the Secret Cheat Code by James L. Cambias

High school English teachers get obsessed with fairly minor aspects of literature. One perennial favorite is “Theme,” and this leads to hours of frustration in class as teachers struggle to make a room full of bored students understand — let alone care about — the theme of a story. Moby Dick is about Man versus Nature, or the sin of Pride, or the nature of obsession, or some damned thing like that. The Great Gatsby is about social class, or the nature of identity, or the moral corruption of the 1920s, or maybe about giant eyes watching you.

          The students come away convinced that literature is either filled with hidden secrets they’ll never be smart enough to understand, or that literature is full of plonkingly obvious messages and it’s a bunch of hooey not worth understanding.

          The funny thing is that English teachers — and let me note here that my experience was in a very good school with amply qualified teachers — focus on theme and message but ignore a lot of the mechanics of telling a story. I don’t think any of my English classes talked about dramatic structure, or narrative voice, or how to create a scene. It’s as if we were studying automobile repair and the instructor spent all his time telling us about different kinds of fuel injector systems without really going into why you need fuel in the first place.

          In recent years I’ve taught in a summer program at Smith College, trying to guide a dozen bright high school girls through how to create a science fiction story over the course of two weeks. I think I’m learning as much as they do. In the process I’ve had to rediscover what all those topics that bored me in high school English are really for. And the biggest revelation has been theme.

          Theme isn’t (only) a way for high school teachers to frustrate students by having them try to discover some secret hidden lore in every story. It’s a cheat code for writers.

          Let me explain: the process of writing involves a little physical effort, chiefly moving your fingers around on a keyboard. But it does demand a lot of mental effort. Every word on the page represents a decision. And decisions are hard.

          Seriously! What neurobiologists call “executive function” involves multiple regions of the brain, including much of the prefrontal cortex, the cerebellum, and parts of the midbrain. Lots of cells are active when you make a decision. And when cells are working, be they brain cells or muscles, they burn energy. They generate waste. They get tired. There’s a reason why we make bad decisions when we’re tired. Your brain literally doesn’t work as well.

          For experienced writers, the specific words in a sentence don’t require a huge amount of decision-making — rather the way that the details of driving a car become essentially “muscle memory” for an experienced driver, so that one can drive while having a conversation, or planning a novel. But plenty of decisions remain even for writers who can crank out sentences by reflex: what’s going to happen in a scene, what scenes go in the chapter, and so on. And those decisions take work.

          Themes are a way to streamline your decision-making process by narrowing the scope of things you have to decide about. I’ve always said that “constraints cause creativity” and it’s true. Faced with a blank sheet and infinite possibilities, most people can’t create anything. Give them a set of constraints and then the creative spark ignites. That’s what story prompts are: constraints, so that you can apply your limited executive function ability to a defined task instead of wasting time and effort trying to decide what task to do.

          A theme is a ready-made set of constraints. Let me use my new novel The Ishtar Deception as an example. As the title might suggest, the theme is deception. My main character, Sabbath Okada, is a secret agent sent by the government of Deimos to the megacity of Ishtar on Venus in the year 10,000. The life of a covert operative is naturally full of deception, and having that as my theme made all my story choices very simple: nothing can be as it seems. Every action is a deception of some kind, every relationship a betrayal. Even the betrayals aren’t what they appear to be.

          This actually makes the job a lot easier. In every interaction between characters, I already knew that there was deception going on. That decision was made for me when I picked my title. Following the famous guideline of “who, what, where, when, how, and why,” I had already made many of those choices before any scene began. “Who” was everybody. “What” was lying. I managed to off-load a third of my decision-making effort to my theme!

          Along the way I finally understood the distinction between a theme and a message. A theme is a process, a message is one possible outcome. In my novel there are many deceptions going on, for many different reasons. Some are justified, some are silly, some are deadly. Having deception as my theme meant I could explore the various kinds of deceptions people commit, and the reasons for them. Whereas if I started with a message — “Lying is bad,” perhaps — then all I could do is state it, over and over.

          So don’t be afraid of themes. They weren’t invented by high school English teachers to fill up class time, they were invented by working storytellers as part of the universal tool kit for creating stories. When Homer was trying to figure out what would happen to Odysseus next, he just had to decide “who is going to violate the rules of hospitality in this section, and how?” He knew his theme. Pick a good one for yourself and half your work is done.

James Cambias’s newest novel is The Ishtar Deception, the latest in his “Billion Worlds” series of far-future hard science fiction adventures from Baen Books, due for release June 2 of 2026. You can read his blog at www.jamescambias.com.