Writing a satisfying, meaningful story that touches your readers’ souls and gives them chills, or giggles, or depression as they disintegrate into a blubbering puddle of despair (I’m looking at you Gideon the Ninth) is hard. If anyone tells you there’s just “one secret” to it, take it with an ocean of salt and consider a rude gesture. But even though it’s difficult to write such a story, one of the things all such stories have in common is that each has a unifying theme. In fact, I’d say that you can have mastered all the other writing skills, but without a coherent theme, the resulting story will at best be decent. 

 

    This is why in the Hierarchy of Story Elements chart, theme is the very soil that nourishes the story. Without it, your story has nothing to stand on. When executed well, theme from a reader’s perspective is that sense of satisfying cohesion that makes stories feel meaningful. From a writer’s perspective, it’s the guiding light that helps us pare down an infinity of writing choices to something more manageable. 

 

    So, let’s look at what theme is, how to frame it, and why you should probably start with it when crafting your story. 

 

What Theme Is and Isn’t

 

    If you think back on high school English class, you might have been taught to think of theme as a one-word concept. Like: “this story is about love” or “this one is about honor”. But this is not a useful framework for the purpose of writing a story. It’s vague and there is no organizing principle that could help you make decisions about what to include or exclude in your story. 

 

    Colloquially we accept that theme is the “message” your story conveys. This gets us closer to usefulness, but I’ve found that this framing can lead writers astray into preachiness and moralizing territory, with all its most boring, disengaging connotations. This isn’t to say that your theme can’t deal with morality—the most memorable books often do—but just that heavy-handedness can be a turn off when it comes to fictional theme. 

 

    Instead, let’s go back to why we as humans tell stories in the first place: because they provide us with simulations about what decisions are worth making in life (and if you are unsure what I’m talking about, you can read the “What’s the Point of Stories” article). If the driving force of stories is character decisions, then the overarching “message” that gives your story coherence will be your personal position on what decisions are worth making under specific circumstances. In other words, what are you trying to say here? So for our purposes, let’s think of theme as: 

 

what your story is saying about what decisions are worth making in a specific circumstance 

 

    Now this might seem abstract, so let’s look at how to make it actionable with a planning tool I’ve developed: the thematic choice framework. 

 

Sweet Themes Are Made of This—the Thematic Choice Framework

 

    Figuring out what your story is saying can be intimidating because for most of us, story kernels come in the shape of a scene, a snippet of dialogue, an image, or a feeling and not in points we’d like to make or arguments we’d like to explore. But the good news is that to begin excavating your theme you need just two things that are likely already present in your story kernels:

 

• A sense as to whether your story will have a tragic or happy ending

• A protagonist who is doing something 

 

    For the ending, you might not know exactly how it ends, but I find most writers know whether they want to write a tragedy or not. There are gradients in all endings, but for our purposes, pick from one of these two:

• Your protagonist pays a high price and still doesn’t get what they wanted (think Romeo and Juliet or The Godfather or The Great Gatsby. These are your classic tragedies)

• Your protagonist pays a price, but ultimately gets all or part of what they wanted (this may not be a slam dunk happy ending, but it’s not a tragedy and the majority of commercially successful stories fall into this category)

 

    As for the protagonist, once you have your character in mind and that character is doing something, your job is to interrogate that scene snippet. Ask why they’re doing it and what the significance is until you pin down enough of their motivation to determine a central choice. 

 

    Once you have the sense of an ending and a sense of what your protagonist is choosing to do, you’re ready to use the thematic choice framework to work out your theme. If you are writing a tragedy, fill out this statement for your protagonist:

 

If you choose to [X] in order to [Y], you will fail and will also lose [Z]. 

 

    Here, X is usually a concept, behavior, or belief that you believe is negative and Y is something positive. Z is the price the character pays. To make it more concrete, let’s roughly fill this out for the character of Michael Corleone in The Godfather.

 

If you choose to adopt your family’s methods in order to protect your family, you will fail and will also lose yourself. 

 

Or roughly for Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. 

 

If you choose to become a liar in order to recapture the love you lost long ago, you will fail and will lose your love and your life. 

 

    If, however, you are not writing a tragedy, the thematic choice framework you should use for your protagonist is:

 

It is better to choose [X] over [Y], even if it means [Z].  

 

    Here, X and Y can either be negative or positive concepts, behaviors, or beliefs, but the key is that if one is positive the other one also has to be equally positive. And if one is negative, the other has to be equally negative. The key is that this creates a conflict that forces your character into a trade-off decision. The Z is again what price the character has to pay. Again, to consider a concrete example, let’s look at Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, where the statement would read something like:

 

    It is better to choose risking your own life over killing your loved ones/risking the lives of your loved ones, even if it means future suffering/losing a comfortable and certain future.

