Is it bad idea to directly state the message/moral of a story?
I realized I tend to state directly the message/moral of the story in my stories (as dialogue in most of the cases). My plots are rather ambiguous, though. And I use a lot of metaphors/symbols so the connection is not always clear.
Few examples:
Ghost Earthquake
The story is about a girl who misses an earthquake that hits her city. She doesn't remember what she was doing at the time, and nothing seems to have moved a single inch in her apartment. As she tries to uncover the mystery, she comes face to face with her deepest fears, and realizes the world around her is very different to the one she once knew.
Around the middle, the protagonist's boyfriend says (while discussing about earthquakes):
“Maybe what we see around us isn't as solid as we think. In fact, sometimes I think the concept of things being solid is just a human thought. Perhaps nothing is really solid in the universe. Instead, everything's constantly breaking apart, taking a new form.”
The Kid with the Gigaku Mask
About a girl who encounters a mysterious kid while on vacation at the beach. It's a story about ownership and belonging.
At the beginning of the story one of the protagonist's friend says (while discussing about his friend's runaway cat):
“Anyway, those things happen.” Kazuo took a long drink of his beer. “Nothing can be taken for granted. In fact, sometimes I wonder if anything really belongs to us in this world.”
Sushi Break
The story is about a girl who travels every weekend to another city to see her boyfriend. But he cancels every time, so she ends up eating sushi alone in a sushi stand. It's about love, distance, and how happiness can come from the strangest places.
Near the end, the protagonist's friend says (after the protagonist has already stopped questioning the reasons her boyfriend is avoiding her):
“You know,” Faye said, “sometimes I think the best thing to do is to stop trying to think about reasons. You have to stop trying to make sense of your pain, and actually do something to avoid it. If you don't, you'll find all kinds of ways to rationalize it, or find things to temporally fill the void they produce. I'm not saying it's bad. It's OK to find happiness in little things, little experiences. Just remember you gotta keep moving. No matter what. You gotta keep moving.”
Hope these examples helped to illustrate (of course, the characters don't bring the matter all of the sudden. The transition is smooth most of the time).
Some of my favorite writers do this, sometimes. But I'm wondering, is this an example of bad writing?
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Fundamentally, a story is a an experience. Strictly speaking, an experience does not have a meaning. Different people may reach different conclusions based on the experience they have had, just as they may with real life experiences. The novelist should be content to create an experience that is true, regardless of the conclusions people draw from it.
Of course, in many cases the novelist want the reader to draw a particular conclusion -- the conclusion they think must necessarily follow from the experience. But the novelist does not trust the reader to draw that same conclusion. What are they to do?
They can state the conclusion. The problem here is that merely stating the conclusion is not particularly likely to make the person who had the experience that novelist created suddenly draw the same conclusion just because the writer stated it. If the reader shares the conclusion, they may cheer the novelist for stating it. (Some highly doctrinaire readers clearly want this statement to put an exclamation point on the story. The trouble with these folks it they are really only in it for the conclusion and are disappointed in the whole story if they don't get the conclusion they were after. It the writer does not share the conclusion, however, it is likely to sour them on the whole experience of the story. In other words, if you only want to preach to the choir, go ahead and state your conclusion.
They can manipulate the experience to try to get the reader to reach the conclusion the writer is after. The problem with this is that now the experience is no longer truthful. It has been manipulated to produce a conclusion. Most readers will detect this and devalue the story. Only those who are only in it to have their own conclusions affirmed are likely to stay around.
Forcing your conclusions into the open, therefore, is not likely to change anybody's mind. Your best chance of changing people's minds is probably simply to present a truthful experience and let people draw their own conclusions.
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Many of my favourite authors are my favourites because their novels are ripe with great philosophical ideas. What you call your "message" is a philosophical idea. Reading your story, I might not understand it as the message of your story at all, but rather as a bonus, that does not prevent me from understanding the story in a completely different way.
Having a character (or the narrator) reflect and comment on the events, does not make these comments the only possible interpretation in the mind of a reader. The only danger I see is that an author writes with a raised finger: dear reader, let me tell you what you must learn from this story. You might want to avoid that, because your readers will want to resist your preaching. I call this the "but-induction": If you state a supposedly universal truth, every thinking person automatically contradicts you. "Smoking is unhealthy." "Yes, but ... ."
If you really want to educate your readers and lead them to your conclusion, you must let them experience your truth. The best learning is always through experience. But if your "message" is provided as interesting thought that you allow the reader to consider and either adopt or discard, then I don't see a problem.
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As I understand, this is done all the time for television scripts. For instance, when Star Trek characters are discussing new aliens or territories, their discussions go over some basic facts. Maybe they are confirming their knowledge, in theory. In reality, the reason they say many of these things is for the audience benefit. If the audience is enjoying what you produce, and they don't have a problem with noticing anything unrealistic/out-of-character, and the details help the audience to know something that the audience needs to know, then this is a good thing. (That's my answer to the last paragraph in the question.)
However, this approach can also be a dangerous thing. One key item to remember is to keep things within character. If the text doesn't fit the character, then change it. Or have someone else say it. (Maybe a new, and possibly temporary, character.) Or have them say it at a a more appropriate time.
Be careful when trying to explain something for audience benefit. For instance, a famous radio broadcast had a fictitious astronaut explain weightlessness (when out of orbit) to another astronaut. That just feels absurd for modern society, where more of us do know about weightlessness, and we know that any astronaut would not need to receive such an explanation.
There is another aspect to keep in mind: show, don't tell.
I've been taught that the best writing won't say that the weather was hot. The best writing will include sweat drops, and someone seeking shelter, and being happy about the shade.
Here's some specific feedback to the specific examples you provided in the question:
In two of the three examples in this question, the text "sometimes I think" shows up. In the other example, there is "sometimes I wonder". I also see a "we think", a "perhaps", and a "I'm not saying". Such thoughts and wondering just feels a little insubstantial. The writing may appear a bit stronger if you can give it some more substance. Your characters can wonder, and speculate. But their thoughts will appear stronger if you can reduce how much they speculate, because they can draw upon related solid life experiences (that happened earlier). If the character has sufficient observation skills (and the ability to learn from what is observed), those life experiences could even be experienced by someone else.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27942. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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