspectives of the main character's bullies, too, so that we can begin to understand why unfettered access to AI tools can easily lead to them being misused and abused. 

And there you have it. Obviously, the thoughts I've shared here are not exhaustive, and I'd probably want to go into more detail as I continue to flesh out the story and dive deeper into the theme and the different ways that I can represent it. I'd have to make decisions about the ways that I want to represent the theme, too - there's no way I'd be able to do every little thing that I come up with, so I'd consider what the most powerful and impactful decisions for character development and plot points would be. The same goes for setting, symbolism, and even the tone of the story. Who is my audience? Teenagers? I need to make sure the tone and mood of the story - as well as the language used in such an internet-culture-based story - are appropriate and engaging for my audience. 

But there you have it! Your theme can be the seed from which your story can grow. 

This is one way you can use theme to guide your storytelling. Next time, we'll be talking about how you can integrate or derive a theme from a story idea that you may already have, even at different stages of the drafting process. 

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