So now we have the beginnings of a story. What settings would help to convey the message?Ī town that was once well known for its beautiful foliage, pristine waters, and local fauna is now a barren industrialized wasteland with sludgy rivers and blackened skies. Perhaps your protagonist’s daughter died of lung disease due to air pollution. What types of characters would be impacted by environmental efforts? Your theme might be the importance of going green. Let’s say you want the reader to believe that environmental efforts need to improve across the board. You simply choose the message you want to convey and then think about what narratives best fit the message. If you choose the theme itself as your starting point, then the process is relatively easy to understand. While theme can emerge organically, you can also make conscious decisions to control the theme and convey a specific message. When you don’t assign meaning to your work by your own hand, others will assign meaning on your behalf. If the couple ultimately walks toward the sunset together, despite all of the odds being against them, then your work ends up communicating that “love finds a way.”Ĭonversely, if it proves to be impossible for them to be together, despite being madly in love, then you might end up with a theme like “love isn’t always enough to make a relationship work.” These seemingly trivial decisions about events in your narrative can create meaning. Well, does love prevail in your story or doesn’t it?ĭoes the good upstanding guy get the girl or does she leave him for the bad boy? Let’s say your only goal is to write a romance novel and that you have no big, bold aspirations about what the theme should be. This is because, if no explicit theme is present, then the theme will emerge organically from the events and dialogue of the story itself. Whether every work needs a theme or not, pretty much every piece you ever write will inevitably end up with a theme. Old horror stories about wicked creatures in the woods blatantly portray an unsafe forest in order to convince children to stay out of the forest at night. Other times a theme may be much more transparent, however. It uses the shock factor of its satirical proposals to communicate deeper messages about the injustices of society. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, for example, is unsurprisingly not trying to convince the reader that eating babies is actually a good idea. Satire is a perfect example of the exact opposite.

Note that this does not mean it automatically represents the goal of the characters or possibly even the narrator. In other words, theme is the ultimate goal that the story itself is trying to accomplish. The theme is the underlying message that the work is trying to communicate. So we’ll be going over a breakdown of what they are, how they’re used, and how they affect each other. While both theme and mood represent elements the author is trying to convey, the theme is the message or meaning whereas the mood is the emotional impact of the piece.īoth theme and mood are instrumental to understanding a work of fiction and its intended impact. Theme and mood do have some similarities, but they are ultimately very different. 6 How Do Theme and Mood Interact? What Is the Difference Between Theme and Mood?

Mood words literature