Finding Your Novel’s Dream Theme

How to find your theme, and make your story sing.

Many writers shiver at the T word. After all, finding a novel’s theme sounds so intellectual, like a boring week of high school English you’d rather forget. But throw out your book’s theme at your own risk, because it’s the secret ingredient that will make your story soar, or leave it sorely lacking.

To begin, let’s get a grip on what the term theme actually means, and the role it plays in your story.

Let’s say, we want to write about a knight who saves a damsel from a dragon. There’s your plot, BAM! It’s filled with clashing swords, a hint of romance, some funny reptile jokes and a good dose of poetic description about fire and scales. But when the dragon falls, the reader is left feeling empty. Why? Because in getting caught up in the plot, the author has totally forgotten about the meat in the sandwich: theme, theme, theme.

You see, the reader is only partly engaged in the story because they want to find out if the dragon is killed. But mostly, they’re embarking on the journey because they want to a) fall in love with characters they care about and b) garner an insight into the human condition, or to put it more simply, feel something that they can relate to.

Getting too spiritual for you? Stay with me, it’s about to get simple again.

Theme harks back to why storytelling began in the first place. Just as cavemen used primitive images to convey important messages about survival, modern stories pass on important messages about the human experience that are best illustrated via dramatic examples. After all, it’s one thing to warn a child not to raise an alarm in jest, it’s another thing to sit with them by the camp fire and make them wet themselves as they listen to ‘the boy who cried wolf’.

So if you have a dynamic plot and character, you may very well have a theme already, and have failed to recognize it. Or you might have a story that’s all plot, or all character, but lacks a greater insight. So how do you find your theme? Do you have to dig it out of yourself via hours of therapy and a big box of tissues? Or endless writing workshops that make elusive promises about some ‘secret ingredient for literary success’? Maybe, but for most of us it’s easier than that.

Finding Your Novel’s Theme

An exercise I often recommend is to think of a theme that excites you. Let’s say it’s the redemption that can be found through duty and sacrifice, or to be a little more intellectual about it, that selflessness can save one’s soul, even if it comes at a material cost.

So, what’s the opposite of self-sacrifice? Why self-interest, of course. And with that simple process, we now have the basis for an engaging character and theme that will thread the work together.

Let’s go back to our knight and his dragon. We could choose to embody self-interest in the form of his enemy, or even the events that happen to him, but in this case, we’re going to bury the theme in the character himself.

Check out this great guest post by bestselling author Joanne Fedler, that explains how to dig past the obvious to find deeper, more nuanced character conflicts. 

Create Conflict With Your Theme

The knight is handsome and across the lands he’s heralded as the greatest warrior that ever lived. But for all his courage, that glittering potential to be a real hero, we find that he’s actually ruthless and arrogant. All he cares about is power and winning at all costs. His life’s goal? To find a mythical dragon. If he can get the dragon and train it to become his own, he’ll be more powerful than the king himself.

Check out a step by step article about how to introduce your character. 

On his quest he meets his damsel. He can’t stand the woman because she’s done something to get in the way of his greediness. Maybe she’s stepped in to save his page from being beaten, much to his embarrassment. Her generosity of spirit has clashed against his selfishness.

But then, she does something selfless for him, even after he’s done nothing but spite her. He’s confused by her generosity and begins to question his ways. As a character, he starts to grow. The theme begins to weave its magic.

Of course, being a selfish brute, he’s not going to throw off his armor and volunteer at a local orphanage at the first opportunity. No, his growth is going to be much more conflicted than that.

Our damsel tries to help the knight see the error of his ways, but he draws his cloak of self-interest firmly around him. Eventually, she gives him up as a lost cause. It breaks her heart, but her generosity can only go so far. After following the knight across the country to find his dragon, she leaves him to return home.

A Hard Choice

When the knight awakes he realizes the damsel has left him and is faced with yet another sign that his selfishness is not as fun as he first thought. He decides to postpone his hunt for the dragon and go in search of the damsel. The mountains are dangerous and while he plans to beat her for her insolence, he feels bad about leaving her unprotected. His selfishness begins to waver.

Crossing the mountains, what does he find, but his dragon! It is the most beautiful beast he’s seen and the thought of taming it stimulates every greedy molecule inside him. He’s never felt so power-hungry than at this one, dazzling moment. If he trained the beat, then the damsel would have to love him and admit she was wrong. But then he looks closer… The beast is bent over his damsel, its huge jaws gaping open, ready to bite her pretty little head off.

See where this is going?

Redemption

The knight has no time to stop the beast through force or magic. Drawing his bow, he sends an arrow through the creature’s eye and watches as his dream collapses into a useless bag of bones. His act is selfless and completely contrary to what he would have done at the start of the book. Of course, they ride off into the sunset and that act of selflessness makes him a thousand times happier than his silly dragon ever could have. As they read the last line the reader sighs and has a lovely “Aaah,” moment. We’ve shown firsthand that choosing love and connection via self-sacrifice will always be more rewarding than working from a place of self-interest. It’s a universal theme that any reader can relate back to their own lives.

Why We Work With Themes

Good writers recognize that the plot and character only exist to illustrate the theme and if a writer’s really smart, they’ll have multiple themes that twist around each other to create a high school English student’s worst nightmare.

If you have already written your plot and you theme is MIA, don’t despair. With a good rewrite, you can insert it retrospectively. Ask yourself, what potential for a theme/s is there in the work? If there was one lesson the character learned, what would it be? Once you have it, flip it to its opposite (negative) extreme and apply that to the character, enemy or plot to create trouble, tension and good room for growth. In no time at all, you’ll be positively thematic!

Quick Tips on Themes

• Themes are always universal, an insight into the human condition that could apply to a schoolgirl in Paris or a business executive on Wall Street.
• The theme may be timeless, but the execution needs to be fresh and unique. Telling the same old story will ensure people switch off. We’ve already heard about the boy who cried wolf, but what about the woman who pretended to be sick, to garner sympathy?
• Pack it with potential. Make sure the plot is designed to allow lots of room for you to explore your theme. For example, if you want to write about love and you decide to do that via characters embroiled in hate, build a plot that raises lots of reasons for them to despise each other. No one wants to read about two happy people, in happy land, who love each other. They won’t even get past the first chapter.

What is the central theme in your current manuscript?

Have you focused on one theme, or multiple ideas? Comment below!