• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Theme in a story

What exactly is theme in a story? Perhaps this sounds like an emergency question, must answer before writing. The truth is, the only theme I've ever followed is fantasy. I'm not sure what people mean by theme.

Sent from my SM-G550T1 using Tapatalk
 

Ireth

Myth Weaver
Fantasy is a genre, not a theme. Theme is more like the message a story tries to convey. In LOTR, for example, there are themes like "you don't have to be an important person to change the world for the better", and "war affects everyone whether we're involved in the actual fighting or not".
 

Saigonnus

Auror
Fantasy is a genre, not a theme. Theme is more like the message a story tries to convey. In LOTR, for example, there are themes like "you don't have to be an important person to change the world for the better", and "war affects everyone whether we're involved in the actual fighting or not".

Agree wholeheartedly with this. Intentionally or not, usually you impart the themes with how and what you write, whatever the genre you choose to write in.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Fantasy is a genre, not a theme. Theme is more like the message a story tries to convey. In LOTR, for example, there are themes like "you don't have to be an important person to change the world for the better", and "war affects everyone whether we're involved in the actual fighting or not".
Oh ok so like a fable. Got it, this is actually something my writing needs to improve but yes I agree, it is often unconsciously imparted.

Sent from my SM-G550T1 using Tapatalk
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
What exactly is theme in a story? Perhaps this sounds like an emergency question, must answer before writing. The truth is, the only theme I've ever followed is fantasy. I'm not sure what people mean by theme.

Sent from my SM-G550T1 using Tapatalk

Perfectly valid question. It's something I've struggled to come to grips with, and which I'm still not entirely comfortable with. I think what Ireth and Saigonnus are saying is accurate though. It's a sort of a philosophical thing - what the story is about on a deeper level than just the plot and the action.

I'm not sure saying that it's like a fable is entirely accurate. I think of fables more as having some kind of moral message, or trying to exemplify some kind of point, whereas them doesn't necessarily do that.

I'll try and make an example of my current project as I've been thinking a fair bit about it lately. The story itself can be summed up as boy meets girl, but there's a bit more to it than that. However, the them of the story isn't love, even if that's a big part of it. The main theme is loneliness. I also don't present loneliness as an adversary to overcome and I don't provide any solutions for what to do about it. What I'm doing is I'm showing how loneliness affects my main character, and how he attempts to deal with it.
There's a lot of other stuff happening as well, and my main character doesn't necessarily complain about being lonely. The theme of loneliness is often there in the background though. It's why he's thinking of maybe getting a dog, and why he's a little jealous of his friends who have families, and it's why he'd really like to try and meet a nice girl to spend some time with.

Does that make sense?
 
Yeah I got it. I was just trying to make a similar comparison with fable.

Sent from my SM-G550T1 using Tapatalk
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
Theme is an interesting beast. On the one hand, if you define it simple enough you can declare, "all stories must have a theme" and be right, because theme is such a basic thing. Then there are theme people who believe there should be a single overarching theme throughout the book, with everything in it needing to reinforce this theme. This is a somewhat literary approach, the grander version of the fable. In the latter definition, a story does not need a "theme" but will still have themes by the less restrictive definition.

As far as I'm concerned, themes are whatever the reader makes of them. One of the greatest things I could imagine happening is having a book hit the success of GoT, or whatever, and seeing what the hell people draw from it all, see if they're close at all. Tolkien was aggravated by it all, and while I've no doubt some of it would be irritating, it would also be fascinating as all get out.
 
Oh ok so like a fable.

No. Not like a fable. In a fable, the moral is explicitly stated, usually at the end, in a "The moral is..." sort of way.
The theme in your story is much different. It is implicit, underlying, implied. It's the undercurrent of your story. It's the hidden element that most readers don't even notice, but still see. It's the "direction" your story is pointing, and every piece of fiction (and most non-fiction) has one, whether the author recognizes it or not.
Finding your theme is important, but not crucial.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
Yes, Tolkien didn't like the allegory thing, but he also didn't like the thematic conclusions people often pulled from the story... depending some on how you define theme, which is not a solid one size fits all definition.

But it's all neither really here nor there.
 

Ronald T.

Troubadour
Fantasy is a genre, not a theme. Theme is more like the message a story tries to convey. In LOTR, for example, there are themes like "you don't have to be an important person to change the world for the better", and "war affects everyone whether we're involved in the actual fighting or not".

