Finding Your Story's Theme Using Your Characters

Or How to Make Drafting and Editing Your Story Easier

I had a friend ask me for writing advice the other night. Like all newbie writers before him, he’s got about 50,000 years of history before the story starts, has a half dozen ideas of his main conflict, and scaled up his worldbuilding to a level that would give Tolkien a headache. After explaining to me the mess he wrote himself into, he asked me his big question: “how do I find the theme of my story?”

Theme was the last thing on my mind. Cutting about 49,999 years of history from his world to make it easier was my first suggestion, or maybe doing something about the wreath-shaped family trees, but he didn’t seem to care much about either things, at least not right now. He’s not writing to publish, and if he was, he’s still got a lot of work ahead of him, and there’s only so many times you can tell a first-time writer to cut back the scale of their first project—it’s a cannon event, I’m afraid.

“Just keep writing and think about it later, it will come to you,” is a common piece of advice I’ve seen floating around the Internet, and one that didn’t help him much before he came to me for help. He was overwhelmed by a massive, incohesive story he was quickly losing inspiration for. In this case, narrowing down the theme could help him get him back on track for success.

First Off, What Is a Theme?

Straight from the writer’s overlord, Wikipedia, a theme is:

a central topic, subject, or message within a narrative. Themes can be divided into two categories: a work’s thematic concept is what readers “think the work is about” and its thematic statement being “what the work says about the subject”.

You can’t control what your reader feels and thinks about your story, but what you decide it is about will make the writing, and even marketing process, 1000% easier.

Some pretty common themes for stories include Survival, Power, Identity, Family, Freedom, Love, Nationalism, Conspiracy, Mental Health, Greed, and Self-Reliance. You can Google “story themes” to get you thinking about what resonates with you if you haven’t started writing yet. One of my favourite resources on the topic is from ProWritingAid with examples, but don’t just limit yourself to one resource. Take the time to think about what will inspire you to write and push through edits.

A theme can be seen in the overall conflict of your story and in the microscopic actions of your characters, and even the general atmosphere and worldbuilding if you take the time to integrate it that deeply. You can have multiple themes in your story but for now, try to keep things simple as possible early on to not box yourself in while writing. A strong, compelling central theme will keep your readers thinking about your work long after they’re done reading your book.

But you’re already in the middle of your story, and you can’t focus on just 1-2 themes since there’s so much going on. You have way too much plot and too many characters, and all of it is so good, how do you choose what to cut and what to keep?

How do you find the theme of your story amidst all of the chaos to make the writing process easier?

So, What Is My Advice?

For a story of any size, from the iconic “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” by the legend Ernest Hemmingway, to the sprawling hellscape of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, you can distill the story down to 1-2 words. Death, for the former, and Paranoia for the latter. You can do this for any story, from book, TV show, and movie. Another legendary book, the Poppy War by R. F. Kuang, can be distilled down to War Sucks, and although that’s barely scratching the surface of the book, the awfulness of war is something blatantly apparent throughout Kuang’s trilogy, even during the most casual read through (but whoever is reading those books casually… are you okay?)

My advice is to figure out your story’s theme before you start editing but after you have figured out your characters values, weaknesses, strengths, and conflicts. If you do it too soon, you run the risk of boxing yourself in while you’re still in the creative process, but if you wait too long into your edits, your overall narrative won’t be as cohesive if you figured it out sooner, and you’ll end up in my friend’s place.

“But Phoebe, that wasn’t the question. How do I find the theme of my story?”

I’m getting there. First off, answer me this, what is your story’s main conflict? Who are your characters?

What Does Your Story Mean?

Let’s start with an easy plot: “Bob robs a bank on an alien planet.” Amusing, but not deep. Not yet, at least.

What does it mean? Personally, I like bank robberies, but that isn’t going to sell copies.

“Bob is an ambassador for human-alien relations on Earth, but he must rob a bank on planet Snorgg because the Alien Dictator is holding his family ransom. It’s about sacrifice and family.”

Sacrifice. Family. Now those are themes.

A theme makes the story more cohesive, and if you don’t follow an outline, using a central theme can be a great way to keep your character’s decisions in line with your main conflict. Bob betrays his job by committing a felony on an alien planet, but he has a reason to do so: to save his family.

Let Your Characters Mold Your Theme

People want complex, interesting, diverse characters, but some themes like “family” are universal, no matter what species you are or planet you are on.

If you have a messy draft, and can’t seem to figure out your main conflict, 99.999% of the time, your characters aren’t developed enough. If they have a strong sense of values that motivate their actions (or lack thereof), can shape your story’s plot before you even have one.

