Theme: The Unifying Throughline of Your Story
by Brooke Warner
Last month, I wrote about Aboutness. If you’re curious about what that means, here’s a short video of mine on the topic. This week I want to talk about a complementary topic: Theme. Think of it this way: If aboutness is the map, then theme is the meaning of the journey.
Aboutness = what your memoir is literally about
Theme = the throughline that creates a unifying message of meaning
These two things go together, of course—because there’s what your book is about, and then there’s what it’s really about. Maggie Smith said about You Could Make This Place Beautiful: “The memoir wasn’t just about loss; it was about what beauty I could find on the other side of it.” Yes, her book is about loss; it’s just that making “this place” (her life) beautiful again after loss is the much more compelling throughline of the book.
Theme is often elusive when you first sit down to write. This is because themes can feel ethereal. Themes include things like grief and loss; self-discovery; identity and belonging; addiction and recovery; silence; love and devotion; survival and resilience. These are heady topics, and lots of newer memoirists haven’t yet given themselves permission to shape their scenes to fit the book’s themes. Eventually, though, you will because you must.
Once you know your themes, you unlock the doorway to reflection. In memoir, reflection is accessed through theme. Theme gives you parameters for what should matter. You have to narrow it down because a memoir that’s about everything is no good. That’s not “slice of life,” which is what defines memoir. And trying to find meaning everywhere and anywhere will dilute your message.
Memoir specifically asks its writer to focus. If you want to make meaning, find your few key themes and mine them. When I teach my long courses, I talk about theme in the following ways:
1. Theme is your North Star
Explorers used the North Star as a navigating tool—a way to orient them to where they were and where they were going. Theme serves this same purpose for your memoir. If you know your North Star, you won’t get lost in what doesn’t matter. You’ll have an organizing principle to bring you back to what matters, and to why your readers chose to read your book in the first place.
2. Theme is seeing your story through theme-colored glasses
Consider what it feels like when you put on a pair of glasses with yellow lenses. The whole world is a shade of yellow, but that doesn’t mean you can’t see everything that’s happening. The same is true with your memoir. There is plenty of story that can and will unfold, but keeping in mind that the entire thing is infused with your theme will help you make clarifying decisions about which stories should be included and which shouldn’t, or perhaps even tint particular stories in a way that accentuates your themes.
3. Theme is the air the reader breathes
This simply means that theme is always present. The reader may not feel it or be acutely aware of it, but you should be. It’s the atmosphere of your book—and it should be present in every scene. Ask yourself the question: In what way does my theme inform this scene? If the answer is, it doesn’t, then it’s time to rework the scene or consider whether it might need to be cut.
Do you know what your themes are? Are you using your themes to make decisions when it comes to scenes and reflections? If not, that’s okay—but you’re missing an opportunity at refinement. That North Star is available to you, but it requires that you first identify it.