Mdtryhht

I am in the process of the writing a book. It is not my first attempt.

My goals for the book are:

• Naturally, appeal to my target audience and with work and luck, sell well.


• Invoke the same emotions, that I enjoy having while reading a good book, within my readers.


• Invite them into my custom world etc. etc.

So far, so simple (in concept :) )

But now I am a bit worried:

I have, of course, read a ton of advice and "how-to-write-better-books" (next to many articles on the internet and so on). They all offer at least a small morsel of value to me, so thats not the problem. I generally apply a mix-match-collect attitude.

But most of the theories and guides to writing and story structure seem to agree that a story without a theme will fail to entertain readers.

All of them agree that a novel should have a climax aswell, a point which I strongly agree with. Is the theme as universal as the climax for a story?

What do you guys think? By the way, English is not my mother tongue.

CLARIFICATION: Since there seems to be a problem with the exact definition of theme I will try to clarify:

This SE defines its as follows: "Theme' refers to a message being conveyed to the reader by the author, through a piece of creative writing, usually a novel"

So I am referring to a single clear (but might be subtly woven into the plot) piece of advice from author to reader like "This is the way you should behave if caught in a similar situation" or "This is the way to behave morally right".

This is not about a question if I should have a blatant message within the book, but rather if I need to have the aforementioned theme, sort of an suggestion how to behave.

A message and a theme are not the same thing

A story need not have a coherent message to be successful. Look at Disney's take on The Little Mermaid - what was the message? If you sign away your soul to chase after a cute guy, you might get to keep your soul AND reconcile the stormy relationship you've got with your father? When striking deals with dark, supernatural powers - the dark powers cheat? Or maybe that the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence?

The Little Mermaid (or Disney's take on it) definitely has themes, though - like the common pairing of a longing for a different life, and the ups and downs of being dropped into an unfamiliar environment. There's the struggle and confusion that goes along with growing up and finding your place in the world. And there's rebellion and reconciliation. Etc.

A story without a coherent theme is like a fish man getting run over on his way to buy donuts to hang on his ears. It doesn't make sense. Your reader is left wondering what the point of it was.

Fortunately, themes often arise naturally. Reader confusion may be a sign that a coherent theme is missing. However, it's common that some theme is part of what makes the story interesting to you as a writer - so you may not need to put one in artificially.

A story without a message is... normal.

I'll set out my stall straight away: I think a theme is essential. However, I don't see how you can write something worthwhile that doesn't have a theme.

If you are trying to appeal to your readers, how are you doing to do so? Are you suggesting that good will overcome evil? Does worrying about your body image get in the way of positive relationships? Is climate change the issue of the century? Your story has to have an idea behind it.

What are the emotions you enjoy when reading a book? What evokes them? Is it the good winning? Is it hypocrisy being shown up? Is it clever ideas being shown to be better than stupid ones?

What are the social, cultural and historical constraints on your imaginary world? These things, be they positive or negative, form part of your theme. For example, 'Macbeth' was written at a time when women had little power, were not allowed to be actors and were expected to be caring mothers. Lady Macbeth is the opposite of all these things.

In slightly different words from those of Reverend Lovejoy: Short answer, maybe not with an if; long answer, maybe with a but.

Remember when they made you read specific novels in school, boring you or at least a few of your classmates? But you had to read those ones in particular, because they were great literature. That's the idea, anyway. What's great about them? Presumably, a theme or a message or something with a fancy Latinate technical term that comes to the same thing.

But novels worth studying in school aren't necessarily representative of publishable novels, or of commercially or critically successful ones, or even of ones that deserve to be indefinitely well-remembered. Syllabuses choose the novels that are easiest to claim, convincingly or otherwise, are many pages dragging out opinions that fit on a postcard. Anything else is too complicated to ease you into the subject. (Best still, with some of the chosen novels it's probably true!)

That said, themes, messages etc. often come unintentionally, or at least after you started writing a story whose plot was half in your head. Genuinely great stories may well have their themes not because that makes them great, but because their authors can't help but add them in. After all, they're people: they have opinions; unique experiences have shaped them; certain things puzzle them.

So if you don't have an idea for such things yet, don't panic. For one thing, you can brainstorm which ones matter to you; for another, if you flesh out a great story, great world and great characters, it'll come in time if it helps. In fact, if you could get a timeline of when every detail in a novel came in, it would be very messy, maybe something like character-town-theme-plot-theme-plot-character-plot. Also, some parts might be swapped for something else.

