It’s always the first question I get when I tell people I’m writing a novel: What is it about?

I cringe, and describe the basic high level plot. Ah, oh. Vacant nods. It must be hard, it must be fun, it’s so admirable that I’m even trying.

I smile and say thank you and crawl away, wishing I knew what the hell my novel is “about.” I don’t even know what that *means*. How can I possibly define it? What could I have said that would have boiled a 400-page manuscript down into something not only digestible but tasty?

Well, now that I’m working full time on revisions on this blasted manuscript that I’ve been living with for nearly two years, I think I’m beginning to get a clue. This should not have been news to me: “What is it about” is a question of theme. My interragators may not have meant it that way, but that’s what *I* needed to know.

Theme. I didn’t have one, and my plot suffered. My characters suffered. My brain suffered. The theme ties the whole together, and I couldn’t see it until I had every plot point, turning point and character motivation top of mind, until I’d questioned everything from inciting incident to final resolution and thrown out all my safe assumptions about what the hell I’m doing writing a book. And now that I have a theme, I’m going to have to rethink everything again. But it will be worth it. Now I know what I’m going toward, and my characters will become more passionate and my plot will deepen and I’ll write a book I can be proud of. Goddamn it.

On a sidenote, while I’m sounding all high-falutin’ and grand and motivated and thematically sound, I’m simultaneously making resolutions, like: I will never start a manuscript without knowing its theme ever again. Which follows the many other resolutions I’ve made, such as “I will never start a manuscript without a thorough undertstanding of all my characters’ inner and outer motivations again, or without an outline, or without doing my research, or without a map.” I don’t know how much of that is actually possible, though. How much can a writer realistically know before starting a manuscript?

How would you end the sentence “I will never start a manuscript again without…”?

Anyway, to return to where I started. That’s the first question I get: What is it about? The second question varies, but so far my favorite has to be:

Will it have pictures?