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    Note how “risking your own life” and “killing your loved ones” are both negative things. As for the consequence, the only reason the future-as-a-consequence works here is because there is more to the series. If you’re writing a standalone book or the final book of a series, make sure the consequences are in the present. Or for something slightly different, but still structurally similar enough to a novel, let’s look at the show Arcane and the character of Vander in season one. For him the thematic choice framework would read something like:

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It is better to keep your children safe over winning a war, even if it means living oppressed/losing freedom.

 

    Note how “keep your children safe” and “winning a war” are both positive concepts that are pitted against each other. 

 

    I hope these examples are illustrating the key choice points and trade-offs at the core of all these stories. If these were short stories, you could stop with a single thematic choice framework and use it to guide your writing journey because a single choice is pretty much all you have time to explore in a short story. But, as you know there are many more characters in each of these stories, so how do you build a whole novel-wide theme with this framework? 

 

Finding the Theme of Your Whole Novel

 

    So, you have the thematic choice framework filled out for your protagonist, but you have five other characters in your novel. What now? Well, there are two things you’ll need to do, but the order is up to you:

 

• Determine the theme question

• Fill out the thematic choice framework for each major character. 

 

    The theme question must meet two criteria, which are that it should be open-ended (i.e. not a yes-or-no question), and that every character must make at least one crucial choice that answers the question differently from one another. You can see how this is a chicken or egg dilemma in that these two elements have a clear feedback loop. In my experience with writers, it’s usually an iterative revision process to pin down both the theme question and each of the characters’ thematic choice statements. I normally start with the protagonist, then give the theme question a crack, then go check the other characters, go back to the theme question, rinse and repeat. However you do it, in the end you should end up with an overarching question that your whole story is tackling, with each character serving as a lens to an answer by virtue of the choices they make throughout the story and especially at the climax.

 

    As an example, the theme question to The Great Gatsby could be worded along the lines of: How do you live a life built on lies? If you look closely, all the major characters are dealing with appearances that hide painful truths for each. Gatsby is literally pretending to be someone else. Tom has his infidelity. Daisy arguably married Tom just for his status and never loved him, and then has her affair with Gatsby. Gatsby lies about who drove the car that killed Myrtle, and so on. Their existence is a nesting doll of lies, all for their different reasons and each character reacts differently once the facade crumbles. Nick, the narrator, ultimately moves back to the midwest where we can take his answer to the theme question to be “you don’t”. 

 

    For The Hunger Games, you could argue that the theme question is: How do you survive in a world intent on degrading and destroying you? Every main character in that book struggles to survive and all of them have a slightly different approach, from pacifism, self-sacrifice, seeking community, rejecting community, obedience, rebellion, sycophancy, to proactive brutality. Katniss repeatedly chooses to be as compassionate as possible while also trying to survive. 

 

    For Arcane, I feel the theme question is: How do you build a society that will keep your loved ones safe? As this is a show with an epic scope, every major character indeed does have a take on how society ought to be run while trying to preserve or gain the safety of their loved ones. Vander, for example, believes that oppression and inequality is fine so long as peace is maintained. Silko strongly disagrees and is (initially) willing to sacrifice the well-being of many to advance his plans for political equality of his city. Ekko decides to pursue a self-sufficient commune. Heimerdiner decides to prevent the research of magic. Jayce pursues the research of magic. There are several more characters with several more takes on the theme question. And all of these people are making their choices in order to create a society that will keep those they care about safe. 

 

    Though I’ve phrased all these example questions as “how’s”, a “what” framing also lends itself well for theme question formation. Some examples include: 

• What is the price of equality? (Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson) 

• To what lengths would you go to gain love and respect? (Flowers for Alegernon by Daniel Keyes) 

• What does it take to be powerful? (She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan) 

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    I do suggest sticking with the “how’s” and “what’s” here, especially if you haven’t used this tool before, because these two question words run less risk of giving you a too broad or too narrow theme question to work with. And remember, the key is for the questions to be open-ended.[1]

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Why You Should Start With Theme

 

    All right, so you’ve put in the work and have a theme question and thematic choice statements for all major characters. So what are you supposed to do with these now? Well, I’d only be mildly exaggerating if I were to say you can do everything with that now. Once you have your theme, you have your guiding light to make all major, and many minor, decisions in the creation of your story. To illustrate this more concretely, let’s say I’m writing a story where my protagonist has this thematic choice statement:

 

It is better to choose integrity over success even if it means losing social status. 

 

    And let’s say that after I assessed my ideas for the other major characters, my overarching theme question is: How do you find somewhere to belong? 

