Theme is Everything, on Dispatch from the Razor's Edge

When Robert McKee was a young writer/director in New York, he got the chance to interview Paddy Chayefsky, the only person to have won two Academy Awards for original Screenplay (Marty and Network.) Chayefsky shared this priceless nugget

As soon as I figure out the theme of my play, I type it out in one line and Scotch-tape it to the front of my typewriter. After that, nothing goes into that play that isn’t on-theme.

If there is a single more powerful piece of wisdom for any writer, artist, or entrepreneur, I don’t know what it is. Theme. Theme is everything.

Once we know the theme, we know the climax, we know the protagonist, we know the antagonist, we know the supporting characters, we know the opening, we know the throughline.

For each new project, I open a new file and title it THEME. I go back to this file over and over. I pile paragraph on paragraph, trying to answer the question, ‘What the hell is this book about?’ It’s hard.

- Steven Pressfield

Just like Elvis, theme is everywhere in a good screenplay. It’s part of every single element in the story.

A good script has no accidents… everything has purpose in your script. Every word. Every character. Every line of dialogue. No scene is random. Every single scene in your screenplay has a purpose and contains the story’s DNA.

We want to be able to *show* rather than *tell* our stories. Give audiences an experience rather than a lecture. You want your story to *demonstrate* the theme. Let the story and all of the other elements in your script carry the theme. No need for lectures or on-the-nose dialogue – the theme is under every surface.

You want theme to be buried so deep that it doesn’t show, yet effects everything in your story. If you break your story using a story seed that is theme based, every element becomes thematic.

- William C. Martell

steven pressfield storytelling writing

Dispatch from the Razor's Edge is owned and operated by novelist, technologist, vegan, exercise junkie, classical liberal, rambler, and Londoner Michael Stephen Fuchs.

Fuchs is the author of the novels The Manuscript and Pandora's Sisters, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation); the D-Boys series of high-tech, high-concept, spec-ops military adventure novels – D-Boys, Counter-Assault, and Close Quarters Battle (coming in 2016); and is co-author, with Glynn James, of the bestselling Arisen series of special-operations military ZA novels. The second nicest thing anyone has ever said about his work was: "Fuchs seems to operate on the narrative principle of 'when in doubt put in a firefight'." (Kirkus Reviews, more here.)

Fuchs was born in New York; schooled in Virginia (UVa); and later emigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lived through the dot-com boom. Subsequently he decamped for an extended period of tramping before finally rocking up in London, where he now makes his home. He does a lot of travel blogging, most recently of some very long walks around the British Isles. He's been writing and developing for the web since 1994 and shows no particularly hopeful signs of stopping.

You can reach him on .

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Dispatch from the Razor's Edge is owned and operated by novelist, technologist, vegan, exercise junkie, classical liberal, rambler, and Londoner Michael Stephen Fuchs.


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