Alright, so let's review. We started with conflict. Someone wants something badly, but they have trouble getting it.  From there, you add a plot (exposition, culmination, resolution).  And together, they create a story!  A standalone story, or a storyline, a plotline.

And when you design a conflict and a plot, you're designing it for the audience. That's the text of the story. It's what goes on your page, which will hopefully go on the screen or on the stage. It's the stuff that actually happens in the story, and anyone who's paying attention will know that it's in the story.

Now, into that conflict and plot, you can design a bonus storyline called an arc. The arc is basically just another plotline that gets added into the subtext of your story. The arc is for the character. It's not for the audience. The story is for the audience. The arc is for the character.

You're seeing the story from the character's perspective, as if this stuff was happening to you. And you're asking yourself, how would this story change my protagonist's personality? How would it change their behaviors? How would it shape the way they experience the rest of their life?

So the conflict and plot are the text of your story, and the arc is subtext. It's psychological subtext. It's subtext, from the protagonist's perspective.

Well, it turns out you can design yet another bonus plotline in the subtext of your story!  And this plotline is not for the audience and it's not about the character. It's about you, the storyteller. This plotline is called theme.

Theme answers the question, why are you telling me this story? You could have told me a story about anything in the universe... but you picked these specific characters, going through these specific events, in order to face this specific conflict. So why are these things important to you? What does this story tell me about you as a person? What are you saying about it? What does it mean to you? What does it mean to me?

And the thing about theme is, it's gonna happen no matter what. You can put it in intentionally... and I think you should. You should be mindful about it, because even if you don't put it in intentionally, it's gonna get in there.

For example, JRR Tolkien, who wrote the Lord of the Rings, he served as a soldier in World War I. He was in the trenches, during combat. I think I read his friends and compatriots were killed in front of him. And he survived the war, and he went on to write the Lord of the Rings. And historians who read Lord of the Rings can't help but compare and contrast JRR Tolkien's book to what it must have been like to fight in World War I.

But Tolkien really hated the idea that Lord of the Rings was about World War I.  He said it was not! To quote:

"I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old & wary enough to detect its presence.  I much prefer history— true or feigned— with its varied applicability to the thought & experience of readers.  I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”
— JRR Tolkien, in the Foreword to the Second Edition of Lord of the Rings

And like, okay, nobody likes a theme that punches you in the face.  But nobody likes to be punched in the face! If you use theme for something other than punching the audience in the face... it's fine.

And my larger point is, if JRR Tolkien-- a man who served in World War I-- wrote a book with war scenes in it... and if I-- someone who has never served in the military, I've only been in 1 fist fight in high school, I have no real experience of violence-- if I wrote a book with war scenes in it, it would be a lot less like World War I than JRR Tolkien's book with war scenes in it.

You, the storyteller, are shaped by your experiences & observations & beliefs. So when you're designing a story, when you're deciding what a conflict is to you, you're gonna be telling the audience so much about what matters to you! And what you think about the world! And what you think about yourself! And what you think about what's happening to these characters.

So scroll down, and I'll tell you about a practical way that I like to think about theme.

When I'm ready to start designing the theme, I think about my own life. I stop writing the story that I'm working on, I take a break, and I write my memoirs, basically. I reflect upon the conflicts that have actually happened to me in real life, that I have some first-hand expertise with, and I think of it as an arc that I've been through.

I plan it out, just like I plan out the fictional story. Conflict, exposition, culmination, resolution. Before, after, with a change in the middle.

And it kind of becomes a therapy session for me, inevitably! Because I'm picking a point in my life that is related to the story that I'm working on. Something that I think will give me insight into the character. Something that'll help me feel immersed in the scene that I'm writing, when I'm actually ready to write the darn script.

And I should add, you can start anywhere in these story charts! If you have a great conflict, if you've got a great antagonist, then you can kind of reverse engineer the rest of it. Or if you have a great theme, you can start with the theme & work your way backwards. You can start with the plot, you can start with the arc. It's all one big interconnected system.

So for example: when I went to grad school, I got my master's degree in screenwriting, as a matter of fact. And I had a really, really toxic grad school experience. I had a bunch of personal stuff going on in my life that I wasn't handling well. And then when I got to grad school, my teachers were really very abusive. It was a very toxic situation. I behaved very poorly. I learned a lot about myself through that whole experience, with a lot of therapy.

But that's an interesting Before, for my character arc. Because now I'm teaching Intro to Scriptwriting, as a class! I've had other traumatic things happen to me in my life. Emotional abuse, physical abuse, a lot of really weird humiliations. But I'm not teaching a class about any of those. I haven't made any of those my career. For some reason, this was a really formative one for me.  So if I pick this point in my life as the Before to my current After-- the After is always where you are right now, today-- it brings up a million interesting themes.

This arc is about my career, so money's involved. Not a lot of money! Not enough money. Notice how the story only has a Before and After, and already I can get into Marxist criticism?

The arc is about scriptwriting and how you do it, what the process is. Because my teachers didn't really teach me the process. I asked a bunch of questions... but they weren't really professors. They were screenwriters. This was in LA. They were working screenwriters, who just wanted a semester-long gig, basically. And they didn't believe in film school. They hadn't gone to film school. And so when we came in & asked film school questions... that triggered their imposter syndrome, and they took it out on us. It was brutal. It was not the right way for teachers to treat their students.

