People always ask you what your favorite quote is – nobody ever asks you what your least favorite quote is. And they should! It’s a way more interesting question.

Well, since nobody asked, mine is Game of Thrones writer David Benioff’s “Themes are for eighth grade book reports.” The show was not even on my radar when he first said this, but I remember reading that quote somewhere and thinking, ooh, no. I am not exaggerating when I say this quote haunts me in the night to this very day. Unfortunately, it’s something a lot of people walk away from a typical high school literature education fervently believing.

Themes are important. They’re the secret sauce that make stories feel not only meaningful, but cohesive. They connect the stories we read, however fantastical and outlandish, to the world we live in and the values we live by. They are, in a way, the reason people tell and consume stories, whether we realize it or not.

So how do we use them? How do you write something with powerful themes – resonant, stick-with-you kinds of themes that permeate every aspect of the story without feeling heavy-handed or overly preachy? Well, strap in and let’s find out.

And fair warning, I’m feeling very into bullet point lists today. No, I don’t know why. But we’re going to roll with it.

What are themes, anyway?

In case it’s been a while since your last eighth grade book report, let’s quickly go over the definition of theme in literature.

Theme was probably first explained to you as the “big idea” of the story – the main thrust at the core of the narrative. You might have examined morality tales like Aesop’s Fables, which tend to have a big “lesson learned” moment at the end of them that drives home this main idea in a very literal, in-your-face kind of way. Stories like that make themes easy to spot, but they’re far from what most writers would call an ideal execution of the concept. Themes are typically more like an abstract reoccurring motif – an idea or viewpoint that manifests itself in several different aspects of the story. Next time you finish a book, set it aside for 10 minutes to let any shock, surprise, or adrenaline wear off, and whatever you feel at the end of that 10 minutes is probably somehow connected to the themes.

Most people seem to walk away from this kind of introduction with the idea that worrying about themes is, at best, unnecessary for the average writer, and at worst, pretentious and overly philosophical. But it’s not any of those things. Theme is everywhere! If you grew up with the same stories I did, you can probably cite at least three examples from the text off the top of your head for each of the following themes:

• The power of love in Harry Potter
• The power of propaganda and public perception in The Hunger Games
• The horrors of war in Avatar: the Last Airbender

(By the way, there will be spoilers for all three of these works in this post, which is why I deliberately tried to pick really, really popular stuff. But if you haven’t read/seen these and care about spoilers, proceed with caution.)

Once you know what you’re looking for, you probably won’t need to reach very far or think very hard to come up with at least one theme for any popular work of fiction, and point to how it plays into the characters, plot, and worldbuilding in at least a few places.

Now, notice that none of the themes I just listed are what you’d call subtle. Each work I’ve listed is rife with striking descriptions, visuals, character actions, and plot twists that rely heavily on these themes, and often involve stating them openly. I point this out so you understand that subtlety, while important to the delivery of some themes, is not by any means mandatory.

So the key to this isn’t really subtlety – it’s more like indirectness. You don’t want it to be hard to notice, but you also don’t want to bash the audience in the head with it. Good thematic delivery isn’t preachy, but instead leaves the reader with a powerful sense of something. It convinces you of something, and if that something is a thing you already believed, it makes you believe it even more.

Now, unfortunately, this is where many writers kind of run out of gas. You see, while our eighth grade book reports might have taught us to spot themes, I don’t remember a single moment in my entire education when I was taught how to actually write them – given specific guidance on where to insert them into the story, or studied examples with the specific intent of applying the lessons to my own writing, any of that. We get what theme is, sure, but… what now?

Where to find themes

Rarely, in my experience, does a writer start out with their themes. Some do! If that’s you, then that’s great. Good for you, but it could never be me. I am just not that profound. What I prefer to do is what most writers do, which is to start with a cool idea for a premise. I sketch out a couple of characters, maybe a rough outline of the plot, perhaps a few pertinent details of the world. Sometimes I just go ahead and start writing — get a little ways in and see where the story is taking me. Then, when I’m finally ready to tackle it, I go hunting for whatever themes have snuck in while I wasn’t looking.

Because of this method, the themes I write usually show up accidentally as a result of whatever I was feeling or experiencing through at the time I wrote it. Realizing this is kind of like being psychoanalyzed by a really pretentious English major living inside your own brain. She kicks back in an ornate, wing-backed armchair, swirls a glass of brandy around thoughtfully, and like Clippy after a round of higher education, she muses, “It looks like you’re trying to deal with your deep, existential dread by handing it off to a bunch of people you just made up – need some help with that?”

