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What’s The Difference Between The Theme And Subject Of Your Writing?
You need to be able to describe both to an editor, reader, or interviewer who asks you to do it
This is the first in a series of stories about basic writing topics (“What’s the difference between your theme and your topic?”) as well as more advanced publishing questions (“What’s the best way to find a literary agent?”). You can read about my credentials here.
Did you play hooky on the day your middle-school English teacher explained the difference between the “theme” and the “subject” (or “topic”) of a work of fiction or nonfiction? It could hurt you with editors who expect you to have mastered those basic terms.
Fortunately, neither word is hard to understand. Robert McKee explains the difference between the two terms briefly and accurately in his modern classic guide to screenwriting Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (HarperCollins, 1997):
“Theme has become a rather vague term in the writer’s vocabulary. ‘Poverty,’ ‘war,’ and ‘love,’ for example, are not themes; they relate to setting or genre. A true theme is not a word but a sentence — one clear sentence that expresses a story’s irreducible…
