What is Theme?
When it comes to novels, the theme is the overriding point of the story. Stories are, at their core, about life, and each novel makes a statement. That statement is your theme. Sometimes this theme is also the lesson of the story, especially if you're writing children's fiction. But whatever genre you're writing, your story does have a message.
What might the message be? Well, look at your story and see if there's an overriding message. My second novel (Dragon's Tempest) had a lot of things in it. Dragons. A prince and his friends. Cute girl. A creepy nasty not-human guy. And a lot of stuff happens. Battles are fought. People fall in love. A few people die. But none of these things are the theme. Instead, the theme is that sons need to individuate themselves. They need to find out who they are not just as their parents' son, but as grown men. This is the theme.
Never confuse theme with the conflicts in your novel. Conflicts are the obstacles your protagonist encounters. In the case of Dragon's Tempest, there are a lot of conflicts. The principle one is the good guys battling the bad guys. This is in a lot of novels (and virtually all fantasy novels). But Dragon's Tempest isn't really about good vs. evil. That's the entertainment portion of the novel (though "good triumphs over evil" can be a theme). The theme, the thing we learn about human nature from the novel, is about the father-son relationship. Theme and conflict are not the same thing.
Should You Write a Novel With a Theme in Mind?
The answer to this question is maybe. It depends on your point. I haven't written any of my fantasy novels with a theme in mind. And if I had, I probably wouldn't have ended up with a fantasy novel at all. Think about it. If you were going to write a novel with a theme about the nature of the father-son relationship, would you write a fantasy? Probably not.
And yet the entire story of Dragon's Tempest flows from the difficulties between father and son. The rest of the story simply wouldn't have happened without that catalyst. So the overriding theme of the novel is important, but I had no idea what the theme was while I was writing the thing. I simply wrote the story that was crying out to be told.
If, on the other hand, you have a theme in mind, you might want to write from your theme. I'm doing this with a new series of books I'm working. It's a trilogy with one overwhelming theme: the ability to recover and learn from mistakes. That is the theme. That was the theme before I had a clear idea of who the main characters were. I fully intend to convey a certain message and every work of the three books is being crafted with that message in mind.
So you can choose whether or not you'll write with a theme in mind or whether you'll just write the story. A theme will eventually emerge and permeate the whole novel. But it's important to remember that different people will see different things in your novel. One person may say your theme is the enduring quality of the human spirit while another is convinced the theme must be the inevitability of change. A book can have more than one theme, and it can have different themes for different people. This is one of the best qualities of literature.
