Hey everyone! Here I am again back with the second post in the Theme series. I hope that last week’s post was helpful and not too confusing. Most of this series’ posts might be a little confusing but I’ll try my best to make them as coherent as possible. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns feel free to message me either through the website, through the blog member page or directly on social media. Without further ado…
Theme: Why Is Theme Important?
As I talked about last week in my opening post theme is the moral, topic, and why of a story. This week’s post is all about why theme is important. Now that you know what theme is, we need to understand why every story should have a theme. Essentially, we need to know why every story needs a why. When I first decided to make this one of the posts in the Theme series, I had a good idea in my head of what theme was because of my research regarding the first post but my idea of why theme is important was even more vague. I’m so excited to share with you the things I learned.
Theme, as discussed previously, is up to the interpretation of every person and is sometimes not interpreted the way the writer intended to write it. Theme could also be called the spine of a story. Without the theme, the story wouldn’t make much sense. Without the theme a story would be relatively bland with not much interesting ideas and concepts to dig into. Themes also express certain interesting and important parts of human behavior. A single person is not just what is on the surface so it stands to reason that a story (which in the end is about the people in it) shouldn’t be that way either. Without an interesting theme for your readers to relate to the story doesn’t grab your interest.
For example, what if you read a book and the plot was about a young girl (let’s say she’s about 16) and she has to switch high schools and the story is simply a play by play of her life. This story sounds boring. Unless you are a teenage girl who switched high schools and had a boring daily life, you would find nothing to relate to in this story and even people who fit into this category would be bored reading it. This is what a story would be like without any themes. BUT what if our young girl transferred high schools because of something sad that happened at her last school and she just wants to be a normal kid again and have a normal school life. Maybe someone at her school finds out what happened and spreads it around school. Maybe now she’s having a hard time making friends, is being bullied, and is just trying to find her place in the world. Does that story sound a little more interesting and a little more relatable? Good! Because now this story has multiple theme options.
Which way a writer chose to write this story would affect the kinds of themes the story had. Maybe the writer decides that the weird and interesting thing that happened at her last school is that everyone found out she was some sort of monster or mythical creature. Then there is a possibility for a theme about understanding people who are different from yourself. Maybe the theme is as simple as finding where you belong in a place where you don’t feel belonging. There are so many different themes that can be taken from this simple story and yet the one the author intended while writing could be completely different from the two that I pointed out here.
Theme is the part of your story that doesn’t need to be your own original story idea, plot twist, or interesting character. In fact, if you want a really good theme it needs to be as unoriginal as possible. A good theme is a theme that a very large group of people can relate to. Lots of books that the writer wrote to have political meanings about rights for minority groups are often read by the majority as well because that theme of searching for belonging resonates with everyone even if it is on different things. This is the reason that some book tropes and clichés stick around for so long because even though they are common and unoriginal, they resonate with so many people. For every part of your story that is amazing and interesting and unique there is probably a theme that is just as unoriginal and cliché and that is the glory of writing.
This is why theme is important. Theme is what connects your reader to an out of this world story idea. Think back to the last super crazy book you read with a super interesting plot, amazing storyline and out of this world concepts. What was the theme that made such an out there and crazy sounding story relatable and interesting to read?
That’s all I have for this week’s post. Next week we’ve got another post on theme coming up. I hope that you guys are enjoying this series so far. If you ever have any questions, comments, or concerns about these posts feel free to send me a message and I’ll try to get a good look at those as often as I can. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, and follow me on social media using the links below. I hope that you all have a great time writing in this coming week until I see you again and remember…
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
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