Story Mechanics – Theme

The Most Misunderstood Word in the Room

Ask a roomful of writers what theme means and you will get a roomful of different answers. Some will say it is the subject matter: a film about war, a film about love, a film about redemption. Some will say it is the moral of the story, the lesson the audience is supposed to take home. Some will wave the question away entirely, insisting that worrying about theme is the enemy of instinct and that good writers just write.

All of these positions contain something true. None of them is quite right.

Theme is not subject matter. Subject matter is what the story is about on the surface. A film about war can argue that war is ennobling, or that it is futile, or that it turns ordinary people into monsters, or that it reveals who people really are when everything else has been stripped away. The subject is the same. The themes are entirely different. The theme is the argument the story is making about its subject.

And it is an argument. This is the word that matters most. Not a topic, not a mood, not a question held open for the audience to answer as they see fit. A genuine argument: a position the story is advancing, testing, and ultimately either proving or complicating through the actions of its characters. Theme, properly understood, is the story's point of view on the world.

Subject vs Argument

The distinction between subject and argument is worth sitting with, because collapsing them is one of the most common reasons a script ends up feeling directionless.

Take a script about grief. Grief is the subject. But what is the story arguing about grief? That it must be expressed to be survived? That it can be a form of selfishness? That two people experiencing the same loss can be destroyed by it in entirely different ways? Each of those is a theme, and each would produce a fundamentally different story, even if the plot events were identical.

A script about loyalty might argue that loyalty without judgment is just another word for cowardice. A script about ambition might argue that the cost of getting what you want is always higher than you imagined when you wanted it. These are not comfortable positions. They are not designed to reassure the audience. They are designed to challenge, unsettle, and illuminate. That is what theme is for.

The clearest way to articulate your theme is as a complete sentence: a statement that takes a position. Not 'war' but 'war turns the people who survive it into strangers to themselves.' Not 'family' but 'the family you choose can save you in ways the family you were born into cannot.' The sentence form forces specificity. And specificity is where theme becomes useful as a working tool rather than an abstract aspiration.

The clearest way to articulate your theme is as a complete sentence: a statement that takes a position. The sentence form forces specificity, and specificity is where theme becomes useful.

Theme as Argument, Not Answer

Here is where many writers get into trouble: they confuse having a theme with delivering a verdict. They decide what their story is arguing, and then they build the plot as a mechanism for proving that argument beyond doubt. Every character who challenges the theme gets punished. Every character who embodies it gets rewarded. The story becomes a demonstration rather than an exploration, and the audience feels it immediately, as a kind of pressure, a sense that the story is telling them what to think rather than giving them something to think about.

The best thematic writing holds its argument up to the light and lets it be tested. It grants genuine weight to the counter-argument. It allows characters who are wrong about the theme's central question to be sympathetic, coherent, even compelling. It earns its conclusion by making the audience feel that other conclusions were genuinely possible.

John Truby makes this point well in The Anatomy of Story when he talks about the moral argument. The story, he suggests, should dramatise a debate rather than a lecture. The protagonist embodies one position. Other characters embody alternatives. The plot is structured so that these positions are tested against each other in increasingly high-stakes situations. What the story argues is revealed not by what the characters say but by what the story does: by what it rewards, what it costs, and what it allows to survive.

This is why the ending carries so much thematic weight. The ending is where the story's argument lands. It is the last and most emphatic statement the film makes about its subject. An ending that is honest about the complexity of the theme will feel true. An ending that simply confirms what the story decided at the outset, without having genuinely tested it, will feel like a verdict that was never really in doubt.

Where Theme Lives in the Script

One of the most practical questions a writer can ask is: where, exactly, does theme live in a script? The answer is: everywhere, but rarely on the surface.

Theme lives in the choices characters make and what those choices cost them. It lives in the structure of the plot: in what the story decides to make difficult, what it makes impossible, and what it allows. It lives in the ending, as we have said. But it also lives in the details: the images that recur, the lines of dialogue that echo, the situations that rhyme across the script in ways the audience feels before they consciously register.

What theme does not live in is the expository speech. The moment a character stands up and explains what the story is about, the theme dies. This is sometimes called the 'As you know, Bob' problem in its plot form, but it has a thematic equivalent: the speech in which a character articulates, clearly and at length, the lesson the story is trying to teach. These speeches almost always feel wrong because they are wrong. They are the writer losing faith in the story's ability to do its own work.

