You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

If you’ve been following my posts up to this point and you’ve done the necessary work, you should have ended up with a killer concept, a promising premise, and a compelling protagonist. Now let’s tackle the subject of theme: a compelling moral problem at the core of the story, what the tale is ultimately about.

• Can you sum up what your story is about in a short paragraph? One way to begin is to ask yourself how your theme shapes your plot.
• What is the story’s central dilemma, the central moral problem of the story?
• What is the inner issue? How does this story dig beneath the surface of life? How does it illuminate the meaning the protagonist reads into events?
• What themes would make the story unique, and give your story heart?
• What thematic point is borne out in the protagonist’s inner struggle?
• See if you can nail the point your story will make in a few concise lines. Don’t worry if in the beginning it splashes all over the page. Just keep focusing in on the single driving point it wil make, to reduce it to its essence.
• If a theme can be stated in terms of “This is good and that is bad,” then it won’t be ironic or interesting. If your story, however, is about a contest between goods or between evils, then you will create a gap between expectation (good should always be pursued; evil should always be evaded) and reality (some goods must be rejected in favor of others; some evils must be accepted to reject others).
• How would the story be a contest between two equally appealing or appalling ideas that come into conflict?
• How is this story a manifestation of inner psychological conflict?
• Is the central dilemma of the story important enough to change someone’s life forever?
• How is this story an argument about the nature of the world?
• How would it force characters (and hopefully readers) to ask questions — about life, themselves, what they believe, how they view others?
• Can you make the moral argument ambiguous, in a way that would force the audience to reevaluate the hero, the opponents, and all the minor characters to figure out what makes right action?
• What do you want your readers to go away thinking about? What are you trying to say about human nature that will help us keep from getting trounced in the future?
• Is the dilemma ultimately unsolvable?
• How does the emotional conflict and the physical conflict intersect to create the central conflict?
• Determine the central conflict by asking yourself who fights whom over what, and answer the question in a succint line. The answer to that is what your story is really about, because all conflict in the story will boil down to that one issue.
• How does the theme stem from the struggle the problems trigger within the protagonist as he tries to figure out what to do about the problem he’s facing?
• How is the plot’s main problem larger than it looks? Why does it matter to us all?
• How is the story’s moral problem thorny enough to intrigue the audience?