Too many characters or are your characters just too messy? It’s time to step back and figure out what truly drives them before you go any further.

I recommend either setting up a Spreadsheet or splitting a sheet of paper into multiple columns for this exercise. On the left side column, write out the names of your characters, from most to least important. Across the top, set up columns for Motivation, Greatest Weakness, Greatest Strength, and Internal Conflict. We’ll fill it in for each character. Don’t overwhelm yourself, think about it one character at a time and just write down a quick answer for each column. You can go back and fix it later if you change your characters, just think about what you have now.

Character’s Motivation

What is the most important thing in the world to your character? What do they believe in? What moves their soul? What do they hold above even their own existence?

In our case, Bob holds familial love above everything else: human-alien peace, his job, everything.

Bob wants to save his family more than anything in the world, thus, that’s his motivation. But their motivation can be anything. Love, Power, Freedom, Revenge. Just give them something. Kurt Vonnegut said it best: “Make your characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water.” But the stronger the motivation, the better. Don’t worry about justifying it yet, figure out the rest of the cast.

Your main character shouldn’t be the only one with a motivation. Think about your side kicks, your love interests, your villains, their allies, and anyone else in your story. You might begin to notice there’s similarities between characters too.

Character’s Weaknesses and Strengths

What is your character’s most dire weakness? What will kill them before they succeed in their mission if they don’t learn to deal with it? For Bob, it could be blind loyalty, fear of loneliness, guilt. Maybe his family did something stupid to get themselves held ransom on an alien planet. A weakness could be arrogance, jealousy, materialism, hypocrisy, the list goes on.

A weakness could also be a strength, but the worst parts of it. Stubbornness could be bullheadedness, excessive generosity could lead to your characters getting taken advantage of. Ambitiousness could lead to a willingness to destroy others for success.

To keep things compelling, give them something to struggle for. Make sure the weaknesses outnumber their strengths. For Bob, his creativity or his selflessness are great strengths.

The Internal Conflict

I saved the best part for last. Now that you know what motivates them and what hinders them, their conflict should be much easier to decide on. A strong conflict will put their values to the test. For poor Bob, he can either keep his cushy job and stay safe on planet Earth but live with the guilt of leaving his family to suffer or he could give up everything he’s worked for and save his family, whether or not they care about him in turn.

If you’ve done the work for your other characters too, you might notice some of the same things come up in their summaries. For the Alien Dictator keeping Bob’s family hostage, he could be leader of a fragile empire. He’s holding the family of protestors hostage because they threaten his undisputed power (greatest strength), he wants nothing but to protect his own family from an all-out space war (his motivation), and is willing to hurt others for personal gain (his greatest weakness). On either side of the conflict, Bob and the Alien Dictator want the same thing: to protect their families, but the other person is at risk. It’s only a sample idea, so there’s still room to play around with different themes: Family, Survival, Freedom. For a silly little concept we came up with on the fly, it got pretty emotionally tense, fast.

But don’t just think about your main characters, either. In the rest of your cast, what other themes come up? How do they tie into these themes, do they conflict with it? Do they have anything to do with the themes coming up at all?

You might be able to get rid of or combine characters if you notice they’re too similar or too dry to keep in your story. Theme permeates your whole story and makes a great tool to use in keeping your characters aligned to the main conflict.

Beyond Your Characters

Now you’ve found potential story themes within your characters, you can either congratulate yourself for a job well done or look even deeper within your story. How does the main conflict play into this theme of protect your family at all costs? Does the world break apart families, like two warring alien-human empires would? Bob is robbing banks to get the money together—how many houses has the bank stolen from families, sending them to the poor houses on planet Snorgg?

Look at your subplots. Do they serve the main plot and theme or take away from the message?

Most of all, what about you? What sort of story do you want to tell, most of all? It isn’t just about what’s right or wrong, it’s about what you want at the end of the day for the theme. Just make sure your story justifies it.

Still stuck? Maybe you’ve done a lot of work but you don’t have a cohesive enough story yet or you’re struggling with the story. Try to do these exercises with some of your favourite books, tv shows, and movies. Consuming other media is a great way to get ideas for your own work.

If it’s a tv show, try to pick apart different episodes and how they will add to the overarching theme of the whole tv show plot, not just the singular episode. If it’s a book, try to see how the setting and characters interact and how it drives the conflict, and how the conflict conveys the theme. Some stories will tell you outright what the theme is, others will make you pick them apart to find it.

Either way, even the silliest of stories has a theme, so don’t overthink it and let your story grow organically from whatever you choose to write about.