How to Write Unique Themes

Here’s a mind-bender for you: the best story themes are both universal and unique. But how does that even work? How can you learn to how write unique themes that say something fresh and new—and yet are resonant to every person on the planet?

Good question.

This is something I’ve been mulling lately after a comment from Chris Babu on my post “How to Intertwine Plot, Character, and Theme in Every Scene.” He pointed out:

The last several books (bestsellers) I’ve read have had themes that were so obvious and timeworn. Four hundred pages of story just to make a point everyone agrees with. This drives me nuts…. Give me something timely, teach me something, make me look at something a new way, make me think/decide, say something controversial, but for crying out loud don’t let the moral of your story be something everyone already knows.

Although any thematic presentation is likely to be superior to a story with no theme, it’s true that phoned-in themes drastically weaken otherwise original stories.

We’ve all read a bazillion romances that didn’t have much to say beyond love is important or action stories that triumphantly recited good always wins. We’ve all read them, watched them, and for the most part, promptly forgotten them. The writing might otherwise have been pretty good—enjoyable characters, snappy dialogue, sharp plot. But because the themes were lavished with about as much thought as the quips in a fortune cookie, the stories never made us think. They found convenient, well-worn niches inside our memories, curled up, and went to sleep—never to be heard from again.

I don’t know about you, but that’s not where I want my stories to end up in my readers’ brains. And yet if you want to talk about a universal theme, let’s talk about this one: There’s nothing new under the sun.

How are you supposed to figure out how to write unique themes that steer away from clichés, stimulate readers’ minds, and enhance your plot and characters?

Can You Write Unique Themes?

Think of a unique theme. Yep. Right now. Just sit back for a sec and see how long it takes you to think of a totally original theme. I’ll do it too. Here’s ten hours of the Jeopardy theme song to help us out.

Well, I got zilch. How about you?

Sure, I came up with what maybe seemed like a few unique angles. But underlying the specifics of any idea, there always seems to be some peskily simplistic and universal premise. Yep, there’s love, justice, mercy, pain, empowerment, death, hope, despair, deceit, truth, fear, and courage.  Guess the Greeks covered it all back in 700 BC. The rest of us might as well pack it up and pack it in. No unique themes left for us to play with.

Fortunately, however, this is where the balance between unique themes and universal themes comes into play.

Life itself is universal. That’s inescapable. The narrative of life is one we all share.

And the result is the emergence of deeply archetypal patterns. The very structure of story and character arc are founded in the common personal experiences we all share. The reason these basic structural premises work is because we, as humans, resonate with them. If we changed them up too drastically, readers would fail to recognize them, fail to empathize them with, and, frankly, fail to care about them.

Archetypes go even deeper than story structure and character arcs. Life and death, parents and children, joy and suffering, mercy and cruelty, hope and despair—these and so many more are the fundamental premises of life itself. To write a story so unique that it avoided all these ideas is not only impossible, but ultimately pointless.

Stories are about finding commonality. As readers and viewers we seek commonality with the characters on the page and the screen and, through them, with their writers. Deep down, what we’re really looking for in a story experience is not the unique, but in fact the familiar.

In contrast to everything the title of my post seems to be saying, I’m going to posit that themes never get old. I will never get tired of the victorious feeling I get from a story that tells me love conquers all or good is stronger than evil.

It’s not themes we get tired of. Rather, it’s the same themes being told in the same way by the same story. In short, it isn’t archetypal themes, plots, and characters that get old, but rather the ways in which they are combined.

3 Thoughts on How to Write Unique Themes

The difference between a unique theme and a hackneyed theme actually has much less to do with the theme itself than it does with the execution. Creating freshness and vibrancy doesn’t mean you have to posit something radical. It does mean whatever you posit must be radically and honestly personal to you. Tell me good triumphs over evil (again), and I may close the book yawning. Tell me good triumphs over evil as if your life depends on it—and I’ll remember you.

Here are four tips for refining your thematic ideas to find their most passionately and personally unique cores.

1. Look for Your Character’s Theme

Theme is always rooted in character. Your characters, specifically your protagonist, will tell you what your theme is about. Even if you try to tack on another theme, what your story is really about is whatever is at the heart of your character’s internal struggle.

This means you can’t just dream up some wild and unexpected thematic premise and squirt it onto your story like Dijon mustard onto a casserole. You have to start with what you’ve already got. Look at your character—who she is and what she wants—and look at what she’s doing in the plot.

Now look harder.

Let’s say you’re me and you’re writing a historical adventure story called Wayfarer (which, it so happens, I am). It’s a coming-of-age story about a kid who gets superpowers and runs around the city figuring out what it means to be the good guy and save the day.

On its surface, that’s a story about good versus evil, with maybe growing up thrown in as a side dish. Or maybe, like Spidey, he’s learning that with great power comes responsibility. All of those ideas are inherent within the story’s premise. But there’s nothing unique there. More to the point: there’s nothing personal there.

So we dig deeper. We look at what specific struggles this character is facing.

What does he want?
Why does he want it?
What is he willing to selflessly sacrifice to get it?
What is he willing to selfishly sacrifice?
What will he gain and what he will lose by the story’s end?
How will he have changed?

