Guidelines-theme and meaning
1) Think through characters’ actions and conflicts in the story to see if there are recurrent ideas and motivations that logically contribute to the theme.
2) Ask whether the moral overlay of your writing is consistent for the story you are creating.
3) Ask whether a moral theme becomes so apparent as to offend the reader. Readers back away from writing when they feel they are being asked to convert to a particular morality. The necessary morality of a story should stay well within the limits of what the characters and actions in the story would reasonably suggest.
4) Don’t use your fictional story for overt moral or political purposes. The memorable enjoyable art form that is the literary story does not sprout from roots of moral or political purpose. Instead, it grows from significant and rewarding insights into the human condition that makes the reader a better and more complete person.
5) Paradox (contradiction) can express both sides of an issue and is useful in fiction, but to use it with good effect, you must place it within a detailed and balanced presentation that is combined with dramatic writing.
C. Narration of a story
Authors create stories. Narrators tell the stories, either speaking (1) directly to the reader, or (2) through a character. Characters act in stories—they make plots develop—and they are used often to deliver story information to the reader.
Narration must orient the reader so that he or she is never confused and is always comfortably engaged in the story and thus able to develop a sympathetic connection to one or more characters. Reader sympathy with characters is a major source of reader tension. Readers want to know what will happen to someone they care about.
A narrator differs from an author in storytelling. This separation (author from narrator) is essential for good storytelling, enhances story authenticity and helps provide tension.
There are many useful differences between author and narrator.
1) The date and time the narrator tells the story is often different than the date and time the author creates the story. This affects the voices of characters, the quality and type of emotions revealed by the characters, the logic of character development and plot action, and the tone, opinions and morality of the story.
2) The life of the author is different than the imagined life of the narrator. After all, authors telling their life stories are writing memoirs. Memoir writing in a literary story—even partially—detracts from the potential of the story. Both characterization and action can be more fully developed if there is no reliance on what really happened in the author’s experience.
3) The author should not be the foil for characters’ interpretations and opinions. A defined narrator will be more objective in story presentation, and the story’s conflicts and themes can be more clearly presented through the techniques of fiction—in-scene action, dialogue, narration and internal reflection.
