About twenty years ago, I attended a workshop at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis by this title. Well, not “Finding the Theme of My Novel,” rather “Finding the Theme of Your Novel.”
But I digress.
It was a filler workshop for me. There was one I wanted to take in the morning, and I was riding up with a friend who wanted to take the same workshop and another one in the afternoon. I did not want to attend the same afternoon workshop that she did, so I looked at my options and signed up for the one about theme, thinking it sounded sort of interesting but not amazing.
Holy shit was I wrong.
The morning workshop was a bust. I don’t even remember what it was about. I remember being kind of bored and annoyed by it. But that theme workshop — man.
It was a while ago, so I don’t recall exactly what order we did what in. But there was some free-writing, some wordplay, some sensory writing, and some mining memory work. And at the end of four hours of all sorts of various writing exercises that seemed totally unrelated, the presenter said “Now, I want all of you to write down the theme of your novel.”
And we all did. All of us. The room was full of huge grins as everything we had done that day suddenly clicked and made sense. All of it was a carefully laid out step-by-step process that led to exactly where we needed to go. Every single one of us, who had no idea what the theme of our novel was when we walked into that room (and even those of us who didn’t even really know what a novel’s theme might be), wrote down exactly what our theme was.
And here’s the thing: Theme is no longer a weird, mysterious monster to me. It’s not vague or hard to comprehend or explain. I don’t know that I would have gotten that if I hadn’t gone through the four hours of steps that led me to the right place. I don’t know, maybe.
Let me try to explain it here without giving a four-hour workshop: Theme is the gist of what you’re trying to say with your story. It’s the allegory that underlies the whole tone of the book. It’s something from your life. A feeling you had, a moment you experienced, an idea you came to. And it’s mostly a single phrase. It’s not mystical or weird. It’s just a moment in your life that left an impact on you and wants exploring.
The theme I discovered that day was realizing that the grown-ups are not on your side when you are a child and do not actually care if you are in danger, scared, or happy. You are on your own, no matter what they say.
As you might imagine, there’s a lot to unpack there. I wrote a whole book about it.
But when I set out to write the book, I had a character, some events, some trials and an ending in mind. It’s not a kids’ book, either. I had no idea that I was working out that particular moment from my childhood in my mind. Discovering that gave me a lot more purpose in my writing. It told me what to keep, what to cut, what scenes were essential, what sort of resolution needed to be gotten to.
But when I went to write my next book, I came up with my characters, I had my trials and my successes figured out, the beginning, middle, and end, and the theme just became obvious: sometimes life throws you wild curves that you can’t plan for or expect, and you have to improvise, and sometimes you have to do shit you really hate just to stay alive.
Each of my books has a theme. But since attending that workshop, finding out what they are has become super simple. And knowing what my theme is really helps inform the overall tone, the subplots and scenes that help support my theme, and subplots and scenes to develop differently or let go because they don’t support my theme.
The workshop didn’t tell me what themes I had to work with, or which themes mattered in literature and which didn’t; it simply told me how to find my subconscious theme, which opened my eyes to being able to spot my subconscious theme in later books.
“What am I trying to say with this story? The main character is a half-faerie half-human boy adventuring between Earth and Faerie looking for his human mother, but finds he’s afraid to approach her when he actually finds her.”
“Oh, yeah, I have a half-sister that I didn’t reach out to or speak to until I was in my 40s, I was so scared how she would react to me or that she might find a way to force me into contact with my father who I don’t want contact with. That whole mess is my theme!”
You don’t pick your theme, you just identify it once the idea of a story has blossomed in mind. But once you’ve identified it, it makes pulling the story together a whole lot easier.
Anyway, the moral of this post is that sometimes when you think something’s gonna suck, it can turn out actually pretty cool. Sometimes, you will find something you didn’t even know you needed.