When asking yourself these questions about your character, the right answers probably won’t be immediately evident. You’ll have to think about them, roll them around in your brain. You’ll have to recognize and reject most of the obvious answers. In the process, you may find your conception of the character and plot evolving into something deeper right alongside your theme.

2. Look for Your Theme

Your characters will give you specific manifestations of the themes that are most pertinent to your plot. But your characters are really just extensions of you. To tap into the kind of passionate honesty that creates earnestly unique themes, you have to first ask yourself some probing questions.

1. What’s a Specific Question You’re Asking About Life Right Now?

Boring themes are answers. Love conquers all. Yawn. But reframe it as a question: Does love really conquer all? Once you find a question to which you honestly don’t know the answer, you know you’ve found an interesting thematic possibility.

Consider the issues that are most on your heart right now. What do you find yourself constantly chewing on? Maybe it’s a political or social question, or maybe it’s a deeply personal question about yourself or your relationships. Maybe it’s a question about an illness or work struggle you’re trying to figure out.

Whatever the case, I guarantee there’s grist for the mill right there. In writing about it honestly, you may just find some of your own answers along the way.

2. What’s a General Question You Feel You’re Always Asking About Life?

Don’t stop at the “little” life questions right there in front of your face. Look up and look out. What are the big questions that it seems like you’re always asking in one way or another?

I realized just this week that one of the themes that crops up again and again in my stories—and perhaps most blatantly in Wayfarer—is that of identity. My characters are always asking who they are and what their purpose is. Although I don’t deliberately insert this premise into my stories, it’s always there because it’s central to many of the questions I slowly ponder in the back of my own mind all the time.

3. What’s a Virtue You Feel Is Undervalued?

If you’re writing a story with a Positive Change Arc and a happy ending, then your theme will probably focus on affirming a virtue—love, courage, justice, mercy, kindness, self-sacrifice. If this so, don’t just pick the obvious one—love for romance and courage for action. Instead, choose one that is important to you and that you feel is either undervalued in the world or underrepresented in fiction.

There’s a line I often think about in Captain America: Civil War.

Cap sincerely tells a frustrated Tony Stark, “I don’t mean to make things difficult.”

To which, Tony gripes ironically, “I know, because you’re a very polite person.”

It made me realize two reasons why Cap is one of my favorite characters in recent stories.

1. His politeness is actually very unique. Few modern characters—much less action protagonists—are noted for their politeness. It fills a gap that most of us probably didn’t even realize was there.

2. As a “very polite” person myself, I resonate with him. Since it’s a “virtue” I appreciate, I both enjoy sharing the commonality with a character onscreen and seeing a character admirably balance the difficult aspects (being polite without turning into a pushover with no boundaries).

Make a list of the top five virtues or good qualities you value in others and try to cultivate in yourself. How can you thematically explore the difficulties, downfalls, and rewards of these traits in an honest way?

4. What’s a Vice That Scares You?

Where there’s a virtue, there’s a vice. Maybe you’re writing a dark story with a Negative Change Arc. Or maybe you just want to explore the downfall of your antagonist. Either way, consider the flipside of your favorite virtues. What are the vices you see that really get under your skin? Murder, rape, child abuse, substance abuse—those are all big ones. But look at the littler ones too—white lies, verbal insensitivity, maybe even workaholicism.

Look specifically for something that gives you a visceral reaction. If it scares you deep in the pit of your stomach, you know you have to write about it. Or, if it’s a lesser vice, maybe it’s just something that irks you, that makes you hot under the collar, that makes you want to lash back with some equally unattractive vice of your own.

We all deplore the actions human take that hurt one another—from war right on down to petty shoplifting. But don’t mount a moral high horse just because it’s obvious. Choose a vice that has personal significance for you—and use your writing to find out why.

3. Ground Familiar Themes in Fresh Milieus

Consider some of the stories you’ve read lately that just don’t have that nice clean fresh smell. Chances are good this is not because you’ve already seen this particular character, plot, or theme too many times before—but rather because you’ve seen all of them together too many times before.

Original stories are rarely stories that blare their uniqueness in every aspect. Instead, they’re stories that take a fresh look at otherwise familiar elements.

Star Wars was famously a new riff on westerns.

The Book Thief is a predictable Holocaust story that became beloved because of its earnestness and its unexpected narrator.

The Princess Bride is an utterly familiar fairy tale told in a completely unfamiliar way.

Arguably, none of the themes in these stories is unique. But the stories themselves feel fresh because the messages and milieus used to convey the themes are unexpected.

Archetypal characters, plots, and themes will never grow old. As long as humans are living, loving, fighting, wondering, suffering, laughing, and dying—the fundamental things apply.

But if you find yourself writing a certain type of story that always portrays a certain type of theme, stop and question yourself.

Would this theme have something better to say in a different story, a different genre, a different plot?

Or, conversely, would a different theme make everything else about this story absolutely pop?

Finding the right theme for the right story is the secret to writing stories that are universal and yet feel utterly unique and original. Don’t give up until find one!

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What do you think is the hardest part of figuring out how to write unique themes? Tell me in the comments!

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