Why Your Book Needs a Theme

You have a story. You have characters, events, experiences, memories, observations and pages of material. You don’t know why your manuscript still feels as though it is wandering around looking for a destination.

You may feel your writing skills have let you down. But that might not be the reason at all.

Your book doesn’t yet have a clear theme.

Theme is a word writers hear all the time. It sounds grand and a little confusing.

Your theme is the central idea your book or story explores. Call it moral of the story. That’s a familiar phrase, isn’t it?

Your story might be about a woman leaving her marriage. That is the plot. It might be about marriage, independence or identity. Those are subjects. But perhaps, underneath all of it, the story is exploring what it takes to choose yourself after spending years living according to someone else’s expectations. That deeper idea is the theme.

So why does your book need one?

Because without a central idea, almost anything can seem important.

This becomes particularly troublesome when you have a lot to say. You remember another incident that would be perfect for the book. You discover a fascinating piece of research. A character has an interesting conversation. You think of another point you absolutely must make. You add it, then something else. And so on!

Before you know it, your manuscript has gone all over the world and returned home without having made the point it was meant to make. What a waste of potential!

Your manuscript is full of excellent material, but the reader doesn’t know what all those good things are doing together—or where they are all leading.

A theme gives your book a centre of gravity.

It gives you a way to decide what you will keep and what must go into the next book. Decisions like:

Does this scene belong? Does this character contribute something important? Does this anecdote deepen what I’m exploring, or is it simply interesting? Does this chapter move the book forward, or am I keeping it because I like it?

Theme becomes a lens through which you can examine the material.

Imagine you’ve written a memoir about growing up in a difficult family. You have dozens of memories, and many of them may be worth telling. But suppose the deeper theme of your memoir is learning to stop confusing love with responsibility for everyone else’s happiness. Suddenly, those memories aren’t all equal. The ones that illuminate that idea become valuable; others may need to be shortened, moved or left out.

That doesn’t make those other memories bad. It simply means they may not belong in this book.

And that is one of the hardest lessons for a writer to learn: we can love a piece of writing and still recognise that it isn’t serving the book.

Theme also gives a story depth. Without it, a book can tell us what happened. With it, the events mean something beyond themselves.

A character loses her job. A marriage ends. A child leaves home. Someone starts a business. Someone returns to a place they thought they had left behind. These are events. But what is the story exploring through them? Identity? Belonging? Freedom? Grief? Ambition? The cost of loyalty? The possibility of beginning again?

That deeper exploration allows a story to resonate.

And theme doesn’t mean you have to preach a lesson. In fact, a powerful theme is often a question rather than an answer. Your book might explore how much of ourselves we can sacrifice for the people we love before we lose sight of who we are. You don’t have to tell the reader what to think about that. You can allow the story to wrestle with the question and let the reader wrestle with it too.

So when should you know your theme?

Ideally, before you’ve written hundreds of pages and rewritten the first three chapters seventeen times. But if you’re already well into your manuscript, don’t panic. You may actually have an advantage because your existing material can reveal patterns you couldn’t have seen at the beginning.

The theme may already be there, quietly holding your story together.

You simply haven’t recognised it yet.

And that’s what we’ll explore in Part 2: how to find the theme when your manuscript is full of ideas, possibilities and material competing for your attention.

Mother of three adult, opinionated humans and two boisterous dogs. An idealistic, outspoken woman of scrupulous integrity. Author coach and developmental editor. And a passionate bibliophile, of course.