Motifs, Themes, and Trusting Your Reader

A crow lands on a fence in chapter two. Perhaps it means nothing. Another arrives in chapter five. Then, in a later chapter, the sky is black with their beating wings. Hopefully by now the reader’s body is responding, perhaps their heart is racing, their muscles growing tight, and all of this is happening before their mind catches up. By the later chapter, nothing has been explicitly stated in terms of telling the reader ‘Crows signal trouble is near.’ There is no need to, because the motif is doing its job.

(3 Things I Learned Writing Fairy Tale Adaptations.)

Writers tend to confuse motifs and themes, sometimes treating them as interchangeable. However, the distinction matters. Getting either wrong is the difference between a novel that tells the reader what to feel and a novel that allows the reader to organically make that discovery. I’m a writer who trusts my readers. I prefer to provide them with the tools to discover the meaning that is unfolding in the story, and I do that using language and imagery.

A theme is an abstraction. It’s the greater question your novel is asking. Some writers may not know what the theme of their novel is when they start writing it. Some writers may not even know what the theme of their novel is until they have drafted it. Themes are those great, big ideas, many of which we have seen repeated throughout literature, things like ‘Love Conquers All’ or ‘Money Corrupts’ or ‘Good Always Defeats Evil.’ There a number of themes that a writer can explore, and you don’t need to know what your theme is going into the novel draft. Although, having a theme in mind substantially helps when you’re drafting, and aiming to explore the narratives’ themes in ways the reader can identify without stating it.

A motif is concrete. It is an image. A sound. Perhaps it’s a recurring song lyric or phrase a character says throughout the story. Motifs in my recent novel include crows and shadows and windows. Each time one of these images appears, that item is carrying a piece of the theme along with it, and not through direct explanation, but through the accumulation of its presence. If a crow were to appear just once, well, that’s just atmosphere. If a crow were to appear every other chapter, slowly inching its way from the fence to a character’s front door, well, that’s a pattern with an underlying message.

In It Came From Neverland, a larger theme is the horror of being manipulated, and I explore what happens when someone is lured with a beautiful promise, to then find themselves trapped, and then told later on that they are the one who is broken, and not the one who caused the damage through manipulation. The motifs carrying that theme include the crows and shadows and windows mentioned, and yes, their repeated appearance is never thoroughly explained. Yet, all of them mean something as the novel progresses.

For example, crows signal Peter Pan’s proximity and power. The more crows that gather, the stronger he is becoming and the closer he is to access the real world. The reader doesn’t require a single line of dialogue indicating this. The crows are showcasing it.

Shadows function differently. Wendy’s shadow is connected to her sense of self, it is a symbol of her autonomy, strength, and her ability to see clearly. As Peter’s hold over her intensifies, her shadow’s connection to her physical form weakens. The reader sees her shadow fading, flickering, and slowly detaching from herself. The aspect that her shadow is connected to her individuality is never explicitly stated. Once again, that is not necessary. The reader is watching this behavior unfold, and ideally, instinctively, they are able to note that something is being taken away from her. The shadow is the motif.

Of the three motifs, windows are the most layered. In the original Peter Pan, the window is how Peter enters the nursery. This is the point of intrusion where the ordinary world becomes permeable to the extraordinary, or supernatural. In my novel, windows are the past pulling Wendy back. The windows act as a sort of threshold between her present-day life and the trauma she has not yet resolved. And every time she stands near one, she is being pulled towards something she knows has not been reconciled, something she has tried to outrun her entire life. The window isn’t just acting as a physical object here. It’s a stand in for the boundary between what it means to be unable to move into your future self because the past keeps trying to pull you back.

What makes motifs work is restraint. It’s the writer’s job to place the image. It’s then the readers job to receive it. If I were to have placed a crow on a rooftop and then proceeded to write a paragraph explaining that here the crow symbolizes danger and the encroaching presence of the antagonist, well, that’s not narrative, that’s then a report and I have then committed the greatest authorial sin—pulled my reader out of the story. It’s our job as writers to make it so that your readers are experiencing and discovering the narrative without the intrusion of our instruction. We must trust our readers. They came to our books so that they could feel something, so that they could be carried away into another world and not be lectured.

I think motifs can act as a form of respect between author and reader. When I place a recurring image in a novel, I allow it to gather meaning through connection and repetition rather than explanation. I am explicitly telling the reader here ‘I trust you to feel the crows before you fully understand them. I trust you to notice that Wendy’s shadow is fading. I trust you to feel the anxiety she feels as she checks another window latch to ensure it’s locked.’

The relationship between theme and motif is essentially this: The theme is the river. The motif is what you see floating on the surface. The reader is watching the surface, the crows, the shadows, the windows, and through these items the reader is able to feel the current underneath. You never have to point out the river, because the objects on top floating along are telling the story.

If you know your theme but your story feels flat, consider reviewing your motifs. Are they present? What is occurring before them? After them? Are they slowly accumulating? Are they too close together? Too far apart?

Place them carefully and with intention and allow the images to do the work.

The crows will do the rest.

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)