Skip to main content

Explore Your Theme in Creative Writing: Help It Grow With Each Character and Scene

By VJ
In every story, there is a theme. A theme that is expressed in a single sentence or clause, such as:

Army Officers Can’t Fight the War
Smoking Is Injurious to Health
The Most Unlikely Being Comes to Your Rescue Most Often

The story’s backbone is this theme, without which the story can just be a bunch of words. The theme is the soul, and a writer should show maximum respect to it at every instant of it.

Explore Your Theme

Exploring a theme, and finding its separate ramifications is both an intellectual activity and a story building technique. For instance, if you have a theme like “One’s Health Is in One’s Mind” then you can crate several branches of this theme and use them in various scenes and characters in your novel:

Unhealthy characters suffer from mental problems.
People with depression are unhealthy.
The people who fail are usually unhealthy.
In a scene, mentally unhealthy character faces insecurity, though he is physically fit.

These ramifications of the basic plot may be used in various parts of the story.

Advance Your Theme

In every scene and character, make sure the ramifications of the basic theme is shown to the readers. You should help advance the theme by going deeper with it. You can create more and more plot twists with this. For instance, if your theme is “Arrogance Causes Disgrace” you can advance the plot by making an arrogant character in the story, growing more and more spiteful through several instances of humiliation he/she faces in public.

This is a psychological device that can bond the story’s theme in the readers’ mind. The theme should be developed through the character thoughts, dialogs, plot development, etc.

Conclusion

Theme plays major part in the success of a story. A positive, effective theme is as I said earlier, the backbone of any story.

Copyright © Lenin Nair 2008
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated very strictly

Popular posts from this blog

Power of Short Sentences

By VJ
Post dedicated to Thomas Hardy (see History Today below). There are monster sentences like the one you encounter as the first paragraph of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens . One of my friends, whom I am getting equipped for his IELTS ( what is this? ), told me that the examination recommends long sentences. In writing classes also, I guess it’s longer sentences most tutors promote. But indubitably shorter sentences are more powerful . We will see why. Take a long sentence for instance: Tom Cruise, one of the finest actors in the whole world, is perhaps the most powerful celebrity to exist ever according to Time Magazine, but many people still dispute this fact and point out that there are more powerful and popular actors than Cruise, though they were unsuccessful in providing the total number of fans, who liked the films of those actors. This is a long sentence and it is very confusing . Though it has a logical construction and conveys a meaning, it falters in many occasions and seems ...
1 comment
Read more

Creative Writing: Crafting Characters With Emotional Appeal in Mind

By VJ
When you read the greatest fiction works ever, have you ever asked what was so compelling about them that you not only kept reading it, but you ended up reading all other major works of the writer? It may well be because the writer touched your emotional quotient quite a bit. Every reader has a unique taste . Some like to read suspense thrillers , some tender love stories, and some others dark horror and bloodshed stories . That’s why there are all sorts of genres out there. When a writer gives you what exactly you want, you will keep reading. Here we come to the emotional appeal. Character Imperfection Perfect characters may not always be the upshot of a writer’s deliberation. It may well be due to ignorance . Usually the upcoming writers take it for granted that if they create perfect characters, they will be able to garner a bigger audience . It is not true. You have to ask yourself what a character would do in a particular situation. Perfect characters—perfect gunmen, perfect...
1 comment
Read more

En Dash, Em Dash, and Hyphen

By VJ
We have three types of dashes in use: The hyphen, En Dash, and the Em Dash. In this post, we will see how to use them all correctly. Hyphen (-) The hyphen is the minus key in Windows-based keyboards. This is a widely used punctuation mark. Hyphen should not be mistaken for a dash . Dash is different and has different function than a hyphen. A hyphen is used to separate the words in a compound adjective, verb, or adverb. For instance: The T-rex has a movement-based vision. My blog is blogger-powered. John’s idea was pooh-poohed. The hyphen can be used generally for all kinds of wordbreaks . En Dash (–) En Dash gets its name from its length. It is one ‘N’ long (En is a typographical unit that is almost as wide as 'N'). En Dash is used to express a range of values or a distance: People of age 55–80 are more prone to hypertension. Delhi–Sidney flight was late by three hours. In MS Word, you can put an En Dash either from the menu, clicking Insert->Symbol or by the key-combinatio...
11 comments
Read more