This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 90: How To Develop Themes In Your Writing.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring, professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write.

I am your host, Sarah Werner. And I don’t usually have episodes like this, where I talk about a literary element or an instructional writing thing. Usually, if you’ve been listening for any length of time, episodes of the Write Now Podcasts tend to be more like living a creative life. Work-life balance, making a living writing, all of the shoulds and should-nots that come along with that. But I have this spreadsheet from back in 2015 when I started the Write Now Podcast, and this spreadsheet has all of these brainstormed ideas for topics on it. Since I came up with that list, I’ve done most of the topics, except for the episode about developing themes in your writing.

Now, why is that? Why have I put it off for over five years? Because honestly, it goes back to imposter syndrome. It goes back to me not feeling like a professor, you know? Me not feeling like I’m an expert enough on the subject to instruct you in any sort of useful, tangible way. But you know what? I’m not here to instruct. I’m here to hang out with you and to talk about writing and the different reasons that we love writing. I want to talk about theme because it’s one of the things that A, is actually super fun to talk about. And B, I think it often gets overlooked when we’re plotting and pantsing our way through our work.

Let’s start off really simple. What is a theme? Now, if you’ve ever seen the movie, A Christmas Story, it’s the story of a little boy named Ralphie who wants a Red Ryder BB Gun for Christmas and all of the family antics that ensue as he pursues his dream. So you might remember a scene from the movie in which Ralphie’s teacher gives them an assignment to the class’s great dismay. “I want you to write a theme.” That is not what we’re talking about today. We’re not talking about a type of essay that you write. So phew, collective sigh of relief.

The theme that we’re talking about today is essentially what your story is about outside of your plot and your character arcs. So once again, we’ll use the example of A Christmas Story to illustrate what we’re talking about. So if I ask, what is the movie A Christmas Story about? You can say, “Oh, well, it’s about this little boy. And he wants this special BB Gun for Christmas. And he goes through all this trouble. And there’s dogs from the Bumpuses’s next door. And their Turkey gets destroyed. And he has to put soap in his mouth for saying a bad word. You can tell me on and on and on what the movie’s about, but that’s not really the question that I’m asking.

There’s two ways to answer the question that I’m asking. The first one is, this happens, then this happens, then this happens. That’s what the movie’s about.The second way to answer it is by talking about its theme. What is this movie about? “Oh, well, it’s about childhood life in another era. It’s about what happens when you set expectations around tradition. It’s about being careful what you wish for. It’s about the flexibility that you need sometimes to get through the messiness of life. It’s about responding to bullies.” I mean, once you start listing out the themes, there’s a lot going on here. Well, I mean, there’s a lot going on there anyway.

Let’s do another example. One of my favorite books growing up was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. If you ask me what it’s about, I would say, “Oh, well, it’s about four siblings who are sent to live in the country, in this big old rambling house. One day they find this room while they’re playing hide and seek. Inside of the room is a wardrobe. When they open the wardrobe, well, when one of the siblings opens the wardrobe and they go inside. They go further and further in, and they find that soon they’re in a magical land called Narnia.”

I could tell you the plot of the story forever, but I could also ask you on the other side of that coin, what is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe about? I could say, “Oh, it’s about good versus evil. It’s about the relationship between four siblings. It’s about betrayal. It’s about forgiveness. It’s about courage. It’s about sacrifice. It’s about how things change and why they change.” That is by no means a complete list. The theme is what your story is about outside of the plot and the character arcs. Your theme is going to be the broad topic that you’re talking about, or the big idea behind it, or the big idea that you later pull out of it as we’ll talk about in just a little bit.

We’ll do one more. Some of you know that I love the movie Jurassic Park. You could ask me, “What is it about?” I could say, “Well, it’s about these doctors that are invited to go to this mysterious Island off of Costa Rica. When they get there, it’s all very mysterious. Then they notice that, ‘Oh my gosh, there are dinosaurs here and we have to survive.'” I could keep going again forever about the plot of the movie.