The same goes for stories in any medium, but you almost never get such inside details. If you do, it seems to happen with early concepts for films. Let's take Coco, which for some reason I can't stop mentioning in my answers. Originally, it would have been about a boy learning how to let go of his late mother, the theme presumably being "you should let go after you mourn". Research into Mexican culture quickly revealed, however, that the point of Día de Muertos is to not let go, but rather to remember the dead because it benefits them. Needless to say, one theme gave way to another pretty quickly at that point. Don't be afraid to discover your story needs that.

Let’s look at the even-numbered Star Trek movies. They’re considered good pop culture, and tonally, they’re all over the map, so they’re a good example.

Counting backwards, VI is a blatant allegory for the end of the Cold War. IV has an explicit message that was trendy at the time (“Save the Whales!”), and became the iconic example on TV Tropes of making up an absurd fictional consequence to frighten the audience (“Or else aliens will destroy the Earth in three hundred years!”)—but that’s largely because the movie is a comedy with all the Star Trek characters in contemporary LA, and the plot is an excuse to get them there. The message of the movie is not really its theme.

The there’s II. It doesn’t have an explicit message (although Khan, Spock and Kirk all do get speeches about what they think the lesson of their lives is), but it has themes. Big themes. The director and screenwriter, Nicholas Meyer, has talked bout how those developed around the needs of the production: Leonard Nimoy was ready to stop playing Spock, so Meyer saw that the way to lure him back to make the movie was to promise him the chance to play a great death scene. Originally, that would have been closer to the beginning, but in rewrites, it kept getting pushed later until it became the climax at the end. This got Meyer thinking, “We were giving birth to planets, and Kirk was meeting his son, and Spock was dying. You sort of looked at that and said, ‘Well, what unifying ideas are running through here?’ And then you thought, ‘Ah! This is going to be a movie about…’” At that point, Meyer decided, “This was going to be a story in which Spock died, so it was going to be a story about death, and it was only a short hop, skip, and a jump to realize that it was going to be about old age and friendship.”

So all of these are popular, well-reviewed movies that have stood the test of time, and are liked mostly by the same people today, but in terms of themes or messages they’re all over the place. The consensus is that the most serious movie, the one About Growing Old And Friendship And Death, is the “best” Star Trek movie. That isn’t sarcasm: a lot of people have a real emotional reaction to that, especially people who grew up with the show and saw the movie as they got older. But it’s also not as if First Contact needs to be about anything more saving the Earth from the bad guys and maybe a little about PTSD to be considered a good Star Trek movie.

Or if you’d rather use books as examples, Lord of the Rings does have things for academics to talk about: it has literary motifs, allusions to mythology, the preeminent set of constructed languages in all of literature, and even a few homilies on topics such as capital punishment, but it’s not in any way a book about big ideas. Its contemporary Narnia series is (with The Silver Chair literally a religious take on Plato’s allegory of the Cave), and today that’s mostly written off as preachy Christian books for kiddies.

If you look at the kind of literature that people usually call “great,” and study in literature classes, it typically tries not to sound didactic. That’s considered a mark against it. The kind of person who talks about what a work really means doesn’t want everything spelled out for them. Also, if a work of literature is trying to argue for a political point and is universally considered great, then almost by definition it has to be saying something that everybody agrees with, and usually telling the reader what to think is considered condescending to an adult audience. (Although a lot of the best books with a political message are for one reason or another disqualified from being assigned to children: they have upsetting endings, all the better to motivate the reader to get up and change the world, or they deal frankly with sexuality.) Even so, some books in the Western Canon do have an explicit moral. To Kill a Mockingbird, The Grapes of Wrath and All Quiet on the Western Front all have stand-ins for the author spell out how we should feel about what happened. This is mostly, though, a thing of the past. If a work shows a villain having a great time and showing all the authority figures up, until the final scene where he’s punished and the audience gets a lecture about how you mustn’t admire him because he’s bad, a modern audience is going to be extremely cynical about the disclaimer at the end.

More often, though, there’s room for us to make up our minds. People still debate whether Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it” when he wrote Paradise Lost, or whether he was consciously being subversive, or perhaps we’re just projecting our own modern viewpoints onto the poem. People disagree about whether Shakespeare meant Brutus as a villain or a tragic hero. But these works touch on big, universal themes that people still care about and identify with today.