Writing Workshop: How to Find Your Story’s Theme

The last few workshops we’ve looked at how to craft a compelling protagonist. But while desires, fears, and even flaws can be pretty straightforward to nail down, many writers have no idea where even to start when it comes to coming up with a theme for their book.

And this makes sense. Themes are so deep and often abstract that it takes an entire book to explain them fully. Unfortunately as authors, we’re the ones who have to actually write the explanation through storytelling.

Finding a theme based on just the structure of your protagonist is what we’ll be focusing on today. While there are many other methods to finding a theme for your novel, these four are my favorite. All you need to get started is a fleshed-out protagonist and some idea of a setting, which gives you a lot of freedom when exploring your theme. Although it is possible to discover your theme after you’ve plotted your entire novel, written the climax, or even finished the entire book, you have so much more freedom to craft a compelling plot and side characters around a theme that you love when you try to figure out your theme beforehand.

Themes guide the entire story. Readers subconsciously measure the relevance of your plot events, side characters, and other elements by how closely they tie into your theme. When you wait to discover your theme until later on in the writing process, you risk including plot events, characters, or other elements that don’t apply to the theme and therefore don’t appear to be relevant to the story.

While there are methods to finding a theme in a partially or even fully-written story, this month we’re diving into four different methods of what to do when you have a character you love, a premise you are excited about, but no idea how to move forward with the plotting process. 

Method #1 To Finding a Theme: Write What You Love

If you’re writing your first full-length novel or including a theme intentionally for the very first time, I highly recommend this method. It’s simple, straightforward, and guaranteed to give you a theme that resonates with you deeply enough to drive your entire story on from the very first idea to the final line edit. The only drawback is that this method doesn’t always match up perfectly with your protagonist — you might have an issue coming up with how your protagonist could learn your theme, for example, or how the theme could eliminate their flaw.

But ultimately, these problems can be worked out, and it is worth it to have a theme you can get behind all the way. If you find yourself losing interest in a project, there’s a good chance you lost interest in the theme. Once the characters and plot seem predictable, there’s nothing to hold your interest, so you assume the readers’ lost theirs, as well. The truth is that your readers will be learning about your plot and characters for the very first time, while to you they seem old. You’ll need a theme that never gets old to drive you forward in these moments.

This method does just that and gets straight to the heart of what drives you to write.

Answer some of these prompts to find a theme that is truly meaningful to you.

• If you had the heart and ear of an individual, and they were completely willing to listen and believe what you say to them, what would you tell them first?
• What qualities do you admire in others?
• What themes from other media stick out to you?
• What truth about the world do you feel that culture fails to understand?
• What truth about the world gets you through rough days?
• What truth do you remind yourself of?
• What piece of wisdom or advice will you never forget?
• What do you find yourself repeating when everything seems uncertain?
• What is the most powerful truth you’ve learned through your own experience?
• If the entire world stopped to listen to you, what would you say?

For example, if you find yourself admiring people who are grateful, ask yourself what theme could teach your protagonist gratitude. What truth is strong enough that they no longer feel thanklessness? 

Once you’ve hit on an answer to these questions that really resonates with you, you’ll know you’ve found your theme.

Method #2: Satisfying Your Character’s Desire

But the first method doesn’t always work. If you want to write a story about the importance of prudence and caution, but your character desires nothing more than a safe, reliable routine, you might not have very much to teach your protagonist, since their desires already align with your theme.

These next three methods focus on your character needs — what your protagonist needs to tackle, rather than what you want to write about. Although you must be careful picking a theme this way and ensure it is one that will hold your interest over plotting, writing, editing, and possibly publishing an entire novel, it has much potential for creating a far greater impact by being more intimately connected with your character.

Your character should grow and develop over the course of their arc, and one of the most powerful ways to do that is to shake their very core — bring their deepest fears to life, hold their goal tantalizingly close to them, or teach them to live without their deepest desire.

So for this method, think of you’re theme as the truth that is going to transform your protagonist. And find it by crafting a theme that resolves their deepest desire.

In this case, our character’s desire is for comfort. So what can fulfill our protagonist’s deepest desire for comfort? What truth is more powerful than even the very basic desire to avoid pain and suffering?

I wrote some answers that I came up with, but there are many, many more! 

Each of these themes could radically transform our character and show our readers that comfort is not as important as these other values. However, it’s important to pinpoint exactly what these other values are, like I did below.

Ultimately, each of these values (friendship, achievement, and morality) are not actually about comfort. They answer the desire for comfort, but they do so in a fundamentally different and more powerful way than just fulfilling the desire. If you were to pick one of these themes, your story would not ultimately be about comfort. Rather, it would be about one of the values listed above and how sometimes these values are more important than comfort.

Part of the beauty of storytelling is its ability to demonstrate nuance, because neither friendship nor ambition should come above comfort every single time. To demonstrate this nuance, I might include a side character who places achievements above comfort, and has to learn to put his ambition aside and enjoy life while the protagonist learns that she will never achieve her goals if she is not willing to work for them. This will show the reader that neither value is absolute. It will instead demonstrate the maturity and discernment needed to include a complex theme in your writing. 

Exploring this nuance also begins to hint at the building blocks for creating side-characters to support the theme (which is one of the reasons I like to come up with the theme before the side-characters.) We’re already getting hints of a desire (achievement), a goal (whatever he desires to achieve), and a fear (failure), not to mention the flaw of overambition. This will help create a fully-fleshed out theme, as well as side-characters that are highly relevant because of their relation to the theme.

As I said before, there are many different themes and concepts that you can discover from the very same desire, or even the same character! So pick the one that resonates the most with you.

Method #3: Calming Your Character’s Fear

This method is very similar to the last one. Ask yourself what truth would calm your character’s deepest fears.

In this case, our character’s deepest fear is the fear of pain and suffering.

So what truths are stronger than the fear of pain? I wrote some possibilities below.

And under each one, I highlighted the value each theme explores.

It’s possible our character misunderstands strength, and believes experiencing pain or negative emotions is weak. It’s also possible she needs to understand friendship’s role in alleviating and working through pain. It’s also possible that our protagonist undervalues the joy and achievement that can only come after a painful struggle.

If you’re starting to notice a pattern in the concepts that come up, you’d be right — there will be similarities between the methods, and you might find yourself running into similar (although subtly different) themes despite using different methods to get to them. 

Method #4: Cure Your Character’s Fatal Flaw

Last month we talked about finding your character’s fatal flaw. Each of the methods should strive to ultimately resolve your character’s flaw, but this method comes at the flaw directly. Rather than letting it be slowly healed over the course of the story, it brings your protagonist right up against their failings and forces them to deal with the fallout from giving into their temptations, ultimately allowing them to enjoy the fruit of resisting (assuming they’ll get a positive character arc, of course.)

In this case, our character’s fatal flaw is the self-centeredness we discussed in our last workshop. 

What truth would be strong enough to convince our protagonist to abandon her flaw? I wrote some ideas down below.

And the values underneath that each idea explores…

These themes explore similar values to some of the ones above but, as I mentioned before, this is just the beginning. There are dozens of other themes, concepts, and values that each of these methods can explore, and ultimately it’s up to you as the author to pick one for your book. Different themes will resonate differently with individuals based on their personality, background, and experiences. You’re the author. For one book, you’ll have an entire audience’s ear. So pick a theme that holds a special truth you wish the whole world could see, and you’ll end up writing a book that impacts everyone who reads it.