Trust is the operative word. Trust that if you have built the argument into the structure, into the choices, into the consequences, the audience will feel it. They do not need to be told. In fact, being told is the one thing most likely to make them resistant. People do not like being lectured, even by stories they are enjoying. The theme should arrive as a realisation the audience reaches themselves, not a conclusion the script hands them.

The theme should arrive as a realisation the audience reaches themselves, not a conclusion the script hands them.

The Relationship Between Theme and Character

Theme and character are more tightly bound than they might first appear. In most well-constructed scripts, the protagonist's central journey is the theme made flesh. The thing they need to learn, the wound they need to address, the mistaken belief they carry into the story: these are almost always expressions of the thematic argument in personal terms.

If your theme is that self-sufficiency taken too far becomes a form of damage, your protagonist will likely be someone who has built their life around not needing anyone, and the plot will systematically dismantle that position. The argument is not made in abstract. It is made through one specific person, in one specific situation, with consequences that are entirely their own.

This is why Chinatown works so completely as a thematic film. The argument it is making, roughly that power corrupts absolutely and that the systems we build to deliver justice will always be turned against the powerless, is not delivered as a speech. It is delivered through Jake Gittes: through his arrogance, his good intentions, his catastrophic intervention, and the ending that follows. The theme and the character are inseparable. You cannot remove one without destroying the other.

The supporting characters, as we touched on in the Character essay, function thematically too. Each one tends to embody a different position in the story's central argument. Together they constitute a kind of debate, with the protagonist at the centre and the plot as the adjudicator. When you understand your theme clearly, casting the supporting characters becomes much easier: you are looking for people who can put genuine pressure on the argument, not just people who can populate the story.

Finding Your Theme

Here is the uncomfortable truth about theme: you often do not know what your script is really about until you have written a draft of it. The theme is frequently something that emerges from the writing rather than something that is planned in advance. This is not a failure of process. It is how the subconscious works. You are drawn to a story for reasons you may not be able to articulate, and those reasons are often the theme trying to find its way to the surface.

The practical implication is that the first draft is, among other things, a process of discovering what you are actually arguing. When you reach the end of a first draft and read it back, one of the most important questions to ask is: what is this story insisting upon? Not what did I intend it to say, but what is it actually saying, through its structure, its choices, its ending?

Sometimes those two things will align neatly. More often there will be a gap, and the gap is where the rewriting begins. The revision process is, in large part, the process of clarifying and deepening the theme: removing the scenes that argue against it carelessly, strengthening the scenes that test it honestly, and making sure the ending earns the argument the story has been building.

Blake Snyder, in Save the Cat, suggests that the theme is stated early in the script, often in the first few pages, by a secondary character who says something to the protagonist that the protagonist does not yet understand. It is a useful structural device, and worth being aware of, but it is a technique rather than a rule. What matters is not where the theme is stated but whether it is genuinely present throughout: in the bones of the story, in the choices of the characters, in the weight of the ending.

Theme and Meaning Are Not the Same Thing

A final distinction worth making: theme and meaning are related but not identical. Theme is the argument the story is making. Meaning is what the audience takes from it, and meaning is, to a significant degree, beyond the writer's control.

Two people can watch the same film and come away with entirely different senses of what it meant. This is not a flaw in the film. It is a sign that the film is doing its job: presenting something complex enough and honest enough that it can sustain multiple readings. The theme may be clear, the argument legible, but the meaning resonates differently depending on who the audience member is, what they have lived, and what the story touches in them.

This is the paradox at the heart of thematic writing. You must know, as precisely as possible, what argument you are making. And you must also remain humble enough to understand that the argument is not the last word. The audience completes the story. The meaning they make is theirs, not yours, and the best thematic writing leaves enough room for that to happen.

Write with intention. Hold your argument clearly. Trust your structure to carry it. And then let it go. What the story means, in the end, is something you and your audience will discover together.

Starting From Here

If you are beginning a new project, try writing your theme as a single declarative sentence before you outline a scene. Not a question, not a topic, not a mood: a position. 'The need to be right destroys the people who love us.' 'Survival and integrity cannot always occupy the same space.' 'What we refuse to grieve will eventually grieve for us.' The sentence does not have to be permanent. It will almost certainly change as you write. But having it gives you something to write toward, and something to test yourself against when the story starts to drift.

If you are revising an existing draft, read it back with one question in mind: what is this script arguing? Not what you intended it to argue. What it is actually arguing, through its structure, its reversals, its ending. The answer will tell you what the rewrite needs to do.

Theme is not an ornament added to a finished story. It is the reason the story exists. Find it, trust it, and let it do its work quietly, from the inside out. The audience will feel it even if they never name it. That is exactly how it should be.