Prompt: Read chapter 9, Theme.

Response: This chapter was especially helpful to me, as I’ve been stuck on what the “meaning” of my short story is. It was helpful to read about how you shouldn’t necessarily write with a theme in mind and that the theme is not synonymous with the overall message of the work. Personally, I’ve been struggling with the type of story I want to tell, and that struggle has kept me from actually writing. When the author of this section just tells the audience to “not think about it”, it definitely seems like hollow advice. Yet, as with most of the chapters, the “theme” seems to be to write and revise, even when you aren’t sure about the meaning or the plot or the characters. All a writer needs to do is try. Refocusing on theme, I guess I had it in my head that whatever theme an author presented also needed to have some sort of solution, which is ridiculous now that I think about it, because many works don’t offer solutions to their thematic problem. George Orwell didn’t have a solution to a dictatorship police-state, but the work still handed the audience that theme. Like the author of this section says, all the writer needs to do is state the problem correctly, and then a theme can arise from it. I also appreciated how there was a discussion of how an author presents a theme and how the audience receives the theme. There’s a fine line between interpretation and misinterpretation, one that I hadn’t thought about. An author can present their theme in a way that leads to audience interpretation, yet subconsciously the theme is still absorbed by the audience. If an author isn’t confident in their theme, then it can be missed entirely. I think that I’m focusing too much on creating a theme that I know will be interpreted the way I want it to be, rather than allowing the theme to be created naturally and organically. Overall, I think the biggest lesson to take from this chapter is that the theme doesn’t have to be shoved down a reader’s throat, and that it doesn’t have to instruct an audience to be meaningful. All the theme needs to do is connect to the story and come from a natural space.