Post #194 December 9 2019

“Have a Central Theme to Your Story”

Continuing our story lab, we come today to the fifth element of good storytelling; having a proper theme.  The theme of any story is like your spinal cord, a scaffolding upon which all other elements of the story can be hung.  The best themes are simple, able to be stated in a sentence.

Earlier this year, I wrote a science fiction story called ‘Second Sun.’  In this story, a future saboteur comes to a space station with the intention of destroying the station.  However, the saboteur encounters his own estranged mother aboard the station as a crewmember and winds up sacrificing himself to prevent the station’s destruction in the end.  What’s the theme of this story?  That family ties are stronger than personal circumstances.

Your story should be about something.  I’m indebted to the website Storysci.com for these thoughts: the central core or theme brings unity to all elements of the story.  Of particular importance is the notion that your theme should be explainable in a few words or a sentence.

The theme is best exemplified by the actions, words and thoughts of the main character(s).  It often involves conflict: with another person, with himself, with society, with fate.  In my story above, we see several of these conflicts at work.

Realistically, every word you write in your story should contribute to the theme, amplify it, employ it to provide significance to the story.  The theme is why you want readers to read the story.  The theme is usually something universal: bad guys lose in the end, war is bad, you can’t go home again.  That universality is what readers identify with.  “Hey, that could be me in that predicament.”  Or “hey, that same thing happened to me once…maybe I should pay attention here.”

Themes are what resonate with your audience and the more universal the theme, when done well, the stronger that resonance.

The website literarydevices.net provides these short examples:

1. When the astronaut landed on the moon, he felt loneliness. Thinking there was no one else, he became a little forlorn, though the view of Earth was stunningly beautiful.
   (Theme of loneliness)
2. The space travelers were travelling to the moon, when their spaceship suddenly ran out of fuel. They were all frightened to learn that they wouldn’t be able to return to Earth, and could only land on the moon.
   (Theme of fear)
3. The bus was travelling at a great speed when it was stopped by a gang of robbers. The passengers were ordered to get out, leaving their precious belongings in the bus.
   (Theme of fear)
4. Their marriage ceremony was taking place in a grand hotel. All the eminent people of the city were invited, the reason that the celebration was excellent.
   (Theme of happiness)

Several years ago, I ran across an article in the November 12, 2016 edition of the Wall Street Journal entitled “Novel Findings: Fiction Makes Us Feel For Others.”  The author was Susan Pinker.

 

It seems that in 2006, a study at the University of Toronto connected fiction-reading with readers’ increased sensitivity to others.  To measure how much text the readers had seen across their lifetimes, the readers took an author-recognition test—a typical measure for this type of study.  The more people read, the better they empathized.

 

In 2009, the same team of psychologists reproduced the study with a sample of 252 adults, controlling for such variables as age, gender, IQ, English fluency, stress, loneliness and personality type.  In addition, the subjects took an objective test of empathy called the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test.  The purpose of all this was to see how long-term exposure to fiction influences the subjects’ ability to intuit the emotions and intentions of people in the real world. 

 

Once the variables were statistically controlled for, fiction reading predicted higher levels of empathy.  Such readers also lived larger in the flesh-and-blood social sphere, with rich and enduring networks of real people to provide entertainment and support than people who read less fiction. 

 

Later studies confirmed that reading fiction causes a spike in the ability to detect and understand other peoples’ emotion. 

 

The experimenters then assessed participants on several measures of empathy.  Non-fiction, along with genre fiction—science fiction, romance, horror—had little effect on the capacity to detect others’ feelings and thoughts.  Only literary fiction, which requires readers to work at guessing the motivations of characters from sometimes subtle fictional cues, fostered empathy.

 

As one of the investigators put it, “What matters is not whether a story is true or not.  Instead, if you’re always enclosed in a bubble of your own life and interests, how can you ever imagine the lives of others?”

 

So now there is solid scientific support for what readers, editors and authors have known for generations, probably for thousands of years.

 

With a strong theme in mind, create a memorable character, give him a big problem to solve and drop him in a believable setting and you are doing your part to help Humanity evolve and grow. 

 

And you thought you were just telling stories to amuse yourselves.

 

The next post to The Word Shed comes on December 16.  In this post, we’ll look at item #6 in our story lab of basic storytelling elements: Know what your story is really about.

 

See you then.

 

Phil B.