So there's another theme: teaching. What are the ethics of teaching? So whenever I write a scene with a mentor in it, it will be shaped by my experiences of being a student & being a teacher.

And that also bleeds over into parenting! I'm a dad. At the moment when I'm writing this, my son is 5 years old. (We just spent all day at the Magic Kingdom. It was awesome.) And absolutely, my experiences as a student have shaped the way that I parent, have shaped the way that I communicate with my son, have shaped the way that I have taught my son to communicate. If he goes on and has kids, he's going to be communicating with them the way that I communicated with him (sometimes).

So my story only has a Before and After, and already we're talking about my son's child, and the wisdom passed between parents from generation to generation. And if my son doesn't have kids, then the wisdom dies with hi-- alright, nevermind. He's allowed not to have kids. That's fine. I'll be happy either way.

So to recap: I pick a point in my life that I think is relevant to the story that I'm writing, and I use that as the Before.  And I use me, right now, as the After.

So I'm designing a memoir, part of my own life, a story that actually happened to me, a way that I arced in real life. And after I thought about the Before (which was whichever point in my life that was), and compare it to the After (which is where I am right now), then I really take a look at how I changed.

What were my major milestones? What were the biggest challenges? What was the most meaningful stuff I learned from it? What observations do I remember so that maybe I can get some sense memory, really feel like what it was like to be there?

I do this because the next major step of planning the script is figuring out how it's gonna fill all those pages, figuring out what each chapter is gonna be. And to figure out the chapters, we need to figure out what the major scenes are. What's the audience's first impression? What's their last impression? What's the midpoint? What's the end of act one, the beginning of act two?

An easy way to get all that stuff is to think about my own midpoint, my own act one closer. What I want the audience's first and last impressions of me to be in this story. So after I pick my before and after, I think about how I changed each major step of my change. What were my major milestones?

So for example, if we're returning to me having a really toxic, terrible experience at grad school, I didn't become a screenwriter. I moved home for a little bit with my parents. My teachers kind of beat the ability to write scripts or any type of fiction out of me. I really couldn't write fiction after grad school, but I still really liked story structure. That was when I really started digging into this story structure stuff.

And so I talked about it a lot to my parents and my stepfather-- who I love, who's a great guy-- but you could just watch his eyes glaze over as I talked. Because I was using jargon, I was using weird words like protagonist and midpoint all the time. And eventually my stepfather said, "I'm a meat and potatoes kind of guy. If you've given me all this fancy words, it's just right over my head. You're wasting your fancy stuff on me." Which was a nice way of saying, "God, you're boring."

So that taught me to boil an idea down & make it more conversational. And I realized if I can teach my stepfather-- who I love, I think he's great, and I think he's really smart-- but if I can take a complicated idea and explain it to my stepfather in a way that's simple enough for him to understand, and short enough to maintain his attention span, then I could probably teach.

Now my stepdad is a big movie nerd! Now he's seen more movies than I have. And he's got a better memory, so he remembers them all. He's a better film student than I am. So that was his arc.  But maybe it was my midpoint, between toxic ruinous grad school experience & me teaching this class now.

All right, so I'm writing this memoir. I've picked an example from my own life that reminds me of my story. Maybe it's the main conflict of my story. Maybe it's the relationship between two characters. Maybe it's part of my protagonist's motivation. I can put it anywhere I want to, wherever it's most useful.

So the Before is something that happened to me in my life, a real-life conflict that happened to me. And the After is me right now. How have I changed, from before to after? What were the major milestones? And once I've written out my conflict, my plot, and my arc, I read back through my story and I ask myself, in just one sentence, what did I take away from all of this? What does this experience mean to me?

If I can summarize that in just one sentence, then I have a thesis. A thesis is the premise of the theme, in the same way that a conflict is the premise of the story. In the same way that the internal conflict is the premise of the arc, the thesis is the premise of the theme.

So let's return to my example. I went to grad school to become a screenwriter. That's the Before, and my After is here I am teaching this class, Introduction to Script Writing, to you. When I took classes about this subject, I had a really toxic, unhealthy experience. So when I became a teacher, that helped me realize-- here's my 1 sentence-- I want to be the teacher who I wish I had, back when I was a student.

So that's like the major intentional theme of this class. I wanted to be a screenwriter, but I needed a class that taught me how to walk through the steps... in a plotty, architectural sort of way. I want the lectures to be like simple and easy to understand. I want the examples to be fun. I want the assignments to be helpful. So every time I design something new for this class, I'm pretending that I'm myself back then and using what I know now to work backwards and create the lesson that I would have needed back when I was a student. So that's the big main intentional thesis. That's the main theme of the class.

But there are other themes to this class! I'm producing these videos at a time that is really hectic. This semester where I'm recording these videos is the same semester that I was asked to return to the classroom. I've been teaching remotely since COVID began. So I'm like learning how to interact with humans like inside of a classroom again, and then coming home and making a brand new class. With the benefit of hindsight, I should have done only one of these. Should have gotten used to being back in the classroom and then taught this class, or should have taught this class first and then gone back to the classroom. But that's the benefit of hindsight. What can you do?