 

    Armed with these two, when I set out to plot and write, I can have direction with the following:

 

• Character: I now know my character’s possible plot motivation (she will be very interested in attaining social status and will seek out succeeding in activities that give her said status), and underlying motivation (she wants status because she believes it’ll make her feel like she belongs), and I know her method for obtaining her goals (integrity, if she is a character without an arc, or lying, cheating, and manipulating if she’s a character with a change arc and needs to learn that integrity is more important than success). (Ideally by now I know if I want my character to have a change arc, but more on that in the next section on developing characters.)

• Circumstance: I know I need to create a context in which my protagonist feels like she doesn’t belong. I still have to do work on figuring out what that would be, but I’ve got a great direction to go in.

• Conflict: Because I know the central choice will revolve around integrity versus success, I can build the conflicts around that. Let’s say I do want my protagonist to have a change arc, so she will start out willing to compromise her integrity. Now I know she’s willing to lie to get what she wants. Great conflict, especially if she lies to someone she really cares about to convince them to do something they don’t want to do because that thing would benefit her—would give her success. 

• Consequence: This one is built into the thematic choice statement, so it’s pretty easy: she will lose social status as a result of the choice she makes. And I just need to make sure this really is a significant price to pay for her. 

• Plot: With character motivation in place, I just need to make “success” more concrete for the genre and the world I’m writing in and I have helpfully narrowed down possible plot trajectories. Let’s say this is a fantasy setting and my character is in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere dreaming of making something more of herself. Her ticket out of there are the summering noble family and she managed to get hired on as staff. She wants them to take notice of her, so she volunteers to complete a task the rest of the staff find too difficult. That would be a success. Or the story can start with her already noticed. Maybe they ask her to transport a very valuable item for them—an asinine ask for one person, but she’s driven. That could be her success. You get the gist. 

• Ending: I already know from the thematic choice statement that I’m not writing a tragedy, so I know that in the end, my character will pay a price, but will ultimately still gain something she wants. Per the statement, I know the price she’ll pay will be the social  status she’s either gained or would be about to gain if she only chose success one more time rather than integrity. That’ll be her loss. However, because I know my overarching theme question, I will need to make sure that she still achieves a sense of belonging even if it doesn’t come in the form she initially thought it did. 

 

    As you can see here, I still have a lot of work cut out for me, but I have some clear landmarks and organizing principles to guide me. Even more importantly, having the theme pinned down in this way from the beginning allows you to reject some ideas quickly. If you’re anything like me, your brain likely offers many ideas in the course of plot ideation. What if she encounters a beggar and becomes really invested in becoming a secret benefactor? Well, knowing my theme, I can ask myself whether that conflicts with her integrity or success, or whether it would help her gain social status. If the answer to any of these is no, then I know I don’t even need to bother to include it. She really wants to master her grandma’s recipes before the grandma passes away? Nope, doesn’t fit. She swears bloody revenge and goes on a killing spree to solve problems? Nope, not the story I’m telling. 

 

    But what if in the process of ideation you stumble upon an idea that doesn’t fit, but you really, really like it? What if I really wanted my status-seeking protagonist to dedicate her life to saving possums from villagers who believe they’re pests even if that doesn’t conflict with her integrity and doesn’t make her very successful in the eyes of her world and doesn’t help her rise in social status and in fact she’d probably become more of an outcast. Well, if you find yourself in this situation, it sounds like you have a brand new story on your hands there. Congrats! If you still like what you had previously, then now you have two stories you can write. If you no longer like the previous story, then it sounds like you can scrap it and write your new one. 

 

    In less extreme situations this theme discovery process can and does often lead to iterative changes. Let’s say I realized that all the ideas I have for her don’t really pit her integrity against succeeding, but rather pit it against being obedient. Then I would tweak her thematic choice statement to It’s better to choose integrity over obedience, even if it means losing social status. It’s a lot easier to change everything about your story at this stage than when you’re already 20,000 words into it. So let your mind roam. Interrogate your theme, your characters, your desire to tell this specific story. Nothing is ever written in stone, but at this stage it’s not even written in sand. 

 

    There of course is more detail to mastering all of this, but I hope you at least can see the use-value it holds in general. In short, finding the theme of your story in the beginning gives you helpful guidelines and constraints that can streamline your planning, drafting, and even revision. 

    Once you have your theme, your next step on the hierarchy of narrative elements would be the story roots—character, circumstance, conflict, and consequence.[2] These four are highly interdependent, so there’s not a mandatory order to go in as a change in one often impacts the others. I usually start off with developing characters, but if you’d like to start elsewhere, you can jump around via the hyperlinks above.