Hey everyone! Finally, we are here together with the last post in the Theme series. I am so excited to finish this post off. Stick around for the ending where I will announce the schedule going forward! I am so excited to share! So, without further ado,
Theme: How theme can make a good book a great one
I’ve spent this whole series explaining theme and how to use it and develop it. I’m sure there are still questions about theme that I didn’t answer and some that I probably still don’t understand but despite that I feel like I have come to a decent conclusion on what exactly theme is. But there is one last question about theme that I would like to briefly answer in this post. And that is, how does theme make a good book a great one.
To answer this question, I have to make a statement that I know can sometimes be contradictory, but I personally believe it to be true. Anyone can write a BOOK, but it takes practice and skill to write a NOVEL. I heard this statement once at a writers’ conference I attended and it took a lot of thought, reading, and exploration into more styles of writing, for me to finally understand what they meant.
Anyone with creativity, imagination, and a good story idea can write a book. I’ve written several books. But what makes a book a novel is all of the skills that are put into it. The writing style, the foreshadowing, the characters, the setting, and genre, and the theme are all elements that turn a manuscript of a book into a novel. A novel is something people have to work for and struggle to understand. A book is something anyone can do. Usually, the first draft is a book and only after you edit does it become a novel. A book is good. A novel is great.
But a person does not need to be perfect to write a novel either. A person simply needs to write a book and learn the skills to turn it into a novel. One of those skills is applying, developing, and utilizing theme in a story. Theme is what turns a book into a novel.
Theme does a lot of things for a book to make it into a novel. Theme adds depth and dimension to a novel. It takes the surface storyline and ideas of a book and creates deep underlying meaning and concepts that relate the story to the reader and cause the reader to think. Theme also helps your reader to understand things about life or morals that you as the writer want to teach your readers through your story.
Theme is also curative. Theme can create a novel that helps people realize things that they need to know to fix problems they are having in their own lives. I once attended a writers’ conference were the keynote speaker spoke about her first junior fiction series and how she still received letters everyday from readers who told her that her story gave them strength to push through their own problems in life.
Theme also helps to focus your story into a more consistent idea. Instead of a long book with a series of events that create a good story your theme creates events that are connected to one another to develop that deep understanding of something about life that can make your book into a novel.
In the end theme is the part of making a book (a good story) into a novel (a great story) that really makes it relatable to the audience. Theme is important to a story. If you ever struggle with theme, I hope that these last posts can help you understand it because the relatable concepts that are related through theme is what makes a good story a great one.
I hope that you enjoyed this series on theme. As I write these blog posts, I aim to make them understandable, interesting, educational, and also helpful. If you have any advice, ideas, or questions, about writing feel free to contact me either through the contact page of this website or through my social media links. This is usually the part of the last post in a series where I announce my schedule for the next little bit along with the topic of the new series coming up. I will do part of that today. I will be making a schedule announcement, but I will not be announcing the topic for the new series quite yet.
I will be taking a short break for the rest of this month and for the month of November. In December I will be back with about 4 stand-alone posts and the new series will be in January. I’m still working on the new series concepts and so I’m planning to announce the new series topic in the last stand alone post of December which also happens to be the last blog post of 2021. How poetic!
So, I hope you stick around for at least that post if not the rest of the stand-alone posts. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, and follow me on social media at the links below. I hope that you have a great day and remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you in December!
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