A big part of the reason I fell so heavily into sci-fi in college was that I was studying aerospace engineering, and I was wrestling with how to reconcile the anti-war views I was raised on with the fact that I was paying an institution to teach me how to build missiles and fighter planes. This gave rise to a ton of thematic ideas about the nature of human evil and the dark side of technological advancement, and plenty of stories about scientists getting caught in the middle of wars. There was an intentionality to these themes in the end product, but the seedlings they grew from tended to originate subconsciously, worming their way into a few key places depending on what I chose to develop or outline first. In every case, the story just started with, “Well, this seems like fun to write.” My point is, no matter what you’re writing, I promise you there’s a little bit of you in it. And that little bit of you carries a lot of meaning.

If you’re looking for something you can deliberately turn into a theme for your story, do a few brainstorming sessions without focusing on it too much. Then sit back and look at what you’ve got, and ask yourself the following questions. To give some examples, I’m going to take the three stories and themes I mentioned in the last section (the power of love in Harry Potter, the power of propaganda and public perception in The Hunger Games, and the horrors of war in Avatar: the Last Airbender) and use them to answer these. Look at how these themes weave a common thread through each of the answers.

• Fundamentally, what are the villains or antagonists of this story trying to achieve, and more importantly, how are they achieving it?
  • Harry Potter – Voldemort essentially wants to achieve world domination, which he does in large part by spreading fear and hatred – the opposite of love.
  • The Hunger Games – The Capitol wants to maintain the divide between the upper and lower classes of society, and one of their tools for doing so is a televised event that basically boils down to a PR stunt.
  • Avatar: the Last Airbender – the Fire Lord is also going for world domination, but with more of an all-out war approach, spreading carnage and destruction, and seeing no problem with genocide.
• Who is your protagonist at the start of the story? Consider not only their personality, but their needs, status, and role in the world around them.
  • Harry Potter – Harry is a lonely orphan with no friends, and the only family he has don’t show him any love or affection.
  • The Hunger Games – Katniss has a sharply-tuned BS detector and a deeply rooted need for authenticity and honesty.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender – Aang is a young, innocent child whose entire civilization has been wiped out by genocide.
• Is there anything in particular driving the technology or magic in your story, particularly at big, emotional, climactic moments?
  • Harry Potter – Love is portrayed as a powerful magical force with the power to save lives.
  • The Hunger Games – Televisions are everywhere in Panem. The first book is literally about a television broadcast, and TV continues to play a massive role in the story long after the characters leave the Hunger Games. Some have argued that TV is even a separate theme unto itself.
  • Avatar: the Last Airbender – Zuko loses his Firebending abilities when he leaves behind his warlike, violent upbringing and destructive tendencies, and only regains his powers after learning to draw them from the sun rather than his own anger.
• What negative consequences do the villain or antagonist’s actions have for the protagonist on a personal level?
  • Harry Potter – Harry loses his family, and later in the books, has to give up his relationship with Ginny to protect her.
  • The Hunger Games – Katniss is forced to fake a relationship, then fake a pregnancy, as well as fabricate or conceal many key aspects of her personality, because the only way to protect herself is to remain consistent with the Capitol’s propaganda about her.
  • Avatar: the Last Airbender – Aang lost his home and his people to the Fire Nation’s genocide, leaving him feeling guilty and heartbroken.

Some of these questions you’ll be able to answer at this stage – others, maybe not. Some (like the question involving technology and magic) might not even be relevant to what you’re writing. It depends on the genre, characters, and the type of story you’re putting together. But if you can pin down the answers to at least two of these, you can start to look for common threads. Some points you’ve written down might go further towards supporting the theme than others, which you can also see in the examples above. But you’ll likely find at least one pair of answers that seem to line up suspiciously well, occasionally to the point of being word-for-word identical.

And keep an eye out for more than one of those connecting threads here! You might have one central theme with a bunch of smaller ones, or two or three big ones that balance each other out, or any of a million other variations. The point is, you’ll probably find more than one.

So, now you’ve got your themes! You’ve swirled your spoon around in the Story Soup you’re cooking and pulled out a Big Idea. Now, what do you do with it?

