What Is Theme in a Story? Definition, Examples and How to Find Yours

What is theme in a story? It is the idea the story proves about its subject: not the subject itself, such as love or ambition, but what the events say about it, which you can write as one sentence. "Love" is a topic. "Great love defies even death" is a theme. That second line is Lajos Egri's, from The Art of Dramatic Writing (1946), where it is his summary of Romeo and Juliet.

A reader finds the theme in what happens, above all in the ending, not in a speech. This page sets out what theme is and what it is not, with the definitions in their authors' own words, then shows how a novelist finds the theme of a draft and makes the scenes carry it. Every quote below was checked in the original book or letter.

What Is the Definition of Theme?

In everyday English, a theme is just a subject. Merriam-Webster's first sense is "a subject or topic of discourse or of artistic representation." Writers and critics use the word more narrowly. M. H. Abrams, in A Glossary of Literary Terms, says the term "is more usefully applied to a general concept or doctrine, whether implicit or asserted, which an imaginative work is designed to incorporate and make persuasive".

Robert McKee, in Story (1997), makes the same cut in fewer words. "Theme has become a rather vague term in the writer's vocabulary," he writes. "Poverty," "war" and "love" "are not themes; they relate to setting or genre. A true theme is not a word but a sentence". He calls that sentence the Controlling Idea: "one clear, coherent sentence that expresses a story's irreducible meaning."

So a theme has three properties:

• It is a claim, not a noun. It says something about its subject that could be argued with.
• It is shown, not told. The events prove it. Abrams's "whether implicit or asserted" allows a character to say it, but the story still has to earn it.
• It is proved by the ending. McKee places the meaning in "the last act's climax", which is the event the whole story was building towards.

What Is the Difference Between Theme, Topic, Moral and Premise?

These four words get used as if they meant the same thing. They do not.

Theme vs moral. Merriam-Webster defines a moral as "the moral significance or practical lesson (as of a story)". A moral tells the reader what to do. A theme only says how things turn out, and it can be bleak. Macbeth has a theme, but nobody reads it as advice.

Theme vs premise. This is where most confusion starts, because the two best-known books on the subject use "premise" in opposite ways. Egri lists the words other writers had used for his idea, "theme, thesis, root idea, central idea, goal, aim, driving force, subject, purpose, plan, plot, basic emotion", and says: "For our own use we choose the word 'premise'". His premise is a theme. McKee uses the word for the starting question instead: "A Premise, however, unlike a Controlling Idea, is rarely a closed statement. More likely, it's an open-ended question". McKee's Controlling Idea is what Egri calls a premise. Read either book with that in mind.

Theme vs motif. A motif is something concrete that recurs: an image, an object, a phrase. Abrams notes that "theme" is sometimes used interchangeably with "motif", which is exactly the usage he argues against. A motif can point to a theme. It is not one. How a motif is planted and changed across a novel is covered in what a motif is and how to use one.

What Are Some Examples of Themes in Stories?

Egri gives a premise for four of Shakespeare's tragedies, and each one is a topic turned into a sentence.

Egri builds the Othello line in front of the reader. "Jealousy" alone tells you nothing. "Jealousy destroys" gives an action. "Jealousy destroys itself" gives a goal. The full sentence adds the ending. He also breaks a premise into parts: in "Frugality leads to waste", "The first part of this premise suggests character", "leads to" suggests conflict, and "waste" suggests the end of the play. "A good premise is a thumbnail synopsis of your play."

McKee's version has two parts: "The Controlling Idea has two components: Value plus Cause." For Dirty Harry he gives "Justice triumphs because the protagonist is more violent than the criminals". The value is justice, positive at the end, and the cause is why.

Common topics in novels include love, loss, power, belonging, freedom, identity and justice. Each needs a verb and an outcome before it is a theme.

How Do You Write a Thematic Statement?

A thematic statement is the theme written as one sentence. Build it in three moves:

1. Name the topic. One word: trust, home, grief.
2. Add what happens to it. A verb that the ending proves: leads to, destroys, survives, costs.
3. Add the cause. McKee's "because" or Egri's "leads to": why it turns out that way in this story.

Test it against your ending. If the climax went the other way, would the sentence be false? If the sentence would still be true whatever happens, it is a topic in disguise, and it will not hold the scenes together.

How Do You Find the Theme of Your Novel?

Most novelists find it in the draft, not before it. Stephen King, in On Writing (2000), warns that "starting with the questions and thematic concerns is a recipe for bad fiction. Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story." He says every book worth reading "is about something", and "Your job during or just after the first draft is to decide what something or somethings yours is about."

Five places to look in a finished draft:

1. The climax. What does the main character do at the end, and what does it cost them? The theme is what that choice proves.
2. The change. Compare the character in the first chapter with the last. The shape of that change, covered in character arc types, points straight at the theme.
3. The argument against. McKee calls the opposing view the Counter-Idea. Find the character or the force that argues the other side. A theme with no opposition has nothing to prove.
4. The lines someone else says. Blake Snyder, in Save the Cat! (2005), puts it in the first five minutes: "someone (usually not the main character) will pose a question or make a statement (usually to the main character) that is the theme of the movie." It is the Theme Stated beat in the Save the Cat beat sheet.
5. What keeps coming back. Repeated images, objects and situations are motifs, and they gather round whatever the book cares about.

Then revise towards it. King again: your job in the second draft, "one of them, anyway", "is to make that something even more clear." Cut the scenes that argue nothing, and sharpen the ones that do. A subplot can echo the theme or contradict it, and how to write a subplot covers both uses.

