Hey everyone! Here I am with another blog post for this week. We only have one more month of blog posts in this series and then we’ll be starting up with new things soon. This week’s post is shorter than some of the past ones in this series. I feel like this week’s theme topic is a little simpler. So, without further ado…
Theme: When should you determine Theme?
Alright guys. If you ask me this is the real big question of this series. I think this is the question that most people ask when trying to write or improve a stories theme. Its honestly a pretty good question. If you don’t know when to determine your theme it won’t matter what theme is, why it is important, or how to write it. However, determining a theme for a story is not as hard to understand or explain as those earlier questions were. The next few topics of theme are also just as difficult to understand as the first few and yet they are also not as important as this post.
The three steps to writing theme as I discussed in the last post are: First, determine your theme, second, develop your theme, and third, forget your theme. These steps sound super simple. I briefly mentioned forget your theme and develop your theme in the last post and today is mostly about determining your theme. Forgetting your theme also has great importance and impact to determining your theme. Let me try to answer this week’s questions with another pointed question.
Why would you need to determine the theme only to forget about it?
Let me answer this question simply. If a theme is written correctly and well, it does not need to be obtrusive. So, by that logic, it doesn’t necessarily matter when you determine your theme. I know many writers that come up with a theme they want and then develop a whole story around that theme. I have other friends who write a whole 3 book series on their own and then realize they had an underlying theme. I had friends who were about halfway writing a book before they first realized that they had an underlying theme for their story.
When you determine your theme isn’t as important as how you develop it. What ways are you displaying your theme for your reader to understand it? Is it understandable? Even if the theme you were aiming to write isn’t noticeable to readers is there another theme, they are picking up that you could develop instead?
Sometimes the theme that you are developing or the one you determined at a certain point on the journey isn’t the same one that you end up developing. Maybe you identify a different theme that is more prevalent as you continue to write. Whatever happens, determining the theme doesn’t happen at once. I have been working on a certain 5 book series on and off for about 7 years this last August. Before writing this series, I read through some of it again to come up with some idea of how I was using theme. I noticed 5 different themes that carry through all 5 books that I never intended to write. There were 2 themes that I originally intended to write related to man vs society conflict and mental illness and now I can find a total of 7 major themes and there are probably three or four times as many minor themes throughout the book that I don’t notice.
In the end, the question of when you should determine theme is a personal question. You should determine the theme when you think it would be the easiest and best time for you to successfully follow the other two steps of developing and forgetting your theme. For me, (and a larger majority of writers then I thought after asking around) its during or after the process of writing the first draft. But for others it is before they begin plotting, after they begin plotting, just before they begin writing, or any other portion of the long and extensive writing process. Either way, when you should determine your theme is ultimately up to you.
I hope that this week’s post was helpful in relation to theme. Next week I’m going to talk about how to determine your theme when you are already writing because, as I mentioned above, I found out that a large majority of writers determine theme while already writing. I hope that you can all stick around for the last 3 posts in the theme series. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, and follow me on social media at the links at the bottom of the page. Feel free to send me any interesting thoughts of comments you may have about theme! And remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
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