As an aspiring author, you want your stories to matter, but you’ve got this strange feeling they totally suck. You want your books to have deep, resonant meaning, but you also suspect your readers feel that, aside from a few big words, a child could’ve easily written this. You feel like you have so much knowledge and wisdom to share with world, but at the same time, you feel like if some hitchhiker strangled you and left you dead in a ditch, nobody would really give a shit.

And most of that boils down to theme. Stories aren’t just about heroes winning or titillating violence against cheerleaders. Stories with good themes are a means for us to better understand human nature. Before I read Moby Dick, for example, I never really considered that secretly poisoning my neighbor’s dog that barked at me a lot might’ve been wrong.  

But what is theme? My favorite definition of theme comes from my high school literature teacher whose name I can’t recall.

“Theme is… well, okay, theme’s a thing… it’s an artistic representation… well, you don’t write it in your book, like it’s not something you explicitly… to put it another way, it’s something your reader can understand just by reading your book. It’s the subject of your discourse… or no, it’s, like, the idea they take away from your book.”

“Oh, like the moral of the story. Like ‘don’t kill people for fun.’”

“No, no, it’s not a moral. Theme is not a moral. It actually doesn’t answer any questions. When you create a theme, you’re not being preachy. If anything, a theme raises more questions than it answers. It’s basically what your book is really about.”

“Oh, like a topic.”

“No, it’s not a topic. Okay, think of it like this, if you were in an elevator with someone, what would you say?”

“Umm… Floor 1, please?”

“No, I mean about your book. If you had to explain your book to a person in an elevator in one sentence, how would you do it?”

“Do I know this person?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Well, I guess I’d say this story is like an elevator in that it goes…”

“No, that’s not.. Look, nevermind. Just use the word ‘exploration’ in your theme and you should be fine.”

“Exploration of elevators. Got it.”

~

Now, before we get into the specific tips, I’ll start with a question a lot of people ask me:

When planning my novel, should I start with theme, or should I start with plot and character and develop the theme as I go? Also, do you have that 200 dollars you owe me?

It’s a great question that unfortunately doesn’t have a concrete answer. For example, when I wrote It’s All Relative, I knew I wanted to explore the theme of “incest and society’s reaction to it.” Then I slowly developed the characters who were pro and anti-incest and the science fiction plot about incest babies on a generation ship naturally developed from that.

But when I wrote Son of Sam I Am, I just knew I wanted to tell a story about a man with mental disabilities who helps catch a serial killer because there were a lot of very popular TV shows that were basically just that. The theme of the novel–the prejudices that people with mental disabilities face–didn’t present itself until about 2/3s of the way through the novel, when I noticed all my cop characters were being total assholes.

Now, how we can we work to create better themes as throughlines in our writing?

Tip One – Don’t Be Preachy

Nobody likes preachy people. That’s why Democrats always lose elections, and it’s why right-wing ministers have to scare people with an eternity of hellfire to get them to attend church.

So as a writer, you need to be careful that your theme isn’t too on the nose or moralistic. It would’ve been easy to just preach about incest being bad when I wrote It’s All Relative, but instead I wanted to really get into intense debates and explore what incest means to different people. This has a nice side benefit as well. If you’re afraid people will attack you for your political views, being a fiction writer means you don’t need to have any real deep convictions at all and will help you avoid tough questions during interviews.

Tip Two – Embed your theme in your character’s arc

We’ve talked about character arcs on this channel before. Now let’s say you already have a theme in mind. Let’s say that you want your theme to be “Love Conquers all” because you’re trying to get your second wife to realize she shouldn’t have left you and even though her new husband might be younger, taller and he’s got a boat that he actually knows how to operate, that doesn’t mean he loves her more than you.

Okay, now you can construct your main protagonist’s arc around that theme. Your book doesn’t even have to be romantic. Christopher Nolan used the theme to save a dying planet. Maybe, in your story, it’s a love for math that gets your protagonist to turn their life around, stop smoking PCP and win the Fields medal in the end.

Tip Three – Use Symbols and Motifs

Sometimes the best way to deepen the thematic richness of your story is to think small. Think about your word choice. Think about symbols. Think about repeated phrases. In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut keeps using the phrase “So it goes” to hint at the theme of the uncontrollable nature of fate. In fact, it’s a phrase I love so much, I put it on my first wife’s headstone when she was killed by that biker gang and nobody else was willing to claim her corpse.

In my coming-of-age novel Tomorrow’s Sorrows Borrowed the theme is the disillusionment that comes with entering adulthood. To hint at that theme of disillusionment, the motif of masturbation is used over and over and over and over and over again to show how isolated my main protagonist Catcher Ryerson is.