Finding and Using Theme as an Author—With Examples

Writing nonfiction? The post for you is “Rescue the Structure of Your Nonfiction Book.“

If your story isn’t quite pulling together—if it’s unfocused or isn’t connecting emotionally with the reader—it might be suffering from the absence of a clear theme.

What is theme?

Theme is the heart of a narrative. It’s the thing you want a reader to take away from the experience of reading your book. That’s not to say that it has to be a lesson or a moral. Think of it more like a lingering thought that builds throughout the reading experience and stays with the reader after they turn the final page.

Thinking about theme as an author is different than thinking about it as a high school student. You probably learned to identify recurring motifs in the novels you studied in order to list them on a quiz or analyze them in a paper:

As the title suggests, prejudice is a central theme within the novel Pride and Prejudice.

The play Hamlet examines revenge vs. redemption.

The picture book Where the Wild Things Are is about unconditional love.

In these exercises, the theme could often be a single word. As a writer, you might start with a single-word expression of a theme you want to explore, but if your work is feeling unfocused as you revise it, there’s a lot of value in coming up with a theme statement.

Okay, what’s a theme statement?

A theme statement takes your one-word or one-phrase theme topic (prejudice; revenge vs. redemption; unconditional love) and describes what exactly your work says about that topic:

If you think you’re the most rational person you know, that prejudice might cloud your judgement of others just as their foibles cloud theirs.

Those who pursue revenge do so at the cost of redemption.

Unconditional love means that even when we lash out, we will receive the nurturing care we need.

Won’t writing with a theme in mind make my work too didactic?

It can, if you treat this exercise too formulaically. But the goal here isn’t to embed an instantly recognizable message that all undergrad students will be able to locate and articulate word for word. The goal is simply to make the thrust of your story cohesive.

Most people won’t start writing with a theme statement in mind. Instead, they’ll let their early drafts explore whatever ideas seem interesting to them. This is a great approach. You will probably find, once you start revising, that you’ve unconsciously seeded your work with several recurring ideas. At this point, your goal is to nurture those seeds and scatter a few more if their growth is too patchy.

Maybe you’ve written an early scene in which your character’s life is changed by the forgiveness of another character, and your climax hinges on them forgiving someone else. If the idea of forgiveness doesn’t show up at all between those two moments, then you’ll probably want to find some more opportunities for it to appear, whether that’s through events, conversations, or moments of self-reflection. These appearances don’t need to be long or in your face. They’re simply pebbles that will lead the reader from point A to point B and that, when the reader looks back, will turn out to have been marking a subtle trail all along.

What does my theme have to do with my subject?

I’m glad you asked. This is something that comes up in the is-ness exercise I introduced through my “Self-Edit like a Pro” guide (download that for free here). Your book has a subject and a central theme, and when you identify how the two work together, you have a powerful tool for keeping your writing focused. Essentially, you want your subject to work as an effective vehicle for communicating your theme. Let’s look at an example:

The subject of Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros is surviving war college. The central theme, I would say, is that dangerous truths are worth risking everything for. Overall, the book is about Violet Sorrengail deciding that putting herself at greater risk in a mind-bogglingly dangerous place like war college is worth it to choose truth over lies. For cohesive storytelling, that statement needs to be true for the book as a whole, not just some parts of it.

Can my book have more than one theme?

It can, but it still needs a central theme. That’s the one that is integrated into how characters make their decisions at the climax, and it underpins the lingering impression at the conclusion. It’s the envelope that all the other themes are contained in. And the shorter your book is, the more you need to be conscious of that.

This is something I see all the time with picture books. The manuscript is feeling wishy-washy and unfocused, and the culprit is two competing themes. Maybe you want to convey both “Being a good friend means learning to listen” and “Art is a good way to get your emotions out.” You can write a story that conveys both those things, but only one of them can be the through-line that ties everything together and gets the final word.

Option A:

This story is about learning to be a better friend. When a friendship conflict happens, making paintings together helps two kids express themselves safely. The reader is left with the idea that listening to each other is important.

Option B:

This story is about expressing emotions. When a friendship conflict happens, two kids struggle to articulate their feelings until they make paintings together. The reader is left with the idea that art is a useful way to express big feelings.

That all sounds pretty lesson focused. What if I’m writing a funny book?

If you’re writing a novel with humour in it, you are still going to have a theme tying everything together. However, in a short medium like a picture book, a joke can take the place of a theme. In this case, when you ask yourself, “What do I want the reader to take away from this book?” your answer will be whatever ingredient is making it funny:

The joke of The Book with No Pictures is that someone reading a picture book aloud has to say whatever the author wants them to, no matter how absurd.

The joke of Mo Willems’ Pigeon books is the over-the-top demands of the pigeon pleading to be allowed to do something he shouldn’t do (in which kids can recognize themselves).

The joke of 17 Things I’m Not Allowed to Do Anymore by Jenny Offill is the completely unpredictable kid logic behind the things the narrator has, in fact, already done.

How do I find the central theme in my story?

Here are some exercises to try:

1. Ask yourself, “What is one big idea I’d like readers to take away from my story?” Why did I want to write it in the first place? What makes it relatable or relevant to readers?
2. If you have a finished draft, check whether your climax and final scene both touch on the same theme. Impressions from a beta reader can be helpful here. Ask yourself if you’re happy with this being the central theme of your book.
3. If you don’t have a finished draft and/or can’t articulate a theme you want to centre, jot down all the one-word and short-phrase themes you’ve noticed coming up in your own writing (forgiveness, revenge, etc.). Now write down what your story says about each of them. Among those sentences, is there one that can serve as a through-line for the entire book?

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