: In slightly different words from those of Reverend Lovejoy: Short answer, maybe not with an if; long answer, maybe with a but. Remember when they made you read specific novels in school,

@Rambettina586

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In slightly different words from those of Reverend Lovejoy: Short answer, maybe not with an if; long answer, maybe with a but.

Remember when they made you read specific novels in school, boring you or at least a few of your classmates? But you had to read those ones in particular, because they were great literature. That's the idea, anyway. What's great about them? Presumably, a theme or a message or something with a fancy Latinate technical term that comes to the same thing.

But novels worth studying in school aren't necessarily representative of publishable novels, or of commercially or critically successful ones, or even of ones that deserve to be indefinitely well-remembered. Syllabuses choose the novels that are easiest to claim, convincingly or otherwise, are many pages dragging out opinions that fit on a postcard. Anything else is too complicated to ease you into the subject. (Best still, with some of the chosen novels it's probably true!)

That said, themes, messages etc. often come unintentionally, or at least after you started writing a story whose plot was half in your head. Genuinely great stories may well have their themes not because that makes them great, but because their authors can't help but add them in. After all, they're people: they have opinions; unique experiences have shaped them; certain things puzzle them.

So if you don't have an idea for such things yet, don't panic. For one thing, you can brainstorm which ones matter to you; for another, if you flesh out a great story, great world and great characters, it'll come in time if it helps. In fact, if you could get a timeline of when every detail in a novel came in, it would be very messy, maybe something like character-town-theme-plot-theme-plot-character-plot. Also, some parts might be swapped for something else.

The same goes for stories in any medium, but you almost never get such inside details. If you do, it seems to happen with early concepts for films. Let's take Coco, which for some reason I can't stop mentioning in my answers. Originally, it would have been about a boy learning how to let go of his late mother, the theme presumably being "you should let go after you mourn". Research into Mexican culture quickly revealed, however, that the point of Día de Muertos is to not let go, but rather to remember the dead because it benefits them. Needless to say, one theme gave way to another pretty quickly at that point. Don't be afraid to discover your story needs that.

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