Theme is the glue that holds the rest of the story together.

The importance of theme has become painfully obvious in the last week, as I pick up and start editing Red Fever Book 2: Traitor.  The Red Fever Trilogy follows multiple characters through a sci-fi, dystopian universe.  It is… shall we say… complicated.

In the last week (since it has been over a month since I looked at the manuscript), I have had difficulty seeing the connection between all the storylines.  Sure, they’re all (most of them, anyway) stuck on the same ship and hoping not to die.  But each narrator’s opening scene tells something different.  Each character has their own story, intricately woven into all the other stories.  What truly holds the stories together is that each of the characters in their arcs is going through a parallel learning curve.

We know that each scene in a story must serve a purpose and must advance the plot and character in someway.  But how do you know which scenes do or do not advance the story?

Answer: Theme.

Theme = what your story is trying to say.  Like, in the real-world say.

It’s not ‘Harry loves Sally’ it’s that ‘you can’t predict who you’ll love (need).’

Theme must, in my opinion, be the constant undercurrent in every scene, beat, chapter, story.  Or blog post.

It was not until I clearly defined the theme of Traitor that I could see what needed to be done with the scenes.  (And yes, I pick just one central theme — the rest are branches of the same idea.)

Knowing your theme helps you create one cohesive whole story — whether you’re writing in one POV or multiple.  It will and should influence you decisions on which narrator would have the most impact for a particular event.  It will help you develop and track symbols in your writing.  It should even be felt in the smallest beats, in the breaths between the story, influencing word choice and sentence structure.  The more universal and deep the theme, the more resonance your story will have.

I’m curious, what is the theme of your WIP?  What is the thing you want to say to the world?

Have you ever read a book without a theme?  (I have — at least it seemed that way.)  What did you think?