Theme in literature is a topic you don't find covered in many novel writing guides - at least not in any depth. This might make you think that themes aren't important.
Don't be fooled. If you aspire to be a writer of any merit - and why wouldn't you? - you must take theme (and its close cousin symbolism) very seriously indeed.
The beauty of incorporating theme into a piece of literature is that it doesn't actually require much work at all. In the early stages of planning your novel, you simply need to decide what the theme is going to be, and then spend a while chewing it over in your mind. After that, you can pretty much forget about it and the theme will permeate its way into the novel's bones without you even being aware of it.
Theme is like a seed, then - it will grow all by itself. You've just got to make the effort to plant it in the first place. Here's how...
In the earlier 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 the novel that the theme will emerge and develop.
In other words, all you have to do during the idea-finding stage of the novel 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 might think that you already know what you have to say about your theme already, 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 literature as a laboratory of human behaviour, it isn't until you "test" a 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.
It is here that you will have the most work to do on theme. Even now, though, there will be very little actual work to do. You simply need to spend a session brainstorming your theme - that is, thinking about all of its different aspects and what you want to say about them.
This brainstorming is what I mean by "sowing the seeds"...
By the time you have completed the planning stage, you will have done all the work on theme that is necessary. Well, more or less...
It might seem that you haven't actually done very much work on theme at all, merely thought a little about what you want your novel to "say" at the beginning, and used this information to guide your decisions as you planned in depth. But, trust me, that is all the work you need to do.
Because each of your novel's events has been selected and shaped to contribute in some small way to the overall exploration of theme, you can rest assured that the story's message will simply take care of itself during the writing of the first draft.
As a matter of fact, it is vital that you let it take care of itself. Always remember that theme in literature is beneath the surface and should largely remain invisible...
For the reasons stated above, there should be very little to do here. Theme will have already worked its way into the deeper layers of your story all by itself.
The only time you might need to think about theme during revision are on those rare occasions when it rises to the surface. This usually happens during the lead character's epiphany, or the moment when they finally realize where they have been going wrong all this time and what they now need to do to put it right.
(Don't worry about the technicalities now - you will learn all about the main character's epiphany in the section on How to Plot a Novel.)
Taking a novel with "happiness" as a theme as an example...
It is very likely that the protagonist will be unhappy throughout most of the novel. When they experience their epiphany, however, they finally understand what happiness is and what changes they must make in their life to find some happiness of their own.
And it is here that theme often bubbles to the surface in the form of the character thinking about the issue directly, or perhaps talking about it to another character.
When this happens, you might want to tweak their words somewhat to better convey the precise shade of meaning you were after, or else to tone it down to stop it sounding "preachy." But basically you will do best to leave theme well alone during the revision process and leave it to the readers and the critics to discover for themselves the meaning beneath your novel's surface.
The beauty of theme in a novel is that no two people are likely to think precisely the same thing.