Being a Better Writer: Considering Theme and Message · 8:18pm Jun 6th, 2016
Message. Message is an area of much controversy these days, especially in fiction. There are numerous groups with their own ideas of what "the message" of all fiction should be, all arguing and fighting with one another, not a few of them acting like spoiled, entitled children.
But we're not going to talk about that today. Well, we will a little, because it's kind of hard to escape in today's topic. After all, I want to talk about message, and there's a whole political battle going over "message" in fiction (note the quotation marks, they are significant). But I don't want to focus on that. Instead, what I want to talk about is, well, what you see in the title: theme and message.
Let's face it: Every decent story is going to have a theme behind it. Why? Because any good story, from the simplest to the most complex, is going to have a purpose. Something that it drives towards. It's going to have an inciting incident, rising action, a climax, and a conclusion. And in order for it to have that conclusion, it must have something to conclude.
What does this mean? Well, in a roundabout way, no matter what story you write, what it's about, or who you put in it, there's going to be some sort of conclusion. If it doesn't have one, then you don't have a story, just a directionless event. And we don't want that.
So, for our story to fit the requirements of a story, it needs to have a conclusion of some kind. And that means that, even if you're not a fan of message fiction, your story will have a message of some kind, like it or not.
Right, some of you might be a little confused at the moment, so let me step back and clarify something. Message fiction versus theme and message: what's the difference?
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Actually, that is specifically what literary magazines want.
Literary short stories have traditionally been epiphany stories since James Joyce. The manner of the epiphany, however, has moved consistently in one direction for the past 100 years:
- The epiphany itself is becoming less a universal experience that everyone is familiar with, and more a specific experience that most people have never had.
- The "moment of epiphany" has been gradually spread out over time, from being a literal moment in early stories like Joyce's "Araby" or DH Lawrence's "Tickets, Please", to something spread out over the final scene (Hemingway's "The Killers", John Updike's "A & P"), to contemporary stories where it's spread out over nearly the entire story.
- The meaning of the epiphany has grown more and more vague.
What I think has happened is structuralism and post-modernism. These are two very closely-related and incorrect theories of language. (Post-modernism is often called post-structuralism, but really it is a variety of structuralism.) They teach that the only kinds of meaningful statements language can make are to contrast two terms and attach more value to one than to the other.
The consequence of structuralism is that it denies the existence of logic. Logical claims simply don't exist in a structuralist framework. (Historically, it was actually logic that was renounced first in literary theory; structuralism was adopted much later as a justification.)
Without logic, there can be no claims, themes, or message, and hence no story of the type VikingZX is talking about. What you get instead is a careful and precise feeling conveyed, one which conjoins a large set of preferences on pairs of binary terms and associates that set of values with a feeling. This, I think, is what modern literary writers are trying to accomplish.
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And the popularity, sales, and revenue of literary works have dive-bombed as a result. I don't think that's a coincidence.
Omigod, what are you talking about? I thought I totally understood you when you wrote about how evil white men were in your story of the world of Indrim! That was a heroic person of color I was cheering on. I felt that I could relate to Monthly Retreat being an ibex trapped inside a human body. But now it turns out that you never really cared about any of the really important things like being diverse and inclusive. You just wanted to prioritize a good story and well written characters! You woman-hating, racist... /s
Sorry about that, could not help myself. Wanted to see if I could do a stereotypical Tumblr post. Think I failed miserably, thankfully. Anyways, what is interesting is that this is not just a common occurrence in literature alone, though it is more prevalent due to the whole "it is easier to write words than craft other things".
You can see certain groups trying to push a set of "games" as being inclusive and diverse as well, where the "developer" just mostly picked up one of the more basic engines such as Unity to push a story with a message rather than an interesting theme or good mechanics. What is sad is that there is an actual interesting niche of interactive fiction out there, but is largely ignored. Ones that make the reader/player actually put the story together are ones that I find worthwhile, rather than those that cram a message down my throat. If you are interested, I recommend Photopia by Adam Cadre as a starting point, and Blue Lacuna by Aaron A. Reed as a really good story that will take hours to actually get through, and possibly a cork-board to keep track of everything.
Now as for stories written, I find sometimes "Great Works" are sometimes also full of it. The one that sticks to my mind the most at the moment is probably Atlas Shrugged, in which the main character soapboxes for quite a bit in the story near the end. Pretty annoying, to be honest. Just give me good stories with rounded characters. They do not need to be perfect. Scratch that, they should not be perfect, because that would make for a boring story.
4005461 Oh, absolutely. Some self-destructive virus infected the arts in late 19th-century Paris, and they began deliberately killing themselves off. Orchestral music, poetry, painting, and sculpture committed suicide over a span of just 20 years. Literature managed to hang on despite Joyce & co., but it's changed.
I know making the story subservient to the message is bad, but where does one draw the line on the other end? At what point do the whims of the characters become so chaotic that any semblance of a message dissolves in a froth of self-contradictions?
I guess the best way to ensure that the story's message is consistent is to have the message be something that aligns with the protagonist's core principles. For instance, a story about being courageous in the face of one's fears might work better if the protagonist had someone they would give anything to protect.
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Literature... Literature has changed.
Aimless quibbles between structuralists and post-modernists that are really just two sides of the same coin, with the occasional dustup between them and the SJWs.
No message or meaning. Only message, but still meaningless. There is no safe middle-ground left.
Literature has changed.
Bores have become routine.