I’m then going to ask, okay, “But what’s it about?” That’s when we start talking about theme. “Oh, it’s about what happens when you play God. It’s about chaos versus order. It’s about human fear and survival. It’s about found family. It’s about corporate evil and greed. It’s about dreams. One man’s dream of a flea circus was made large and deadly.” Maybe I’m a nerd, but I think that this is really fun. I love looking at works of literature of all kinds. It’s pulling out, “Oh, what themes are they exploring here? What’s the big idea behind this work?”

That’s the point that I really want to hammer home by talking about Jurassic Park, A Christmas Story, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is that you don’t need to be a masterpiece. You don’t need to be a work of staggering genius to have themes. It’s not just classics like Romeo and Juliet and Moby Dick that have themes. Twilight has themes. Lust, and forbidden relationships, and class warfare, and other stuff. The big thing about theme though, and the power that it holds in storytelling is that it defines how the story is relevant to your audience.

The reason that I enjoy and identify with the characters in A Christmas Story is not because I had a similar childhood and not because I had necessarily similar experiences, but the themes resonate with me. Themes of needing to be flexible when life gets really messy. Themes about what happens when your hopes for a tradition or a traditional experience hits the fan? Themes of being careful what you wish for. Themes of disappointment and acceptance in your family. These are the things that resonate with us. Those are the things that will resonate with your audience, with your readers, your listeners, your viewers, whatever it is you’re creating.

Those themes really speak to why your work matters and why your work is loved by people. Well, one of the reasons. As a reader, listener or viewer, I go into a story looking for how it’s relevant to my life. I know that sounds completely narcissistic, but it’s what we all do. We’re constantly on the lookout for, “Okay, how does this story affect me? How is the story relevant to me? How does the story speak to me?” Again, this is not just something for classic literature. Themes are present in comic books, and TV shows, in games, in genre books. They’re everywhere. They’re in kids’ books. How many children’s books have you seen that have a theme of sharing, or sacrifice, or friendship, or communication? Every story is about something in more than one way.

That starts to get at why they are so important, not only to us as individuals, but to our culture. They shape how we feel and think about these subjects. Okay, so here’s the question. How do I put themes into my writing? Well, I have good news for you, and that good news is you don’t, or at least you don’t have to. Something that I found is that if you are writing about anything, and if you have opinions about anything, themes will naturally arise from your work. Anyone who has ever written anything and then shared it with a group or written something, and then published it and read reviews.

Have you ever been surprised by the themes that people project onto your work or the themes that people dig out of your work that you never actually intended? This happens to me every time I write and share something. Maybe it happens to you too, but I’ll finish up reading or I’ll watch the other person finish up reading my work and they’ll look up and they’ll say, “Well, I really liked how you explored the themes of the need for hope in a time of desperation. How we really all work together to create our own vehicles of hope.” Then they’re off on this tangent and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I did not intend to put that in there. But I mean, I can see where you’re coming from.”

A lot of the times our themes will arise naturally. Now you can totally start your work with a theme in mind. If when you begin writing or plotting your novel or whatever it is you’re working on, you feel compelled to explore a theme like, “Oh, I want to sit down and I want to write a play about how power corrupts people.” Or, “I want to write a fantasy novel about the classic good versus evil, but it’s within a family dynamic.” Or, “I want to write a series of poems about motherhood.” That’s great, you can totally do that. It is 100% your choice, but even if you do set out to create work with a theme in mind, it’s very likely that other themes will arise within your work that you did not intend to put in there.

That just comes from us and our own viewpoints, our own opinions, and our own insights about the world. We put so much of ourselves into our work, that it’s a little bit scary. Whether you decide to start with a theme in mind, or whether you decide to write or outline for a while and then figure out as you’re going like, “Oh, I can see a theme emerging here or here.” It’s your choice, whether you want to evaluate that for a theme, whether or not you want to analyze your own writing enough to try to pull out a theme, whether you want to give someone else your first draft and say, “Hey, what do you think the themes are?” Then it’s your choice, whether you want to strengthen and reinforce the themes that are already in there, or if you don’t.

