And there's the tragically ironic ending to round out and now make perfect this little episode of déjà vu. This is like manga or anime where cyclic story telling is so important.
Sorry to stick my neck into someone else's private session but I found the OP's question interesting... however, I must ask a simple question to clarify what ginger asked a while ago, and I still don't understand from various posters - WHAT is it you call a THEME in narrative - question being: Can you name a single work of fiction that is not in any way thematic = doesn't have a theme?
Sparknotes defines literary themes as "the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work." I was going to offer up HP Lovecraft. Other than depicting horror and death, I'm having trouble finding the themes in his work. But searching for an answer I see other people have a better eye for theme than I do. I went to Wiki, (Sparknotes didn't include any Lovecraft in their analyses). I found the interpretation of theme to be a mixed bag within the Wiki contributor crowd: I only think of half of those when I think of theme. The rest I'd call style.
I guess you're not going to acknowledge the fact that you called me out for doing the same thing you do. (bad mood today dude...?)
Well yeah, "first-person perspective" is certainly not a theme off-topic: never found that much "horror and death" in Lovecraft...well, yes, horror, in many ways, but death I never considered a prominent theme in Lovecraft's work: there is a nice set of themes on his wiki page: forbidden knowledge, non-human influence on humanity, etc... on topic: Give or take, isn't THAT what themes should be? You have a motif, then another motif; motifs create complex structures, those structures give "birth" to ideas, first on purely aesthetic level (the first circle of motif arrangement), then they are mirrored on the larger structure of the narrative, transposing into what you may call the thematic structure; finally, what is up to the writer is to explore that structure - whether he goes into a full ideological rampage, or he makes a "sermon" out of it, or he creates a best-selling, easy-reading vampire-love-story - that's a question of his talent and capabilities, isn't it?
Yeah, just followed the link - well, it's a topic on "Lovecraftian horror" and it's both about themes and stylistic "whims" of any writing to be considered "Lovecraftian", but it's not necessarily of Lovecraft's writing itself....
I hadn't read Lovecraft until recently. In another thread someone mentioned he writes purple prose successfully so I picked up a couple anthologies from the library. I'm on the third story in "The call of Cthulhu and other stories" and death was part of the first two. Call of Cthulhu - lots of accounts of death at the tentacles of Cthulu The Hound - Protag's friend is killed and the protag kills himself in the end to avoid the same painful death BTW, I found a site with his complete works free online: http://www.hplovecraft.com/ Guess I'll take the library books back.
Hm, I have a high distrust of paperback editions that are younger then myself... ...going soooo off-topic, sorry
You said it best here. This is also how I feel about the whole theme vs moral issue. I have read some things where it felt pretty clear cut that the entire book was meant to be a cautionary tale type warning which, despite my love of classic fairytales, I'm not a big fan of in novels. One in particular that stood out was an author having their characters go on endlessly about the importance of cancer screening. Cancer is an issue that hits home for me but I don't care to read an entire book that feels like it's a prolonged infomercial about the dangers of not paying attention to your body or going to get the proper cancer screenings. Almost every single chapter had something about people going on about how important it was. Then again as Wreybies said above theme vs moral is also subjective. As a survivor I know too well the importance of screenings and paying attention to your body. So reading something where it was mentioned nearly every chapter was most definitely preaching to the choir and irritated me quite a bit. To someone who has never had cancer touch their life in any way it may not have come across that way.
I think all novels have a theme, or at least a kernel of a theme. I find theme is tied in with premise and all novels must have a premise. To me a premise is what changes between the beginning of the novel and the end of it (and without change there wouldn't be a plot!). Did the murderers get caught? Then one could argue the theme is about justice. Did the main character finally follow their dream to move to Paris? Then one could argue the theme is about following one's dream.
I strongly agree. There is at least one successful writer who chooses a theme first and says she spends six months studying and researching before starting to create characters and the storyline. themes such as infanticide, suicide, ....Sometimes the theme is well explored but the novel itself screams I have researched this topic and I am using the novel as a medium for preaching about it´and the story is spoiled´. Most books that have a strong theme are memorable because they make you think, that is the point surely? The reader is invited to consider/reconsider their views as the theme, and often other secondary themes, strike them. It is integral, incidental, insidious and intiguing and skillfully adds a dimension to the story. Macbeth is about Ámbition´. It is also about male/female relationships, honour, duty, autosuggestion.... It does not matter how historically inaccurate it is because there is scope to discuss and find fascination in the themes ad infinitum.
