A motif is a distinctive image, phrase or action that recurs in a story and builds its larger meaning, and it is concrete where a theme is abstract.
Where the term comes from
The Poetry Foundation defines a motif as a central or recurring image or action in a literary work that is shared by other works. It stresses that, unlike themes, which are messages or ideas, motifs are details whose repetition adds to the work's larger meaning. Its example is the long journey, which appears in both Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and John Bunyan's A Pilgrim's Progress.
LitCharts describes motifs as often being collections of related symbols that help develop central themes, and says a motif is more concrete and more specific to its work than a theme. Wikipedia offers the green light in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and the images of blood and water and the washing of hands in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Merriam-Webster defines the word as a usually recurring salient thematic element in the arts.
An example
Perpetua Hale is writing a novel about a family of salt traders after their warehouse floods. She gives the book a recurring image: stopped clocks. In chapter two the grandmother refuses to rewind the hall clock. In chapter nine a customer pays with a pocket watch that no longer runs. In chapter twenty the heroine climbs into the ruined warehouse and finds every wall clock stopped at the hour of the flood. None of these scenes mentions grief. By the end the reader links them to the family's refusal to move past the loss, which is the theme, while the clocks are the motif.
Common mistakes
- Repeating the image without changing its meaning. A good motif shifts as the story does.
- Stating what the motif means, which removes the reader's part in noticing.
- Using so many motifs that none registers.
- Mistaking a motif for a theme. The motif is the clocks; the theme is the grief.
- Planting it only at the start, then forgetting it at the climax, where it should pay off.
How to check your manuscript
Choose one image that recurs and list each scene it appears in. Ask what it means in the first, what it means in the last, and whether the difference follows the characters' change. If it means the same thing every time, it is repetition. For related ideas, see theme, foreshadowing and show, don't tell.
In Musael, world and characters shows where each entry is mentioned in the text, so a recurring object or place can be traced scene by scene.