The Literary Term Theme Defined

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the literary term theme is "the subject of a piece of writing."

Now, that might be factually correct, but I don't think it is particularly helpful to anyone just starting out in creative writing who is trying to work out what the theme of a novel actually is.

• "Subject" suggests "subject matter," and for me a novel's subject matter is something concrete - like murder or baseball or a road trip.

• The theme of a story, however, is not concrete at all. It can usually be summed up by a word like "love" or "truth" or "courage" or "happiness" - something abstract like that.

I have mentioned elsewhere at Novel Writing Help that a novel's theme is what it is "about." But, thinking about it, it might be more helpful to say that the theme is what a novel's story means.

A love story, for example, is "about" two people meeting and falling in love. In other words, it is about...

• the characters
• the plot (or what the characters do)
• and the setting (or where they do it)

...and these things are all on the novel's surface. The theme, however - or the meaning - happens beneath the surface, and is essentially the lesson that the surface story teaches us, or the conclusion that can be drawn from the novel's events.

Here is that Love Story in a Little More Detail...

• John works in a bank. He has never had much luck with women, and he can't believe his luck when Sarah, the stunning new employee, is interested in getting to know him better.

  (Bet you never thought a definition of the literary term theme would turn into romance!)

• They date, share their first kiss, all the usual stuff - but John still can't understand what Sarah sees in an ordinary guy like him. She tells him she loves him, pure and simple, but John can't quite believe her.

• When Sarah starts taking evening classes in cookery, John becomes increasingly suspicious and one night he follows her, convinced that she is seeing someone else. But she is cooking, just like she said, and when Sarah realizes that John has followed her, she dumps him. End of story.

Now, everything I talked about was on the story's surface - the characters, plot and setting, in other words. I didn't mention theme once - but it is there, nevertheless.

How you choose to interpret the meaning of a story is sometimes a matter of opinion (different readers can take different things away from fiction). But, for me, the lesson to take away from the Jack and Sarah tale (or the conclusion to be drawn from it) is that love without trust can never work.

But back to defining the literary term theme...