Forget English class. Theme is simple: Your theme is what your story is really about. In this Career Authors Round-Up, you’ll discover what these terrific writers past and present have to say about theme.
“In my first class at the University of Kentucky, my American Literature professor came in, and the first sentence out of his mouth was “The central theme of American Literature is an attempt to reconcile what we’ve done to the New World.” wrote that down in my notebook, and thought, “What is he talking about?” But that’s what I think about now. The New World and what we’ve done to it.”
—Sam Abell
“Once an interesting idea or theme occurs to me then I would want to write a poem about it. The rest, frankly, is not difficult.”
—Ama Ata Aidoo
“You can write nothing of value unless you give yourself wholly to the theme.”
—Charlotte Brontë
“The themes in my books, like in life, are about grace and redemption and you never know when they’re going to show up and what form they’re going to be in. Stories emerge from keeping your heart open to the people that cross in front of you or the dogs or the mice, and their ability to open you up and enrich your life.”
—Kate DiCamillo
“I think the great unspoken theme in noir fiction is male self-pity. It pervades noir movies.”
—James Ellroy
“I tend to take [ to Bridget Jones’s Diary] something that nearly happened, or might have happened, and then exaggerate it to make it funny and to make it tie into the themes.”
—Helen Fielding
“A memoir is a book about some particular thread or theme or moment in a person’s life, whereas an autobiography is the entire life.”
—Richard Hell
“Every novel starts with a theme, and I am constantly looking for big ideas.”
—Peter James
“But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it. A novel’s whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme.”
—Diane Johnson
“Look, then, into thine heart, and write! Yes, into Life’s deep stream! All forms of sorrow and delight, All solemn Voices of the Night, That can soothe thee, or affright, – Be these henceforth thy theme.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“They say great themes make great novels. but what these young writers don’t understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.”
—John O’Hara
“The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.”
—George Orwell
“Mickalene [Thomas] is an artist that I have admired for a long time. So much of her work inspires me – I spend time looking at her work when I’m writing. I feel like we’re working toward the same themes, and I see our work in conversation, whether we know it or not.”
—Morgan Parker
“And yet, we know how fatal the pursuit of liveliness may be: it may result in … tiresome acrobatics. … Flashy effects distract the mind. They destroy their persuasiveness; you would not believe a man was very intent on ploughing a furrow if he carried a hoop with him and jumped through it at every other step. … When virtuosity gets the upper hand of your theme, or is better than your idea, it is time to quit.”
—Katherine Anne Porter
“It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.”
—Thomas Pynchon
“What usually happens is that when I’m nearing the end of one novel a vague idea about what I want to do next begins to present itself to me in terms of theme. And I would say over about the next six to eight months, usually as I’m out power walking in the morning, or when I’m cooking at night, or when I’m driving in the car, the people who might embody those themes take on a sharper and sharper focus. And there comes this sort of critical mass moment when they actually start to do things in my head.”
—Anna Quindlen
“I think it’s difficult to be honest about certain aspects of my work without acknowledging that I have experienced or felt or questioned certain of the themes in the books.”
—J. K. Rowling
“A strong theme is always running through a well-told story.”
—Andrew Stanton
“I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.”
—William Styron
“The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands.”
—Henry David Thoreau
“If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”
—Richard Yates
“What can I but enumerate old themes?”
—William Butler Yeats
This post originally appeared on Career Authors