How To Write Good: A Lightly Salted Guide to Stepping Up Your Wattpad Game.

Narrative Themes

Every story has narrative themes, whether you want them to or not because if you don't execute them deliberately, your readers will make assumptions and draw their own conclusions without realizing it.

The theme is what your story is ABOUT. It's not the same as the plot, and a lot of people will confuse the theme with the moral of the story, or a lesson the author is trying to teach the audience. Neither is true.

It's also not equivalent to mood. Books about death can be light and optimistic. In Anthony Doerr's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, All The Light We Cannot See, a story set in Nazi Occupied Paris, death is a dominant theme, but the book is written to illuminate the ways people connect and bond with each other in a positive way. In Voltaire's satirical Candide, the themes are light but they mask a dour and even tragic storyline.

Themes can be simple, as they usually are in short stories, or they can be complex, as long as the complexity can be communicated simply. A story can also have one theme - again, typical in short stories - or they can have many.

Since I've used Harry Potter several times in this book, let me fall back on that again to describe what I mean.

J. K. "Just Kidding" Rowling has said her series has several major themes. The most prominent is death. It's a simple idea, but a lot of what happens across the series points to the causes and effects of death on culture, on individuals, and within the mind of the reader. Voldemort is obsessed with death. The Deathly Hallows, though they appear as a late plot device, stitch together trigger events that predate the series entirely, and they are thematically bound to the idea of death. It's a common theme in many books, ranging from Mary Shelly's Frankenstein to George Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, but each treats it differently.

Another stated theme is the salvation message of Christ. This is much more complex than the first, but she deliberately mirrored the Bible and multiple Christian ideals as she struggled with her own spirituality, emphasized in the sacrifice of Harry's mother, the love that protects him in his early years, and Harry's own sacrifice and resurrection at the end of book 7. It's a good representation of a complex theme because it covers a lot of ground while remaining coherent as an external worldview. While some people disagree with the religious connotations, most can relate to the ideas.

This is where you begin to understand what a theme really is because nowhere in the seven-book series do you receive a treatise on death or receive a sermon from behind a Pentecostal pulpit. The author guides and directs the readers' thoughts and feelings toward them using the emotional hooks and connections in his or her toolbox.

There are other themes in the series like fate and tolerance, and probably more if you spend the time looking for them, but my point is that they exist. Rowling has stated that she didn't plan for any of them to appear, but they grew organically until she recognized them, and then nurtured the story once they began to affect her the way they'd affect a reader.

Taking an example from my own work, The Autumn Prince has a ton of themes - the principal one is love, but it also explores belonging, acceptance, loss, change, and a slew of others. On the other hand, Sunshine is about imagination and discovery - much simpler and concise.

You don't have to sit down and write out your motives immediately, or ever if that's what you choose, but I want you to recognize that it will exist with or without your permission, and deciding what you're writing ABOUT, having a personal understanding of it, and taking an active role in developing it, will give you a stronger connection with your characters and your audience. I tend to understand my themes going into a particular work because they're part of what drives the story, but there's no right way to do it.

I should also point out that theme exists separate from everything else in your book - your characters, setting, plot, conflict... all of these serve the theme, but none of them are dictated by it.

Here are some other examples from literature to help you pick out themes in your own works:

Lord of the Flies: Survival

The Fault In Our Stars: Death and Dying

Don Quixote: Friendship

Anna Karenina: Boredom. Haha just kidding, it's love.

Hamlet: Revenge

The Catcher in the Rye: Innocence

Animal Farm: Power & Corruption

Beowulf: Courage

1984: The Individual in Society

Gone With The Wind: War