Themes can be expressed in a lot of different ways within your story. Perhaps most obviously the themes can be expressed by the plot. You can show clearly this happens, this happens, therefore this. Romeo and Juliet fell in love against the wishes of their family, and now they’re screwed. This works especially well, if your theme has a moral bent to it and sort of a see what happens when you blank. A lot of cautionary tales, a lot of morality tales are very, very theme heavy and very, very, very heavy handed. That’s one of the things that will influence your decision, how much you want to strengthen or reinforce the theme in your work is how heavy handed it ends up being. Whether you want your theme to take a front seat or a back seat to the story, and again, neither is wrong. It’s just a personal preference. It’s one of the things that goes into, it’s one of the factors that goes into your voice as a writer.

We can express the themes in the plot points. We can also express themes in character dialogue, in action. We could have one character say, Dr. Malcolm in Jurassic Park, go on a rant while they’re eating or not eating Chilean sea bass, about how, if you mess with nature, nature will retaliate. He essentially says, “Don’t play God.” This tells us one of the themes in the movie. Again, this all comes down to how blatant or heavy handed you want your characters to be and how much you want them to act out the themes and the theme’s consequences.

You can also express your theme in a little bit of a lighter way and keep it more in the context of the story, rather than making it front and center in the plot points or character speeches. That is through metaphor. A metaphor is a comparison that’s not literally true. If somebody looks at me and says, “Well, she’s a bucket of laughs.” When I am not a bucket, I am also not full of laughter, but you understand what that metaphor means.

There are ways to implant your theme, or there are ways to see your theme implanted. If you’re doing it passively, if you notice that this is arising as you’re writing, that’s okay, too. Going back to A Christmas Story, one of the themes there is traditional gender roles and what it means to act like a nuclear family. No one ever comes out and says, “I’m going to do this because this.” Rather, we just see it happening in the background. It’s not part of the plot. It’s not any of that. It’s just something that arises because of the context in which we see it.

When you have a first draft or when you are in the midst of working on whatever it is you’re working on, you can say, “Huh, I’m going to take a little break and go through and just see what the themes are in my writing.” You can choose to do that. You don’t have to do that. It can be a surprise to you once you publish. It all comes down to how strong and how thematic do you want your work to be? There is no right answer because different readers and listeners and viewers come to a story for different reasons.

One of the reasons that I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe growing up was my dad was a pastor. He was like, “Oh my gosh, I can give this book to my child, one of the themes in there is religion. I feel great giving this to my child because that’s what the themes are about.” I came to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and got out of it very, very different themes. I saw wonders of magic and I saw a fantasy world where I could lose myself. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is extremely heavy handed with its themes. Going as far as to have the lion, Aslan, as pretty much a stand in for the figure of Jesus Christ. The lion is sacrificed, comes back to life. That’s a very heavy handed theme and it makes the book today a little bit divisive because of that.

I didn’t pick up on or care about that theme when I was little, because that’s not the theme that was relevant to me. That’s not the theme that spoke to me. That’s not the theme that made the story matter to me. People at the end of the day, will make your story mean what they want it to mean, despite whatever you intended. That doesn’t mean they’re right and your wrong or they’re wrong and your rights, although, people will argue that different ways. It’s simply relative. This is the reason why people will continually find themes within my work that I never intentionally put there, which is one of the reasons it’s a good idea to have a beta reader, read your work and to run your work past maybe a writers group or some trusted friends. Have an open conversation about what themes they feel are within your work.

Some of them may be on board with your own thoughts and your own intentions. Some of them might be completely based on their own experience that they’re projecting onto your story. It’s your job to decide what to do with that information as a creator. Do you want to make it more heavy handed? Make it more heavy handed. Give your character an impassioned speech about whatever the theme is. Do you want to make it less heavy handed? Okay, maybe take away the fact that they are walking through a crowded hallway and talking about how alone they feel. If you want to tone down the feeling of isolation amidst a crowd and the feelings of loneliness that we face.

Ultimately, theme is all about what you want your story to say. We’re talking beyond words here. We’re talking about the big ideas. We’re talking about what your story is actually about. Hope in the face of destruction, good versus evil, love versus hate, betrayal, war, revenge, death, power, survival, prejudice, greed, fear, loneliness, the illusion of control we have over our lives, the inevitability of fate, nihilism, motherhood, fatherhood. There is no end to the list of possible themes that you could put into, or that could arise from your work. If there’s one that you want particularly to stand out and to rise above in your work, I suggest putting it on a sticky note and sticking it to your computer monitor or to wherever it is you do your writing.

