What Is A Theme In Writing

In literature, the theme of a story is, broadly speaking, what a book is about. They are concepts that pervade and recur throughout a piece of writing and are often reinforced by motifs.

The theme of your story can be as broad as 'love' or 'loneliness' (a thematic concept) or as specific as the idea that "greed is the greatest force in human culture" or "human behavior is the product of upbringing and experience" (both of which are thematic statements, because they express an opinion about the main theme).

As a writer, it's helpful to stay conscious of your story's themes so that you can equip yourself with a compass to show you what's important in your story. This will guide you towards creating moments that engage readers and deepen your story's significance — so let's take a look at why themes are important and how you can tell what a story's theme is.

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Themes aren't simply a nice addition to a story: you might say that they're central. A story without a theme would be a story without focus, aimlessly skirting around various random topics. Not every story needs to be saying something groundbreaking, but a good story will have at least one central theme, and it'll feel all the more cohesive for it. Here are three ways in which story themes add to the reading experience.

Themes make specific stories universal

All stories are about the human condition. Characters are bound by common universal truths of humanity.

Theme of a story | Book cover of Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman

Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman may not at first seem like an entirely relatable book. Its protagonist is someone who grounds her entire identity and purpose in being a convenience store worker — to the point where she wishes society accepted that as her ultimate aspiration and stopped pressuring her to date and get married.

I wished I was back in the convenience store where I was valued as a working member of staff and things weren't as complicated as this.

While Murata's story is peculiar, the central conflict of her story (individual vs. society) is universal. It should resonate with most readers, making them more invested in the protagonist's struggles, even if they don't share her specific experiences.

Sometimes, the theme of a book will take the form of a hypothesis where the story plays out as a "what if" experiment. Here, authors have the chance to use characters as imagined case studies of human behavior, examining, for example, how different people react to the same events.

William Golding's Lord of the Flies takes human morality as its central theme. It focuses on a group of boys stranded on an island and forced to fend for themselves. The children soon create their own micro-society on an island, with power structures, internal politics, and, eventually, violence. In short, the novel's thematic statement — its hypothesis — might be "If isolated from society, human beings would not act 'morally' anymore."

Theme | Ralph and Piggy from the 1963 film, Lord of the Flies — Tragically, boys will be boys (Image: British Lion)

By showing each character's slightly different experience and perception of events, Golding explores how complex "morality" is — contrasting his characters' desire to conform with their sense of behaving correctly. In this way, the complexity of morality becomes the book's organizing force, the central source of tension that propels the story forward.

A theme can organize and unite separate narrative strands

Not all books have a very tight focus on a single character or mission. Many novels and anthologies contain multiple, seemingly unrelated narratives or points of view united only by common themes.

James Joyce's Dubliners is made up of fifteen short stories, each set in the Irish capital in the early 20th century. His characters are all, in some way, touch by a sense of social paralysis or futility — something that readers have taken to be representative of Joyce's view on Ireland at the time. And as we meet more of these characters — the schoolboy obsessed with his friend's sister, the unfulfilled poet who's jealous of his old classmate, the bank teller who spurns the chaste affections of a married woman — this sense of stagnation and dread only grows.

Theme of a story | Photograph of Irish band the Dubliners, holding their instruments. — Not these Dubliners.

Much like a music album will have a central concept that elevates it above being the sum of its parts, so too can themes connect disparate story strands in meaningful, insightful ways.

It can be hard to pin down what a story's theme is, but if you're up to the task, here's a quiz to test your theme-detecting skills with! 🕵️

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