I'm also trying to figure out my family's schedule, how to still have time for them when suddenly I'm never home, or when I am home I need to be making content. And the stress that I'm feeling, and the feelings that I have about my bosses... we don't have a great relationship right now. And the feelings that I have about my family, who wants to spend time with me and I want to spend time with them, but I'm being pulled away. There is no question that in some way, shape, or form, that stuff seeps into the lectures that you're getting, even when I'm not talking about it directly to you. Now I could sit there and summarize that into a single sentence so I could have a thesis statement, but hopefully you get the gist of how this works.

You think about your own in-real-life character arc that you have been through, or that you're going through. You ask yourself in just one sentence, what did you take away from this story? It can be as complicated as the answers I gave you, or it can be as simple as, "This was a time that felt terrible, but I survived it and I'm telling the story about it. And if you've ever felt terrible this way, then maybe this will give you some encouragement that you can survive an unhealthy teacher-student relationship. An unhealthy mentor-student relationship."

Once I've figured out the thesis of my theme-- the 1-sentence summary of what I take away from my story overall-- then I can start changing the story. This is the allegory. It's the layer of fiction, that you wrap around the meaning of your story.

It can be a really strong allegory. It can be really in your face, like Animal Farm. Animal Farm has specific historical counterparts who become farm animals, and the animals act in kind of a simplified way that reflects the way that the real-life historical characters acted in the Soviet Union.

But the changes that you make when you're designing the allegory can be a lot subtler than that! If I'm designing a scene between me & one of my most evil professors, well, those professors were role models. They were my father's age. I was sitting at their feet trying to learn how to have a job like theirs. It would not be hard to write a scene like that, and change the professor to a father figure.

So I can take my example of my toxic grad school experience and what I've learned, the things that shaped me & made me into the teacher I am today, and I can use that story to tell like a really personal drama that's very close to my life & what actually happened. But I could just as easily take what I learned & turn it into a story about a wizard school, or a school for mutants, or a penguin who's teaching all her little penguin chicks how to swim.

Or I can focus on some smaller part of my story! Coming home & telling my stepfather all my big ideas that he didn't understand. Well, two of the characters in the story could have a relationship like my stepfather and I have. And suddenly I know how to write every scene with those characters in it, how to bring authenticity to it, how to bring out the big themes of fatherhood & teaching & failing to leave the nest.

Also, once I know what my thesis is, then I can start designing subplots. I can start expanding the story. What else happens to my protagonist? What else happens to the other characters in the story? How do you make a subplot and make sure it actually fits with the other storylines? Make it come from the theme! Make it come from the thesis! Let it riff on the thesis.

For example, returning to me, when I was in screenwriting school, I had a best friend who I met there. I didn't become a screenwriter, but he did. He actually got a dream gig of mine. My big dream was to write for Walt Disney Animation, which was ambitious because they don't really use screenwriters. They really use story artists. They'll bring in screenwriters to organize stuff, but you're a small cog in the machine. (Which I would have done, if I had the opportunity. But I didn't, so I didn't.)

But my friend from screenwriting school did become a professional screenwriter-- still is a professional screenwriter-- and was one of the main screenwriters for Disney's Wish, which at the time of this recording is not out yet. I haven't seen it. I haven't read what he wrote yet. I can't wait to see it. I'm so excited. I really hope it's good. What will I say to him if it's bad? It'll be fine. It's gonna be great.

So my friend is a reflective character. He was pursuing a similar or the same objective to me, and he got it and I didn't. So I can think about his life and the conflicts that he's faced and compare and contrast them with mine. Whatever thesis I come up with him, I can compare it to my thesis of learning to be a teacher.

On the whole, my impression, he got the thing I wanted, but he doesn't seem especially happier than me. We're both pretty unhappy with our jobs and with pretty equal amounts of passion, and we both love our jobs with all our heart. We throw every ounce of creativity we have at the project and make it as perfect as we possibly can, and at the end of the day, I get a class that I'm proud of and he gets a dramedy about usually cancer patients that he's proud of. So I could use my friend to create at least one subplot to enrich my story that much further.

I should also say that a character can have more than one subplot, more than one plotline. I could tell a story where I'm trying to become the teacher who I needed when I was a student, and also tell a subplot about trying to become the father I needed back when I was a child. Two separate storylines sometimes overlap, but I can change the audience's focus back & forth between the 2 plotlines in different chapters and different scenes and different beats and different actions.

And I can think about how each subplot fits in with my allegory that I'm making. How to adapt these real-life subplots into the fiction layer of the story. If instead of screenwriting school, I went to wizard school, then my friend, who is now a professional screenwriter, could become a major spellcaster, a professional spellcaster, one of the ones who does the good fireworks. And his thesis statement could just as easily be, have I become the screenwriter who I wanted to be as could I become the professional spellcaster who I wanted to be.

So to make a subplot, you take your thesis, and you design a new storyline that riffs on the thesis. And that's the gist of theme... for right now.