Well said, Ireth. And I agree with those who have hinted that theme is sometimes unintentional. I would go even further and suggest it is probably more unintentional than planned. I think that many writers are too focused on their story and it's characters to concern themselves with theme. In truth, I believe theme is more a product of critique than an element of writerly intent. If an author does a good job of telling his/her story, the themes will create themselves. It is merely the unavoidable byproduct of a well-told story. If a writer goes into a work with theme foremost in their mind, the story will likely begin to sound like subtle preaching. And that can doom a story before it can really get started. So, write your story and let others determine the theme. Readers will probably have varying opinions on the subject anyway, no matter what the author might or might not intend.

Of course, that's just one man's opinion. And what the hell do I know?
 
Ok, so theme is a weird creature, and I don't think about it much. But it's probably there.

For me it's like a writer's stance toward things that comes through by the inclusion of situations, events, actions, and consequences in a story and probably by the absence of other theoretical situations, events, actions, and consequences that could have been put into the story but weren't.

So if your story utilizes war in a significant way, you could have....

"War affects everyone whether we're involved in the actual fighting or not." (as Ireth suggested for LOTR)

"War is an undependable tool."

"War is all hell." (General Sherman)

"War causes more bad than good."

Any of these might or might not be true, but that's a little beside the point. The author's choice of development, i.e. how he includes war in the story, may promote one of these over the others. It's almost as if the author sits down to write, knows he's going to be writing a story that includes significant warfare, and asks himself, OK, so if I'm writing about war, what do I feel are the key facts about it? What is warfare? How do I show it?

And this might not be a conscious decision so much as an author being authentic to his own vision of what war entails. It's like deciding to write about citrus and automatically knowing that one does not describe citrus as if it's meat. What is citrus? Well, what is war? What are the salient facts?

So if the story includes a significant friendship, the author knows he's going to be building an image of friendship...Well, what is friendship? How does he draw it? The result might be some kind of theme.

Different authors might have different images of friendship, warfare, and so forth.

In my WIP, the obsession for revenge plays a big role, and you can bet my own views concerning revenge are going to inform the story. I'm also writing about love, and my views on love will inform the story. I'm also writing about the conflict between an entrenched political establishment vs a single individual from the fringes of society, so my views on these things will inform the story. But I'm not going about all this by worrying myself over the question of What's my theme?

In a nearby thread concerning what each scene should accomplish, developing the theme was added to the original list. On the one hand, I want to question this because, as we might see in this thread so far, theme is a little abstract for us. So how can we go about being sure to develop it in every scene? But on the other hand, I do feel theme as I'm writing. I know that what I'm writing is meaningful for me as I'm writing it (or else I'm doing something wrong), and to some degree this sense of meaningfulness is rather relevant to the idea of theme.
 
Last edited:

Russ

Istar
Well said, Ireth. And I agree with those who have hinted that theme is sometimes unintentional. I would go even further and suggest it is probably more unintentional than planned. I think that many writers are too focused on their story and it's characters to concern themselves with theme. In truth, I believe theme is more a product of critique than an element of writerly intent. If an author does a good job of telling his/her story, the themes will create themselves. It is merely the unavoidable byproduct of a well-told story. If a writer goes into a work with theme foremost in their mind, the story will likely begin to sound like subtle preaching. And that can doom a story before it can really get started. So, write your story and let others determine the theme. Readers will probably have varying opinions on the subject anyway, no matter what the author might or might not intend.

Of course, that's just one man's opinion. And what the hell do I know?

You raise a fascinating question of whether or not theme is intentional for a writer.

Let me tell you I know about it from the least useful, to more useful, to the humorous.

Personally, I write from theme. I get an idea I want to tell a story about X issue, and then build my plot and characters from there. My process goes something like "I want to talk about theme X." to "In what kind of world can I most embody theme X without it being a beating over the head" to "What characters have the most to lose dealing with the issues from theme X" etc. So I build from the theme out.

I know many people who make their living at writing and some of them are very conscious of theme, and some of them are totally oblivious to it. Personally, I am very fond of the work that writers on both sides of this divide do.

Lastly I have a friend who writes Spec Fic and some of his work is taught in university courses. Apparently when one of his books is on the curriculum it invariably is taught as trying to make comments on the theme of the plight of North American Indians (we call them First Nations up here). My friend swears up and down that the First Nations people did not cross his mind for an instant when he was writing the book.
 
Last edited:
Personally, I write from theme. I get an idea I want to tell a story about X issue, and then build my plot and characters from there. My process goes something like "I want to talk about theme X." to "In what kind of world can I most embody theme X without it being a beating over the head" to "What characters have the most to lose dealing with the issues from theme X" etc. So I build from the theme out.

Interesting. Personally, I only rarely come up with the theme at the beginning. Typically, my theme reveals itself as I progress through the story. I try to identify it as I go, mainly because identifying it can aid me in bringing parts of the story to life. But I almost always begin with either the characters or the "what if" first.
 

