How To Write a Novel — Theme
Day 20 of writing my novel in public
I’ve started something scary here on Medium. It’s something I’ve done before, but never in public. I have a process that I’m going to follow, and I’d like to share it with you.
If you want to follow the journey from the start, go here.
If you missed yesterday’s, you can find it here.
Day 20 — Theme
I’ve come to this — the scary part. Theme is such a worrying word. How can I possibly define the theme of the book that I’m writing? Will it have just one theme? Or should I have many? Will they be deep and serious? Or can I be trite and cliché? Hopefully, the work that I’ve done so far will make identifying my theme reasonably painless.
Over the last week, I have identified story threads for my book — central, character, symbol, setting, dynamic and phrase. These are narrative elements that iterate through the book, repeating and varying as they go. The job now is to work out what it all means.
I’m looking for the theme, but that word doesn’t have to be so scary. All I’m really looking for is the point of the book. What is it all about?
Can there be more than one theme? According to the Book Architecture method of Stuart Horwitz, no. A book can only be…
