Last year, we went through how to establish a theme for your book during the initial stages of outlining it. We walked through exactly how important themes are and how they are fundamental to every story.
But a lot of people aren’t just starting a new book. Many writers are half way through or even finished with their novel before they realize they need a theme. Some are even in the final stages of editing.
So… is it too late? Are some books doomed to be theme-less?
Absolutely not. With this workshop, we are going to show you how you can take your manuscript — whether you’re half-way through plotting it, almost done writing it, or nearly finished editing it — and give it a meaningful, cohesive theme that pulls every element of your work together and gives your book the sort of impact you want it to have.
Step One: Write a Speech
The first step to finding your theme is writing a speech.
To do this, you are going to picture yourself in the most climactic moment of the book. Your protagonist is facing the villain (or, if you don’t have a villain, the central conflict they’ve been fighting for the entire book) with defiance on her face and a voice that cracks with emotion and…
What does she say?
What speech comes pouring out like she’s memorized it a hundred times, because it’s become a personal part of who she is throughout the book? What words and phrases does she repeat, because they’ve been bouncing around in her head for the last three hundred pages?
Write that out, start to finish. Don’t stop until the speech does, and you’re already halfway to finding your theme.
For the next step, I’m going to take a speech from the actual climax of a real book and show you how you can get a book’s theme from it. Specifically, I am going to use Aslan’s speech from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which he gives after he has overcome death at the White Witch’s hand and is speaking to Susan and Lucy before charging into battle to defeat her once and for all.
“‘But what does it all mean?’ asked Susan…
“‘It means,’ said Aslan, ‘that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.’”
Now you have to ask yourself why this particular character is giving this speech? What is the core of their message? What is its very heart? And once you answer that, you will have found the theme.
In this case, the very core of Aslan’s message is that his power (which is fundamentally good) is stronger than the White Witch’s evil.
Now, you have to take the answer to your “Why” and make it more broad. Ask how it applies to other circumstances. That deeper truth is your theme.
In this case, it is clear that the point of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is that the power of goodness will always be stronger than the power of evil. Aslan’s speech makes it clear that this is because goodness is fundamental to the very universe itself, while evil is not. Aslan’s power, because it is good, extends before Time, before the creation of the very laws of physics that govern our existence. Goodness, in itself, is more fundamental to our universe than anything else — gravity, time, space, and evil are all just forces we experience within this Creation. Beyond that, goodness has always existed and will continue to exist and by its very nature cannot cease existing, because it is more fundamental to the universe than space or time itself.
Thus, the theme of the book is that goodness will always conquer evil.
Step 2: Calibrate Your Story
Now that you know what your theme is, you should begin applying it to your story, one element at a time. The first element you should consider once you’ve determined your theme is your characters, especially your protagonist.
To calibrate your story by character, ask yourself how your main character influences your theme.
If your character doesn’t influence your theme very much, and instead is just a vehicle who begins preaching it by the end, you need to take a deep-dive into your protagonist, investigating their backstory, core motivation, and arc over the story. Make your theme not only a nice sentiment that is meaningful to them, but rather a core part of who they are. If they don’t recognize its importance at the beginning of the book, shape them over its pages so that by the end it becomes a part of who they are. If they do recognize its importance, make that importance deeply, uniquely personal to them by the end of the book. If it doesn’t completely overhaul their belief system and core desire, it should at least impact them so drastically that it becomes a part of who they are.
Next, start looking at your book by plotline. Take each plot from the largest to the smallest tension, and examine how each one demonstrates your theme. Make sure that it points toward the truth you’re trying to get across and supports your character’s journey toward realizing that truth. If it doesn’t or even works against it, try to rewrite that section of the plot at least, or even just the circumstances surrounding it that make it so that it would make sense for your character to believe the theme by the end.
There are two ways to make sure your plot is doing this.
The first one is to ask how an event demonstrates the theme. Make sure that the circumstances and ideas surrounding certain events seem to work against the theme.
The second way is to ask how a certain event or plotline would prompt your protagonist to think of the theme, rather than the reader directly. This is a much more common technique, and especially powerful since the whole story is told through the lens of your protagonist and it makes the most sense to allow your readers to ask questions that are prompted by the protagonist.
Then you should go through all of your side-character’s arcs, from your protagonist’s best friend to your villain’s redemption arc, and ask yourself how they affect the theme.
Each character arc should do one of two things.
It should show how powerful a theme is by having that truth lived out in the life of your protagonist.
Or it can show how destructive the opposite of your theme is by allowing it to devastate a character’s life.
Finally, you should look through each scene, every moment, every word through the lens of your theme, asking yourself if it pushes your character, their arc, or the truth itself forward. This isn’t as tedious as it sounds, thankfully, because often you’ll find hints of your theme already woven through your story. This often happens unintentionally as writers are developing a story, even if they don’t have a particular theme in mind as they’re writing.
But defining it makes it only more powerful. Although a story without an explicit theme written through it may have nuggets of truth, a book with a clear message serves a tangible, much more powerful purpose that gives it the sort of impact we love to see in good stories. It ties together plot, characters, and ideas to make your book cohesive and consistent, even if it juggles many elements, perspectives, or settings. It is that one thread of a theme that leaves readers feeling truly satisfied with a story’s conclusion, and that’s the reason it is worth spending so much time and effort defining.