Where to put themes

Well, look at it for a sec, think to yourself, “Huh, that’s neat,” and pour it right back in the soup – that’s what you do. In order to make your story thematically consistent, you’ll need to integrate that theme you found into multiple places throughout the story, and work hard to make sure nothing else in the story is in open conflict with it (unless that’s part of your point somehow – and if that’s the case, tread carefully and foreshadow heavily, my friend). I’d recommend trying to seed something to do with your theme(s) in the following places:

• Character motivations (what do they want?)
• Character arcs (what do they learn? What were they, and what do they become?)
• Worldbuilding systems (what makes this world go around? What drives the economy, the social structure, the technology, or the magic?)
• Character decisions/plot twists (what allows/causes them to happen?)
• Villains and antagonists (what makes this person a monster, and what makes this monster so scary?)
• Technical considerations like tone, POV, and style (is the theme more impactful from up close or from afar? What feeling does it leave you with?)

Checking off each of these items ensures that the ideas driving your story remain consistent in their delivery across every aspect of your story. Not all of these will be easy, although ideally some will. This is where having multiple themes to play around with can come in really handy, so that neither you nor your readers feel like you’re just doing the same thing over and over again. Without more than one idea behind your story, your Big Idea can start to feel more like a big metal baseball bat that you’re smacking the reader with, yelling, “Feel something, damn you!” For example:

• Harry Potter also featured themes of people not being what they seem
• The Hunger Games also featured the theme of choosing between violence and pacifism as a response to conflict.
• Avatar: the Last Airbender featured themes related to overcoming abuse and trauma.
• …and these are just one additional example each from stories with dozens of themes, big and small, packed into them.

These themes might seem dissonant from each other when you look at them side by side with nothing in the middle. But that’s what’s so cool about theme! You’re just looking at bones with no meat on them yet. The plot, characters, and world form the connective tissue between themes, providing them with a unique context, allowing you to take a collection of ideas that mean something to you – some of them as old as time itself – and turn them into something that is completely, uniquely your own.

Outlining by thematic beats

But why stop there? Why not take this one step further and use your themes to outline the whole freakin’ book? You can! And there are some times when you absolutely should.

The idea of outlining by theme is to craft the most emotionally resonant or impactful moments in your story with a specific theme or themes in mind. You’re not going to create a super detailed outline here – more a road map of the major thematic beats of your story. You’ll want to lean heavily on the character arcs you were looking at in the last section as a starting place for this one.

Another easy place to start is to think of your theme and write down every possibly permutation of that theme you can think of. What are all the ways a person might feel about this topic? What pieces make up the patchwork of opinions and views people might hold on it? If you were to line them up in a sequence or progression, what might that look like? And how could you turn the items in that sequence into beats of a story or character arc?

Here are some examples of thematically driven plot beats, taken from the examples we’ve been using:

• The revelation that Lily’s sacrifice of her life was what saved Harry as a baby
• Harry choosing to sacrifice himself to save his friends during the Battle of Hogwarts
• Peeta telling Caesar Flickerman that Katniss is pregnant
• People in the Capitol falling for Gale’s trick with the parachutes, because they have been conditioned by the media they consume to associate parachutes with salvation and aide
• Aang losing control and going into the Avatar State when he finds Monk Gyatso’s body
• Katara being nearly swayed into helping Zuko by their shared experience of losing a mother to war and violence

Notice how many of these are really big moments in the story. There are smaller story beats and plot twists throughout, but the big moments where you gasp and clutch your pearls? Those are driven by the themes.

Again, you don’t have to hit all the beats, and you don’t even have to hit them in order. The idea is to generate plot fodder. You’re brainstorming right now: carving out puzzle pieces which you can then figure out how to fit together into a cohesive story. Some of those pieces might not even turn out to be plot beats – they might be characters or aspects of the world that represent a particular viewpoint or variation. That’s good! Remember, you want your themes to show up in a few different places in the story in order for it to feel cohesive.

This is a good method to use if you do want to start with a theme and let the premise of your story follow it, rather than the other way around. It allows you to quickly generate characters and worldbuilding that tie directly into the thing you’re trying to say. It’s also a good way to cure the “I don’t know what should happen next” flavor of writer’s block (read more here!).

In conclusion

If you take nothing else from this, remember that theme is what makes a story feel meaningful to someone. It’s at the core of what connects us to the stories we love, even if we don’t realize it. When we describe a story as touching, inspiring, frightening, or otherwise emotionally resonant, we’re really talking about theme.

And you want people to have strong feelings about your story. I don’t know about you, but my favorite part of sharing my writing with people is the moment when I can tell it made them feel something. Strong themes give us a way to achieve this. For me, they also provide a common thread to hang onto throughout the writing process, and a reason to stick with the story through all the ups and downs of writing. Because at the end of the day, I’m saying something that feels like it matters.

Happy writing!