theme

[leoal]

do you think a writer should write stories with a theme in mind the way text books teach themes?

(the text book says that a story has a theme (or themes), and it is a universal message the author wants to communicate to the reader, like, "better safe than sorry" or "don't trust something which is too good to be true.")

Comments

[saare_snowqueen]

I think you should write the story YOU want to write. Do it as well as you possibly can - and - then look for what the theme might be. If you want to make your writing teacher happy you can tweek it a bit so that the theme is clearly visible.
The first rule is: Write what you know about what matters to you.

[leoal]

thank you. i was loosing my sense of my voice -- which is a mistake, and i forgot that.

[saare_snowqueen]

Good - don't forget that as WE are the writers, the teachers will come after, analyze what we did and then tell others what to do. Some people lead - others follow.

[spacedlaw]

Too much planning for my taste.
But my writing is both impulsive and compulsive so I probably do not count. I just write for the sex, really.
To me a message is something that do happen on its own. When I wrote my NaNo story last year, I had not planned it to have ecological submessages in it. But it turned out that way (well, hello, dr. Freud...). A book involving trees would attract this I suppose.

[leoal]

i didn't post here, but i have a friend who would critique a story if it was about sex. so i tried to write a sex story. sex is hard to write!

"over planning." that's a good way to describe what i was asking about.

[seyrah]

Screw "should".

If you are a human being and you write a significant amount, the chances are your writing will tend to revolve around the things that are important to you, the most crucial lessons you've learned, or the messages you most deeply want to impart. You will have a "theme" without intending to.

[leoal]

damn. see. it's so obvious now that you all say it, but i'd forgotten the whole organic thing.

[sniadecki]

I think that any great story told well and with a passionate attention to detail (and there are many different kinds of detail, I don't just mean descriptions of things) inherently carries with it a theme or message, because what happens in the story was decided by a human thought.

[leoal]

i'd forgotten to trust that. i've been trying to be clearer, and i've got to do it with the details, not the theme.