The Writer's Handbook - Write & Publish Like Industry Professionals

THE IMPORTANCE OF THEME

Okay this part is a little trickier to wrap one's head around, but it is vitally important. I admit I gnawed on the material below for a good week back in the day when I was thinking about pitching my book to agents. I just wish I had learned about how important this was before I wrote my book, would have saved me several days of terrified fretting that maybe I had wasted several years of my life. (I didn't, luckily, but still, it would have been a lot easier to have learned this first and have the advantage of writing with this in mind.) I have no idea why this part of writing isn't made into a far bigger deal; perhaps is because it is cumbersome and abstract, making it difficult to come to grips with. However, despite its vagueness, sooner or later writers have to think about theme, so that's why this chapter is at the front of this book and not at the back, where it would be pretty useless if you are thinking about pitching to an agent and haven't yet heard of the importance of your book's theme.

So, why do we need to think about theme anyway? Why does it matter? 

The easiest answer to that question is this: When you have to distill your book down to a five hundred word pitch to an agent (called an elevator pitch), or worse, a twelve word logline, you better know what your theme is or you are going to be in that terrible place where you realize maybe, just maybe your book isn't really a book at all...

The cold hard truth is that theme is what makes or breaks a book. If we were to compare a book to a house, then the theme is the frame, everything is built on it. EVERYTHING.

The excerpt below is taken from WriteOnSisters.com who do a brilliant job of explaining the importance of theme, so I'll just hand the mic over to them for the rest of this post (the link to the original post is included below, just click on the words External Link just above the comments - link only viewable on desktops, however).

'Theme is like a truffle – it has to be there, just under the surface, but one must snort through much mud to unearth it. A most unpleasant process I've been stuck in for the last few months. So why do I keep at it? Won't the theme of my book just magically appear once it's written? Won't a reviewer or professor or reader interpret the theme for me? Why do writers need to know the theme of their novel?

Simple answer: to make the book the best it can be.

First, some definitions...

a) Theme is what the story is about.

b) Theme is the moral of the story.

c) Theme is the lesson learned.

d) Theme is the story's ultimate meaning.

And that's why theme is so hard: our notions of it are vague. People say, "My novel is about unconditional love!" Or death, or forgiveness, or second chances. All broad ideas claiming to be theme. But a theme must be more than that to writers, because vague notions do not help us write powerful, meaningful or impactful stories. We need to get more specific, and it doesn't get any more specific than what some refer to as "The Screenwriter's Bible"...

STORY by Robert McKee is a beast of a book, all 455 picture-less pages of it. It's very detailed, but that's exactly what we need to figure out an ambiguous notion like theme. McKee writes, "A true theme is not a word, but a sentence... describing how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end."

So a complete theme needs change. And that change happens to something humans/readers/heroes inherently value, like love, life, justice, truth, hope, equality, etc. And that value is changed because something caused it to change. Like this...

THEME = VALUE changed by CAUSE

This is what I call "Theme" with a capital "T". McKee calls it "The Controlling Idea." Others say "Thematic Statement." Some label it "Central Theme" because they have many themes but know that one theme must rise above the rest and unify the whole story.