Tips for First Drafts: Theme

Recently, I completed the first draft of the novel I’ve been working on for the past year and a half. As I am now in the midst of contemplating, revising, and editing my work, I thought this would be a good opportunity to offer a few tips to those who have reached, or will soon reach, the first-draft stage of the writing process.

I will be sharing these tips in a series of posts, each of which will focus on a different element of the manuscript. If you’re looking for more general guidance on how to apply the editing process to your first draft, check out my previous post on Editing Your First Draft.

Just to note, I will be aiming these posts toward fiction writers, but I hope the core ideas will be useful to my nonfiction friends also.

Here we go!

Element 1: Theme

Writing a book is like willingly crawling into a hot kiln and closing the door. It’s intense. It’s relentless. At times, it’s agonizing. It melts and refines—not just your written work, but you as a person. The creative process itself shapes your character, as does your interaction with the particular story you’ve chosen to tell.

Because of the natural metamorphosis that occurs while writing a book, you may find that you end up communicating a totally different message from the one you set out to impart. That’s okay! In fact, that can be a really beautiful part of the process—learning something new about the world as you focus on your characters and their experience of it.

Other times, you may look back over your book and realize that your message got lost along the way. This happened to me the first time I wrote a (good) book, back in university. I started writing with a particular theme in mind—an idea about life that I felt was deeply important and needed to be shared with the world. Once I made it to the end, however, I realized that I had gotten so caught up trying to write a clever story that I had skipped over the deeper meaning altogether.

Now, perhaps you are the sort of writer who doesn’t bother much about theme. You just want to tell an entertaining story, or an instructive story, or a scary story, or whatever. Nothing wrong with that. Still, it behooves us to remember that our readers are meaning-making machines. They are going to pull a message out of your work, whether you want them to or not. They may not do it consciously; a lot of them probably won’t. Nevertheless, readers WILL draw meaning from the story you tell them. They will sift through your characters, searching for the ones in which they can see themselves. They will draw connections between the world of your book and the world that they themselves inhabit. They will look for something they can take with them when they close your book and get on with life—something inspiring or affirming or funny or instructive. If your story has really struck a chord inside of them, they might even begin to change their behavior or their way of thinking because of it.

If you ever doubt your power as a writer, let me assure you, it’s nothing to be sniffed at. I rather think that fiction writers are the ninjas of the influencer world. We catalyze change, but it is done covertly, under the guise of entertainment. We’re not YouTubers or public speakers or politicians or activists; we’re storytellers. Our readers may not fully realize the ways they are changing as a result of their immersion in our work, but it is happening nonetheless.

It reminds me of the saying written in 1839 by playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The pen is mightier than the sword. You may not feel like you’re making much of a difference, closeted away hour after hour, tapping away on a story no one’s read yet—but I suspect your impact is significantly greater than you imagine. Words are powerful, life-changing things; we must learn to wield them wisely.

To sum up, the responsible writer should attend to the following:

a) be aware that their work has a message, whether they intend it to or not;

and

b) probably figure out what that message is.

Make sure that whatever theme you are communicating to the reader is something you genuinely believe and can stand behind. If it’s not, you’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and make some changes so that you and your readers can be on the same page—literally.

Remember, theme can be translated through plot, characters, dialogue, and even setting. Track its presence through your story and make sure your book is ultimately saying what you want it to say.

Stay tuned! More tips on revising first drafts to come!