Themes in novel writing

Genre

Writing under a particular genre ~ romance, crime, mystery, fantasy or historical fiction, for example, is one way of classifying a novel, but what about the underlying themes.

Themes

Common themes are love, death, evil, survival, war, peace, tragedy.

Writersedit.com lists and describes 10 popular themes:

love, death, coming of age, good v evil, courage and heroism, survival, power and corruption, prejudice, individual v society, war

It is an interesting blog because it describes novels within each theme, great when beginning to plan a novel or even to advertise your novel alongside similar themes.

Why is knowing the theme important?

• When writing the blurb it is useful to incorporate the themes
• They are key search words for visibility on the internet (Amazon especially)
• Themes are succinct words for any marketing materials when describing your book
• They are great to have ready when giving a succinct verbal description if asked, ‘What’s your book about then?’ ~ difficult if you are not prepared and you don’t want to waffle on.

What themes did I chose?

When planning my recent novel, MISSING Past and Present I slipped into these major themes:

1. Poverty and homelessness
2. Mixed relationships and multi faith marriage
3. Prejudice
4. Gender inequality
5. Resilience and fortitude

In my last few blog posts I have addressed the first theme, Poverty and Homelessness, describing how working in a soup kitchen ‘cum’ network of support for homeless people inspired my novel in the first place, and so in the next few blog posts I will turn to the second and third themes, which I feel go hand in hand.