Write Clearer Story Themes
Tips to Make Your Short Fiction Easier to Understand
Accurately explaining what your fiction is about can be difficult for a writer, but it is an important tool if you want people to remember your work.
Every piece of writing needs a theme. It has to be about something; otherwise, it’s just a series of words and images that don’t add up to anything special. If your short stories keep coming back from editors with rejection letters, the problem may not be the quality of your writing but the clarity of your theme.
Plot or Theme
As you re-read a story, ask yourself if you are confusing the story’s plot with its theme. This is an easy mistake to make, and many writers make it. Keep in mind that plot is what happens in a story. Theme, on the other hand, is what a story is about.
For example, in the holiday classic, A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, the main plot involves a miserly and uncaring man named Scrooge being visited, on Christmas Eve, by three spirits who show him his past, his present, and his possible future. The novel’s theme, however, can be summed up as “change your life for the better before you run out of time”.
Theme Holds Your Story Together
Theme is really the glue that holds all the pieces of your short story – character, plot, place, etc. – together. Each of these elements has to serve the theme you have chosen, or they are a liability to the story.
A clearly defined theme will better focus your story, and help to make it memorable to a reader. Dickens’ universal theme ensures that anyone who reads A Christmas Carol will remember it.
Be careful, though, not to hit your reader over the head with your theme. While it has to be clear, it should also be subtly woven through your story, not flashing from the page like a neon sign.
More than One Theme
As a writer you can explore as many themes as you wish, but consider having just one theme in a short story. By its nature, this form has a limited length, and it can be confusing to have more than one theme. A novel is a better place to explore multiple themes because it allows you the space to expand on each of them.
When You Should Think About Your Theme
The sooner you understand what you’re writing about the better. While some writers don’t think about the theme of their story until they have a first draft to work with, there is a benefit to knowing your theme before you start writing. It will help you to create characters and scenes that fit the story you are telling, and to leave out those that belong somewhere else.
If you begin with one theme – how romantic love fails people, the terrible cost of war, how we interact with nature – and realize that this isn’t what you’re writing about, change it. After all, the best writing usually happens in the re-writing stage.