This is also something that might come through from your writer’s mission statement. Episode 46 of the Write Now Podcast is all about crafting your writer’s mission statement. I know that when I wrote my mission statement for a Girl in Space, which I don’t remember off the top of my head, but which is in one of the many binders behind me. My mission statement talked about how I wanted to bring people a sense of warmth and love and safety. How I wanted listeners to feel like they were entering a safe space when they listened to the show. How I wanted to focus on love and hope in the face of destruction. I remember that being the mission statement for Girl in Space and how I wanted my readers to feel when they experienced the story. I think that ties in with the themes that eventually emerged in the story and from the story.

If you have a mission statement, if there’s something that you’re writing toward, if there’s something that ultimately you want your work to be about, that’s where your theme comes into play. Your theme can serve as a compass. I should say theme or themes because inevitably you will have more than one theme, whether you intended or not. Theme is really hard for me to talk about. Like I said, in the beginning of the episode, I feel a certain degree of imposter syndrome talking about it because I’m not a professor. I don’t have a PhD. These are just my thoughts and what I’ve found has worked for me in writing, what I’ve enjoyed reading and consuming as a member of an audience for a story.

It’s also hard to talk about because there’s no rules, there’s no rules. You don’t have to put a theme into your work. It doesn’t mean one won’t arise naturally, but you don’t have to put a theme in there. Or you can cram 14 themes in there if you want. There’s no rules. People may like or dislike your story because of it. But again, all of those readers, all of those listeners, all of those viewers are coming from a different experience and your themes are merging with their opinions and expectations and experiences. These things come together to create an experience that you only have partial control over. It all comes back to ultimately, what do you want your work to say?

I have some fun homework for you if you haven’t done this before. If you haven’t done this already, whatever your work in progress is right now, your WIP, if this sounds like a fun idea to you, go back and start to think about, “What kind of themes have I planted in here? Am I talking about power? Am I talking about corruption? Am I talking about family versus individual wants and needs? Am I talking about courage?” If you want to enlist a friend, enlist a beta reader, enlist a trusted subject to help draw these out. Often I don’t understand the themes in my own work until they’re pointed out to me. Then I’m like, “Oh yeah, I guess I do talk about that a lot.”

Maybe you’re like me, but maybe you have a little bit more presence of mind and you can identify, “Oh yes, I am Jane Austen. I have written Pride and Prejudice. It is about both pride and prejudice.” I just went with the assumption there that you’re Jane Austen. So I hope that’s okay with you. Another exercise is if you’ve published multiple things or if you have created multiple works, are there any themes that arise in all of your works? That’s something really interesting to track. Again, this might be themes that you intentionally put into your work, or they might just be themes that are important to you that arose naturally as you created them.

What’s your story about? What are your words about? What is your work as an author about? What does that mean for you? I am going to infuse this podcast episode with a theme of gratitude because I am very, very, very grateful and thankful for my generous and amazing and wonderful supporters out on Patreon. Patreon is a secure third party donation platform that allows you to donate $1 per episode, $2 per episode, $700 zillion per episode. There’s actually probably a limit. So I don’t know if it goes to the zillions, but hey, try it and see. Patreon allows me to produce this show and to cover hosting costs and all of the costs associated with podcasting, and pass this show out to you for free.

And so if you would like to become a patron on Patreon, you can do that by going to sarahwerner.com and going to the show notes for today’s episode, episode 90, and clicking on help support this podcast. Alternately, you can go right out to Patreon, that’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/sarahrheawerner, all one word, S-A-R-A-H-R-H-E-A-W-E-R-N-E-R, where you can make your pledge. So if that sounds good to you, please do that. If not, that’s totally fine.

Special thanks for this episode go out to Amanda King, Amanda L. Dickson, Julian Vincent Thornburgh, Laurie, Leslie Madsen, Michael Beckwith, Regina Calabrese, Sean Locke, Susan Geiger, Tiffany Joyner, Leslie Duncan, Lydijia Hurni, and Sarah Lauzon. Thank you as always for your generous support.

With that, this has been episode 90 of the Write Now podcast. The podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise, to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I’m going to go overthink the themes in my work.