Hey everyone! I am so excited to be back here with a new series. This series was really hard to think of good topics and material for because it was a subject I don’t think I fully understood until I did some time researching it, which is why I decided to choose it for this next series. I’m excited to write this one. This series is the last full series until next year and it will contain eight posts. This is the first of eight and I hope that you like not only this post but the whole series! So, without further ado…
Theme: What is Theme?
Since theme is the topic of this next series, I thought it appropriate that the first post would be an explanation of what exactly theme is. I read a lot of articles and have spoken to several writers over the years (and recently) to figure out exactly what theme is. I discovered as I read articles and spoke to other writers about theme that most writers have some sort of inherent confusion and dislike for theme which usually dates back to High School (or even earlier) English classes in which teacher repeatedly told them that the theme of the story is the topic. Most of those writers who dislikes theme for this reason because they thought to themselves, “But what about the story. If I’m so focused on the theme or the topic of my story, how am I supposed to also focus on the actual fun story I’m writing?” And to answer this question in a short way: You Aren’t.
The long answer: Theme does not always have to be the topic of your story and you don’t always have to be aware as a writer of your theme to write a good story. Theme is important not because every writer needs to know exactly what their theme is when they begin writing but because theme is what adds depth and understanding to their writing. There are all sorts of ways to write and incorporate theme which I’m going to have a different post on, but theme is important to the story because it is what gives the story depth.
Another way to explain theme other than as the topic of a story is that theme can also be the moral of the story. For example, when growing up there are a series of fairytales everyone is told depending on where you come from. Those stories could be different in one part of the world from another but either way those stories all have some sort of moral to them and most of those morals are transferrable all over the world even if the story is not the same. For example, the story of the tortoise and the hare where the tortoise and the hare begin a race to see who will win. The hare, the fastest gets so far ahead he decides he can take a nap and still win, and so he does but, in the end, because of this the hare loses and the tortoise wins. I’ve heard multiple different morals of this story including that you shouldn’t stop before reaching your goal just because your ahead, slow and steady is always better than sprinting ahead of others, and that pacing yourself, whether your faster or slower, is important. But no matter which of these morals you were taught as a kid with this story this leads to another point.
Theme is interpretable. When the author writes the story, they may interpret it in a certain way and mean it to be a specific thing. But maybe when a reader reads that story, they get something else entirely out of the tale. Everyone has different experiences and background, and one story might mean one thing to me and something else to a different person and both of those themes that we found in the story could be completely different from the one that the writer wanted to write into the book in the first place.
Theme is intangible. Theme is not something you can easily pick out in a story. Theme is not the characters, the plot, or the settings and yet it is all of those things at once. It almost sounds like theme is something a fortune teller would tell the character in a book with cryptic phrases and confusing sounding prophecies to try to help them understand. But if I had to explain theme to a writer in a simpler and easier to understand way I would say,
Theme is the why of a story. Characters are the who, the plot is the what, the setting is the when and where, the scene and chapter structure is the how and theme is the why. Why was this story written? Sometimes the theme of the story is simply to make someone laugh. Comedy is the theme of the story. Maybe the author wants those who read it to understand that love is more powerful than hate. That is the theme. Maybe someone reads the comedy story the author wrote and finds answers to difficult questions they’ve been struggling with and maybe to that person the theme is something else. But that’s the best part about theme, it’s the why of a story but that why is also up for debate and interpretation.
I hope that was helpful for explaining what theme is. I tried really hard to make this post understandable and easy to process and I hope that it was. Theme is a really hard concept to grasp and like I said before I had a hard time really knowing what theme was myself, before I began researching for this series. If you have any follow up questions or ideas about theme, feel free to message me any of the ways on the contact page or through social media. Also don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, and follow me on the social media links bellow. I hope you can toon in next week for the next post in the theme series. And remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
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