I'm coming very late to this thread, and have read through most of the postings from other people. This is a very good topic for writers to discuss, actually, as our 'theme' is something we are often encouraged to name in a query letter. Here's my personal view, which obviously won't be everybody's. I've always believed that 'theme' is what you take away from a story (not necessarily what you put in.) What are you left thinking about when you've finished reading? What have you learned? What has gone right, what has gone wrong in the story? What made these outcomes happen? What kind of person is a survivor? What kind of person is not? Would the results of actions characters took always be the same, whether or not their circumstances were different? Or would the results be variable? What factors would vary them? Stuff like that. As a writer, I find my theme doesn't really emerge until after I've written the first draft of a novel. I certainly don't start out with one in mind, but simply play with creating believeable characters and throw conflict and events at them that they must deal with. The end result of this play is not always what I'd envisioned at the start! In the edit, I try to sharpen the focus on what my theme, or themes might be. I make sure characters say and do exactly what is needed to make the theme clearer. This is fun, actually, and it's also a window on how I see the world. Sometimes a surprising view! When we study literature, we are encouraged to find themes in the books we read. This, of course, is after-the-fact, because we didn't write the books. We only discover theme in a finished story. I expect if we use the same process to discover themes in our own finished works, we can't really go wrong.
I do not think theme and moral are synonymous. themes usually try to wake people up to realities that are usually unseen or tell tales of "what if" moral is like someone dedicating two years of their life telling a story whose goal is to tell kids to not do drugs.
So, this question occurred to me late last night, and I wanted to put it to you guys for thought. Maybe I'm using the wrong approach and just don't know it. Sometimes I wonder if my symbolism is a little to 'on the nose,' if you know what I mean. Have you ever purposely injected symbolism into your writing? How do you use it? And how do you tackle "themes" without being obvious about it?
When you say symbolism, are you talking about crosses and pentagrams and this kind of symbolism. Or are you talking about metaphor and allegory? If you are talking about the second one, this is where writing becomes a little poetic. It's really hard to explain a good way to do it. In my current book I have made a religion around the hidden meaning, so the different parts I'm trying to explain are represented by gods. The egyptians also used gods to hide what they understood about meterology and farming if you believe certain scientists. JK Rowling used the idea of mugbloods to explore racism, and I think that one was pretty much 'on the nose' without actually saying Lord Voldemort was racist. If you want to go really deep into it you can look up the psychologist Carl Jung, he was obsessed by symbolism and believed that some images and ideas crossed cultures and generations in ways we didn't understand (the cross being one of those symbols). Its a big and interesting area to look into.
I'm working on something new which is intended to be a YA novel. I don't frequently read material for this audience and the ones I have read recently seem to either blatantly ignore normal teenage hormones or they present it with a Disneyesque whitewash. The kids are attracted to each other, they pine for each other, sometimes they kiss, but it all seems a little too chaste for my sense of reality. I can recall reading Judy Blume material as a teenager and having some of her stories a bit more over the line. How much is too much for today's readers? More importantly (for my purposes) how much is too much for parents & publishers to accept? I have the start of chapter 1 - Shabin - in the critique section & this one is pretty tame. The second chapter gets a little more blatant with MC's desires & I'm not sure if I'm going too far. (I'll post it later today when I get more of it done.)
Twilight has chastity as its central theme. It's a thing. Because you and I come from the decadent, hedonistic old days when bad things were written. (Do you remember the waiting list to check out Forever... from the library?) --------------------------------------------- I don't pretend to know what attracts YA readers or publishers, so take my responses as tongue in cheek.... unless tongue in cheek is a little too forward and we have to go on chaperoned "friend dates" first.
You have to let go man. Unless you're getting paid to write a story for a certain audience, do what you have to do to get the story to where you want it.
In the House of Night series by the Casts, the MC Zoey (17) has all kinds of sexual encounters. In one of the first scenes, she witnesses a fellow high school student getting a blow job in the hallway. She loses her virginity to a teacher that's five years older than her, only to later walk in on him and another professor (naked, just finished having sex) talking about how he seduced Zoey for malicious reasons. She has a weird vampiric connection with a human, where the act of drinking blood is an arousing experience, so there's several slightly uncomfortable scenes between her and this guy. She has a relationship with one guy, the weird vampiric relationship with a human, then has sex with another guy later. And that's only in the first few books. I didn't finish the series so I don't know how much more graphic it got. But I'd say you're okay to explore a bit. lol ETA: Is it weird that I suddenly want to read these books again?
To be fair.... the phenomenon of "chaste environs" in lit meant for younger people is nothing new. We didn't really have "YA lit" when I would have been the target audience - at least not as an encapsulated distinct phenomenon the way it is today - but a lot of the stuff I remember reading as a kid was pretty dead from the waist down. OSC managed to have his Ender's Game series go untainted by his soon-to-be-revealed homophobia by making all of the youths as sexless as anatomically blank dolls. You can play mix and mach genders with any of the characters in that series and it doesn't change the story one bit. These kids should be right on the cusp of perfectly normal hormonal overload and yet... nothing.
YA can go pretty far. I can the sense I might be pushing it in the novel mentioned in my sig, but not for the presence of sex. Pretty much anything acceptable in adult is fair play in YA
