“How do you handle theme in your writing?”

Someone once said that it’s important for writers to know their answer to that question, so I’m taking that as an opportunity to think over my own.

Often, I’ll recognise that I have writing habits without actually knowing why I do things the way I do. I know that my work does handle theme—I just can’t imagine why I would write if I weren’t writing around a theme. To me, it is simply inherent in the reason I do creative writing.

I feel like, maybe, the problem is framing “theme” as a specific device similar to metaphor or repetition. In my opinion, theme is not a technique in a toolbox so much as a way of seeing writing, you know? It’s when you make a story say something while hiding your directorial hand.

Let me contrast this with theme in academic writing. When writing a non-fiction essay or a research article, one is usually taking the reader on a journey towards a conclusion, showing how seemingly disparate subjects are related and relevant to the subject, illustrating the pattern of connections from A to B to C.

And importantly, you telegraph that pattern in very clear terms—in the abstract, then in the introduction, and again in the conclusion. You tell people what the essay is about upfront.

Stories are usually not like that. Many readers hate being told the story’s argument or moral, or sensing they’re meant to have one specific interpretation and takeaway. If the story reads like a treatise on morality or the human condition, then it is not usually very fun to read. At that point, that’s less a story than a religious parable.

Even then, I often find myself referring to a story’s themes as its “thesis” or its core “argument” so it’s not that stories don’t make a point: they do.

It’s that “the point” is threaded in in a way that isn’t truly brought to a head until the story is complete. Or at least, that’s the way I approach it. And “the point” doesn’t necessarily have to be a definitive statement. It can simply be a way of seeing or an ethical question. It can be revealing a multitude of perspectives on one subject or the same event. It can be about the multifarious impacts of one specific entity.

None of these entail consciously selecting a theme, an object of discussion. To me, theme is simply the reason you are telling the story. That’s it. The theme can be something you conventionally associate with the concept of “theme” like, I don’t know, “the randomness of misfortune in an uncaring universe,” or it can be something less grandiose like, “students who have nothing better to do getting up to antics.”

Except, that second one can imply something beyond too. It could evoke nostalgia for the simple travails of youth. It could be about school culture. It could be about the poignancy of moments that seemed unimportant at the time. It could be a document of life in a particular decade.

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I’ve been writing a multiverse novel, and those kinds of stories can often veer into chaos. One of the characters is a marine biology undergrad hailing from a modern world who migrated to the US to live his life on his own terms. Another is a young duchess in a magical Queendom who has been positioned by her mother to usurp the throne.

These are obviously different kinds of characters hailing from different genres of fiction (which each universe signifies). But in the fabric of the story, these things aren’t incongruous at all. I may not have realised it when I first wrote this, but Hong Yi and Orobelle are both contending with very similar things: that their parents exerted immense control over their lives from birth, and that they sit on different sides of intercultural power dynamics—Hong Yi navigating his split life as someone who belongs in two countries, Orobelle as the inheritor of a colonial empire who is served in her own palace by people who forcibly migrated at her behest.

And in each one, familial dynamics intersect with geopolitical ones: for each character, their world is their relationships, and the pressures of things like social class, migration and colonialism exert force on the way their parents raised them. It’s a story that approaches, from a few different angles, how human lives are often moulded by societal and cultural trauma that cannot ever conclusively be healed. And these are all topics I care a lot about!

So I wouldn’t say I choose to write with a theme: the theme is just the reason the story matters. It is simply the reason I’m telling the story. It comes from having a sort of voice on a subject and a point I’m trying to make through all its different elements. And because, as a writer, I’m trying not to beat people over the head with the messaging, it usually bleeds through in the disparate elements of the design, which I then organise into a pattern.