Theme and the Writing Process

Yes, I have touched on theme and the writing process before, in the section on How to Write a Novel. But I haven't talked about how, specifically, to handle your novel's theme during the writing process, and that is the purpose of this article.

More specifically, I will tell you what you need to do during each main stage of the novel writing process to ensure that you end up with a novel that is rich in meaning. The four main stages are:

1. Finding an Idea
2. Planning the Novel
3. Writing the Novel
4. Revising the Novel

Now let's look at them one by one...

How to Handle Theme during the Writing Process

1. Finding an Idea

In the section on Finding Ideas, I suggested that although you must have a strong idea of your theme from the outset, it is only through the act of writing a novel that the theme will emerge and develop.

In other words, all you have to do during the idea-finding stage of the writing process is select a theme about which you feel you have something to say, based on your own life experiences, even if you aren't exactly clear what that "something" might be. Easy!

You may think you already know what you have to say about the theme at this stage, but what you will probably discover is that what you thought you believed will be altered, in small ways or large, by the process of writing your novel.

If you look at a novel as a laboratory of human behaviour, it isn't until you "test" your theme, by putting characters into situations related to the theme and seeing what happens, that you will fully appreciate what you want your novel to say.

2. Planning

It is during the planning stage of the novel writing process that you will have to do the most work on theme. But even here there will be very little to do!

The first thing to do is to spend a work session brainstorming your theme - that is, thinking about all of its different aspects and what you want to say about them.

Yes, you might well change your mind as you plan and write your novel, but you at least need to establish a starting point. A page or two of notes should suffice here.

Having done that, the next step is to take what you have learned and use it as a guidance system.

The planning part of the novel writing process is simply about turning a brief novel idea into something far more detailed. Most of the work revolves around plotting, characterization and building a setting.

Theme comes into its own by acting as this guidance system I keep mentioning, helping you to arrive at a detailed plan that is focussed and whose elements are all pulling in the same direction.

• Let's say that you decide during the idea-finding stage that your novel is about happiness - what it is, how you can come by it and how you can hold onto it.

• As you plan your novel in detail, the idea is to ensure that every element - characters, setting, but mainly the events themselves - contributes in some small and subtle way to the exploration of happiness.

• With such a complex theme, one with many aspects to it, you will probably use different subplots to explore these different aspects. (One could comment on finding happiness through love, another on finding it through religion, and so on.) And in order to ensure that every subplot, and every event within each subplot, is "on message," as it were, you simply need to ask yourself: is this plot or this scene saying something about happiness?

• If it is about something else entirely - about guilt, for example - it means you have derailed somewhere during the planning stage of the writing process and must take action to get back on the tracks.