By Josi Kilpack
What Is Theme and Why Does It Matter?
Theme can be a difficult concept to pin down and is often explained as “what the story is about.” It’s a fair enough definition except that it can confuse theme with the subject or genre. For instance, it’s easy to say your romance novel is about love or your mystery novel is about justice. That’s true, but those are not the deeper truth, which is how I define theme. Theme is what stays with the reader after the story ends; it’s what makes them look at how that deeper truth plays out in their own life or understanding of the world.
For writers, especially those starting out, theme can be a difficult concept to grasp because theme is abstract, vague and, to an extent, subjective, as opposed to concrete concepts like character, plot, rising action, or resolution. The writer could write to a theme that a reader may not see. Or the reader might see a theme that wasn’t the writer’s intention. The disparity of interpretation can make the writer ask after the point of caring about theme at all when there are so many other—easier to understand—concepts that require our attention. The reason theme matters, however, is because writing from the place of deeper truth on the part of the writer leads to a place of deeper truth on the part of the reader. Even if the theme does not translate exactly, the depth does. To write without theme is to write without the depth that leads to the resonance of your story.
An Idea for How to Develop Deeper Truth
That deeper truth comes from you, the writer, in that it reflects your own values or curiosity or expansion. While the author is the one to determine theme, it is usually expressed through the main character—what she does and says and wants and works toward. The first part of developing theme, therefore, is to ask what belief you want to either explore or expand on in your story; what is the deeper truth you want to tell?
One way to do this is to brainstorm early in the development of your story. There are a hundred ways to do this, and I encourage you to try a variety of methods before choosing what works for you. For me, the method that works best so far is doing word bubble diagrams, something I learned back in elementary school. So let’s say I’ve decided to write a story with the theme “Beauty for Ashes,” which is a theme I’ve used many times in my stories. I take a blank piece of paper and write that in the center of the page, then circle it. Now I’m going to ask myself what thoughts are sparked with that phrase. I draw lines coming out from that nucleus phrase and write what comes to mind.
For the sake of our example, let’s go with a center cluster that looks like this: God, overcoming hardship, delayed understanding, personal growth. I circle all those things and use them as a new nucleus to expand upon with thoughts that I associate with those words. Let’s take the “delayed understanding” angle. I draw new lines out from it that include the following associations: tragic loss, faith, overcoming hopelessness, purpose of trial. I sit back and see that “faith” connects with “God,” so I make a line between them. I also notice that “purpose of trial” relates to “personal growth” and draw a line between them. Those are interesting connections. I already know I want the main character to be a man who loses everything—like Job did. I add “Job” to “faith,” though I could have added it to “God” too, but I’m developing this “delayed understanding” angle. I think about what I know about Job and draw lines out from that new place: faithful, rich to poor to rich, lost literally everything. I look at that last part—lost literally everything: status, friends, children, wife, home, health.
As you can see, it’s not pretty, but it’s effective. My thoughts about how to tell a “Beauty for Ashes” story is tightening in my mind. I’m going to work this exercise until I have run out of ideas to explore. I might start new pages with “Job” as the center idea or maybe “rich to poor to rich” and see where it takes me. What I’ll find is that my brainstorming is going to come back to some specific concepts. The man I have already envisioned as my main character is going to fill out and become more real. I’m going to better understand where he came from and where I want him to go. I might determine a different theme or a more focused theme, but it will likely be some version of “Beauty for Ashes.” While I’m doing this, I’m looking for a buzz inside myself, that’s how I recognize truth (it might be different for you), a sort of electric excitement as pieces come together. The entire process might take twenty minutes and one piece of paper, or might be a few hours and several papers—it’s different for each story depending on how much mining goes into finding that deeper truth.
The Process Continues
Once I feel like I know the theme, I put it aside and start writing the story. I might need to sit back after writing a particular scene to see if it’s reflecting my theme as well as it could, but for the most part I am done with the “work” on theme. The theme might change as the story develops, meaning I might have thought I was writing “Beauty for Ashes,” but I’m actually writing “Strength Comes from Overcoming Struggle,” which is similar but a little different. I might need to go back and test that new theme in each scene to make sure it’s still consistent, but that’s all part of the process. Change is okay if it leads to a better reflection of deeper truth.
An example of changing theme is my novel As Wide as the Sky. This is a women’s fiction novel about a woman whose son has been executed for a mass shooting he committed a few years before the story starts. She goes on a journey to find the owner of a class ring she found in her son’s belongings while trying to make sense of her complicated feelings. Throughout the initial writing, I thought the story’s theme was “There is Life after Tragedy.” The story was all told through the main character’s point of view, until I encountered a character named Coach Miller. He was an old man who had recently lost his wife, and I wrote his chapter in his point of view in order to better connect with him, planning to change it back to the main characters’ point of view later on. Through that chapter I realized how stuck he was in his sadness and how well his mourning both connected with and contrasted against my main character’s loss. I couldn’t make this a duel POV story since Coach Miller was featured in such a small portion, but I let the chapter sit in his POV while I moved forward. Then I wrote another chapter in another POV character—a love interest—who was stuck in the regret of having abandoned his family years earlier. Three characters, all of them stuck. One because her son became someone she both loved and hated, one because he’d made a huge mistake he couldn’t fix, and one because the natural order of things had taken his sweetheart. Stuck for different reasons, but all of them grieving. Grief was a deeper truth for the story I had not seen until the story was almost finished. In trying to better understand these three characters, I studied up on the cycles of grief and ended up adding additional POV characters earlier in the story to reflect the different stages of grief and how people can become “stuck” in any of them. This adjustment to the theme hopefully allowed more readers to see themselves in my story and see a bigger picture of what grief looks like in its different stages. Writing and revising toward the new theme of grief also helped me to explore the deeper truth of grief as I have experienced it in my own life. Not all of my books have such a strong sense of theme, but it was cool to see how it played out in this experience and has left me with the reminder to make sure I do the work to find the deeper truth in each book.
It Won’t Be Easy, But …
Like all aspects of writing fiction, the recognition of theme is easier for some than others. Just as some writers have a natural ability for setting, some find uncovering theme to be a more organic practice. But in the same way that a writer who struggles with setting must exert the extra effort necessary to grasp it, determining theme may take some practice for those of us who don’t come to it naturally. It won’t be easy, but then no one said that writing was easy. If it were, everyone would do it. ☺
Practice. Read how other writers determine and include theme in their stories. Look for it in the books you read. Find that deeper truth and write it.
Leave a Reply