Curious to see if this helps anyone else as much as it has helped me: A novel is a very complicated question, asked as succinctly as possible. This is essentially a way to understand theme. A novel is one really long question. The question is presented by the writer and considered by all aspects of the book, the end something more like a question mark than a period. If the theme of a novel is a statement, the novel is at risk of being propaganda, even if the statement is a perfectly good one. "Stealing is bad" is a theme for an aesops fable. "Is stealing bad?" Is a theme, albeit an odd one, more fit for a novel. All aspects of the question, all sides, should be honeslty explored. "Is stealing bad?" Would be a terrible theme for someone who isn't interested in making an honest case for thievery being a perfectly noble practice. Taking LOTR for an easy universal example, the question could be something like "say ultimate power was this one object you just had to get. How would that play out?" Basically every character, then, is bounced off this question. Gandalf and Aragorn, wise and already in possession of power, reject it. Tom Bombadil, transcendent of desire, is unaffected by it. Boromir struggles and succumbs before he understands, etc. At the end we have a possible philisophical conclusion, "the object could not exist without destroying everything and must be destroyed itself," but the ending is bittersweet and the question generated by the trilogy still stands. In the end, when we think about how we would have handled it, almost all of us would have to pick a character, because Tolkein did such a great job hitting the question from different angles. As one more example, consider of mice and men. The question here could be something like "what is the extent of the responsibility one life has over another?" Characters bounce off this question, animals of greater size and situations of greater weight lead up to the final ultimate dilemma. The end is the solution of the main character, but could certainly be argued. The question still stands, the case has been opened. Not every novel follows this strategy, but in general it is a very useful tool for building plot and characters. As a last note, theme grows organically out of the writing process, it doesn't have to exist before starting. As the first draft unfolds the theme question will start to appear and can be used to finish the work, and tweaked and backfilled in the second draft. I imagine some great themes in literature were never even noticed by the author until after the work was published, so don't let the idea of it keep you from getting started!