How do I include a powerful theme in my story without making it blatantly obvious? [closed]
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I want to have an underlying message in my writing but I really don't want it to come across as annoying or too preachy. Thanks!
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No one can really answer that. Because what works for you may not work for me, and that may or may not work for the next one in line. It's personal, and different people need to go about it accordingly. Why? Because it depends on theme, on target audience, on author voice, on character voice, and on setting.
Having said that, let's look at a few tools people use to get it across. First is allegory. Take house elves in Harry Potter, or muggle-borns from the same franchise. This is a clear allegory for racism, classism, elitism, and when you toss in squibs you also get ableism. Notice how none of that was actually said in the books or in the movies?
The there's setting to help tell the tale better. How does this help? Well. Use slavery, whether physical or mental, to talk about freedom.
"But that's not..." Everything about the world going on around the characters, including laws being enforced, is setting. For example, in a world where killing a slave isn't illegal, is a murder mystery all that gripping? Not really, it might be relegated to a Scooby Do type group of kids.
You can also use theme to keep it subtle, or completely hide the intentions of your characters or you as an author. In the Tales of Huckleberry Finn, did you know that what's-his-face didn't care whether the man he'd come to tell his master set him free was freed?
Think about it for a second. A boy is told that a runaway slave is set free, and doesn't have to run any more. And instead of telling him, he pretends to help him run further and further away, coming up with ever-increasingly elaborate plans to keep him safe, making himself the hero. But it's never stated. In fact, most people don't ever realise that's what happened (be honest, can you tell me the name of the boy in question here?). So the theme of physical slavery turns into a theme of mental slavery (he thinks he's still a slave, and continues running from it), showing the the very concept of slavery is all in your mind.
All you have to do is write it into your story, and never expressly state it. Not you, as the author, not the characters, and not the narrator within. Just have it be there and let people figure it out for themselves.
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To convey an underlying message, "X is better than Y", you need to present your "argument" in terms of scenes and characters and have the outcomes for these characters prove the point.
For example, IRL I believe Nordic-style socialism is superior to Western-style free-market capitalism. Now I am well-studied extensively on both, so I can list twenty failures of free market capitalism and twenty huge advantages of Nordic-style socialism.
If I wanted to put that argument into a fantasy novel, I would illustrate the differences with characters trying to pursue their dreams, and failing under free-market capitalism, or doing active harm to succeed. While other characters, under Nordic socialism, do not fail, and succeed without harming anybody, and in truth actually help others to succeed.
I don't have to tell you "X is better than Y", because in the story, Y leads to failure and X leads to success. You don't club people over the head: They may not even figure out this is what the author wanted to say! Because when immersed in a story readers forget there is an author and read the events and outcomes as "what actually happened" (in this story universe) and, unless you stray into reverie-breaking implausibility, it doesn't occur to them this outcome is chosen by you and engineered by you for 250 pages to be how the story turns out: X prevails and kicks Y in the face. And that can happen multiple times in the story, in one form or another, as part of character histories and stories they tell, in the news and politics they hear, in your exposition.
You will have to choose an appropriate story, of course. Detailing the difference in governance between the USA and Norway may not be a discussion to achieve in a story of rival gangs in Chicago. Competing cultural systems could be suited to present day, fantasy or sci fi, however.
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Just as a technical matter, a theme is not a message. Love is a theme. Love sucks is a message.
When you say you want to get across a message in your writing, what you are saying is that you want to change people's minds about some issue: either change what they think about the issue or change how important they think the issue is.
There are two ways you can change people's minds about an issue. One is through argument. The other is through experience. Argument sets out a set of facts, then lays out a conclusion and a set of reasons why the facts lead to the conclusion. This is how you proceed with an essay.
When you set out to change people's minds via experience, you lead them through a set of events and leave them to draw their own conclusions. This can be a far more convincing approach, because people reach the conclusion for themselves. We tend to resist when people try to force a conclusion on us, but we are all in when we reach a conclusion for ourselves. The downside of persuasion by experience is that you run the risk that some readers will draw a different conclusion from the one you intended.
You can do persuasion by experience in both non-fiction and fiction. Journalism and documentaries sometimes persuade by experience by simply telling you real world stories with little or no commentary. (Selection is obviously part of the technique here, and persuasion by experience can be false, just as persuasion by argument can.)
When you do persuasion by experience in fiction, you tell a fictional story that highlights aspects of real experience in the hopes that it will change people's minds about the real world. Dickens and Steinbeck are notable examples of authors who took this route to advocating for social change.
What is striking about the examples of Dickens and Steinbeck is that there is no debate about the issues Dickens tackled and not much about those Steinbeck tacked anymore, and yet their books are still read and admired. They are still read and admired because both provide profound insight into the nature of the human experience in a way that transcends politics or any particular cause.
And that is how you deliver a powerful message in fiction: you write an story about human experience that is simply authentic to life as it is actually lived, without preaching or distorting the truth of lived life in order to push your agenda. Pull that off and people will read you book who have no interest in your cause and who would never take the time to read an essay of even a work of fiction that was a transparent argument for your position.
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