Should a Story Answer Its Theme?

No. It should pose its question well. Anton Chekhov wrote to his publisher A. S. Suvorin on 27 October 1888, in Constance Garnett's translation: "You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist." He points to Anna Karenina and Eugene Onegin: "not a single problem is solved, but they satisfy you completely because all the problems are correctly stated in them."

Flannery O'Connor, in Mystery and Manners (1969), goes further. "People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like the string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with," she writes. "They think that if you can pick out the theme, the way you pick the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open and feed the chickens. But this is not the way meaning works in fiction. When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one."

The two views fit together. A writer needs the sentence in order to choose scenes. The reader should never need it, because the scenes already say it.

A Worked Example

Ruth inherits her late father's apple orchard, in a valley she left at eighteen and swore she would never come back to.

• Topic: home.
• The draft's ending: she tears up a sale contract and replants the last row herself.
• Thematic statement: we belong where we choose to tend.
• Counter-Idea: home is just where you happen to be from, and you can sell it.

The scenes, and what each one does for the theme:

1. The will. She inherits the orchard and plans to sell it by spring. (The Counter-Idea, in her.)
2. The graft. Old Tom, the neighbour, shows her a graft: "A cut branch takes, if you bind it to the root." (Theme Stated, by someone other than the hero.)
3. The buyer. A developer offers cash, and she says yes. (The Counter-Idea winning.)
4. The frost. On the night of a hard frost she stays up lighting fires between the trees. (Theme, acted rather than said.)
5. The last row. She tears up the contract and replants the row the frost killed. (The climax proves it.)

Nobody in the book says "we belong where we choose to tend". The graft says it as an image, and the frost and the last row say it as action. If the climax had her sign the contract with relief, the same scenes would prove the Counter-Idea instead, and that would be a different book.

How Do You Track Theme in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app. Its Outliner is a board of cards, one for every document in the book, each with a synopsis, and labels let you mark which scenes carry the theme.

1. Lay out the scenes. Open the Outliner on the Draft and add a card for each scene with Add › Scene, in order. Write what happens in each synopsis.
2. Write the thematic statement where it gets proved. Open the climax scene, open the Inspector's Notes tab, and write the sentence there.
3. Make two labels. Open a scene, and in the Inspector's Properties click the pencil beside Status (its tooltip reads Edit labels & statuses). In the Metadata Manager that opens, switch to the Labels tab and add "Theme" and "Counter-idea", each in its own colour.
4. Label the scenes. Switch the Outliner to its list. Every scene is a row with a Label column, so set "Theme" on the scenes that show the idea and "Counter-idea" on the ones that argue against it.
5. Read the theme on its own. Click the Filters button at the left of the Outliner's header and choose "Theme" from All labels. The list shows only those scenes, in order, and they should read as an argument that ends at the climax.
6. Find the idle scenes. Clear the filter. Any scene with no label is one the theme does not touch. Cut it, merge it, or give it a job.

The same board is where you lay out the novel's structure and where you move scenes around when the theme you find in the draft is not the one you planned. For the whole process from idea to finished draft, see how to write a novel.

Common Mistakes

• Stopping at a word. "Love" or "war" is a topic. Write a sentence with a verb and an outcome.
• Writing a moral. A theme says how things turn out. It does not tell the reader how to live.
• Having a character announce it as the point. Snyder's Theme Stated line works because it is said early, by someone else, and the rest of the book tests it.
• Choosing the theme first and forcing the plot. King's warning: story first, then theme.
• No Counter-Idea. If nothing in the book argues the other side, the ending proves nothing.
• An ending that contradicts the statement. The climax decides the theme. If they disagree, change the sentence or change the climax.

What Do Theme Guides Get Wrong?

• "The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them." This is credited to Chekhov everywhere, but it is a paraphrase. His own words, in the 27 October 1888 letter to Suvorin, are about "solving a problem and stating a problem correctly". The short version does not appear in Garnett's edition of his letters. The nearest line comes a few sentences later in the same letter: "It is the business of the judge to put the right questions, but the answers must be given by the jury according to their own lights."
• "Aristotle named theme as an element of drama." He did not. Poetics gives tragedy six parts: "Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song" (Butcher's translation). His Thought is "the faculty of saying what is possible and pertinent in given circumstances": the reasoning in what characters say, not the meaning of the whole work.
• "Premise" and "theme" are always different things. In Egri they are the same thing. In McKee they are different. The word changes meaning between the two books.

Sources

Retrieved 26 October 2026.

• Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing (Simon & Schuster, 1946), chapter 1, "Premise", read through Open Library's search inside (archive.org).
• Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (ReganBooks, 1997), "Structure and Meaning", pp. 114-119 (archive.org).
• Blake Snyder, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need (Michael Wiese Productions, 2005), chapter 4, "Let's Beat It Out!", Theme Stated (archive.org).
• Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Scribner, 2000), "On Writing" (archive.org).
• Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969) (archive.org).
• Anton Chekhov, letter to A. S. Suvorin, Moscow, 27 October 1888, in Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends, tr. Constance Garnett (1920) (Project Gutenberg).
• M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1988), "Motif and Theme" (archive.org). Later editions change "incorporate" to "involve".
• Aristotle, Poetics, tr. S. H. Butcher, part VI (Project Gutenberg).
• Aesop's Fables, tr. V. S. Vernon Jones (1912), "The Hare and the Tortoise" (Project Gutenberg).
• Merriam-Webster, theme and moral.