Futhark

Inkling
Personally I think a theme or two, subtly and sparingly used, helps to give a story a deeper message. Of course, as mentioned above, different people will get a different message. When I struggled with technical terms someone somewhere wrote this of Spider-Man.

Premise. Kid gets bitten by radioactive spiders and gains powers.
Plot. Fights bad guys and tries to be normal kid.
Theme. With great power comes great responsibility.
 
The way different writers approach theme is very different. I don't think of themes at the beginning of a story, ever. The theme of a story of mine develops as I write it and explore it through the characters and their journeys.

But apparently other people do it totally different. I don't really understand how it works, but everyone works differently.
 
^Also, I think readers can derive themes from books that the author didn't intend.

Interestingly enough, I don't think the reader is "wrong" in this circumstance. If a reader derives meaning from a book that the author didn't intend, they still derived meaning from it. Art is a communion between artist and viewer or reader, and both participate in it and form its identity.

But I'm getting off topic...though this is interesting to think about.
 

Peat

Sage
Amen to that. The reader is only wrong if they start saying the author intended it.

*pause* Well, okay, its possible the reader's taken something crazy from a book, like LotR being a direct statement for modern White Power. They'd be wrong then.

In any case, a lot of themes are unintentional. I know people who swear there's no theme to their work - yet I could look at what they've written and find a theme there.


Something I find theme good for is in establishing those big "POW" moments. If you're constantly talking about a big subject - War, Love, Redemption, Revenge - then you've given the reader a lot of investment when you visit the subject in one of the big dramatic end of book moments. I don't think Gollum biting off Frodo's finger when he can't throw the ring is nearly as cool if Tolkien hasn't been asking questions and making statements about corruption and redemption all the way through the series.
 

Vaporo

Inkling
Yes, Tolkien didn't like the allegory thing, but he also didn't like the thematic conclusions people often pulled from the story...

I suddenly like Tolkien a bit more.

Lastly I have a friend who writes Spec Fic and some of his work is taught in university courses. Apparently when one of his books is on the curriculum it invariably is taught as trying to make comments on the theme of the plight of North American Indians (we call them First Nations up here). My friend swears up and down that the First Nations people did not cross his mind for an instant when he was writing the book.

I've actually had something slightly similar happen to me that's given me a very cynical view on theme and symbolism. In high school, we had a project where we had to write a story. That's it. Write a short story and turn it into the teacher. I wrote my story, put a little bit of effort into it, and handed it in. The teacher comes back and apparently she was pretty impressed by my writing. So, she calls me over starts going on and on about how good all the symbolism and themes that I supposedly put in my story were.

When I tell her that I didn't do thing like that, and that it's just a story about a wizard that I put together in 5 hours, she says something to the extent of "Well, maybe you don't think you put any of that in there, but it's there."

That pretty much turned me off from any kind of literary criticism. When I write, my goal is to entertain. Not to create some symbolically thematic literary masterpiece that you need three degrees just to understand the plot. If you got something out of it other than wizards shooting fireballs at each other, great! But if you come back and start telling me that I have some symbolism or theme that I've literally never thought about, trying to teach me about my own story or that saying that you've gleaned some deep dark information about my psyche, I'm probably going to say that you're full of it.

So, for now I'll just write my stories and, if I ever publish anything, leave it to the literary critics to tag my story with whatever theme or symbolism they like.
 
Last edited:
When I tell her that I didn't do thing like that, and that it's just a story about a wizard that I put together in 5 hours, she says something to the extent of "Well, maybe you don't think you put any of that in there, but it's there."

And here's the thing. You're going to hate me, but I don't actually care. She was right. Theme shows up many times, perhaps most times, completely by accident. But just because you didn't consciously put it there? That doesn't mean it wasn't there. Just because you don't like the fact that someone pointed out it was there? That doesn't mean you didn't.

The theme is, in short, the meaning behind the story. It's that simple. Are you writing a "coming of age" story? That's your theme. If you're writing to entertain? You will have a theme. You can't avoid it. A story without any kind of theme is a story that is not entertaining. A story with a theme is like the guy driving down the highway with a destination in mind. Sure, it may take him a decade to get where he's going, and sure there will be countless "rabbit trails" as he wanders down byways to satisfy curiosity or just have a lark. But he's going to ultimately get somewhere.
Writing without theme, even a subconscious one, is that same guy driving down the highway with no destination in mind. He's never going to get anywhere, even while he goes all over the place, and neither he nor anybody else is going to even remotely care about the journey.
 
Top