🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <92310.095916KVJLC@ASUACAD.BITNET>, Jon L. Campbell <KVJLC@ASUACAD.BITNET> writes:
|A story of love is only
|a series of sporadic events in which multiple random events are brought
|together by chance.  Dick meets Jane at the park, they fall in love and
|through a series of events marry each other.  Their chance encounter
|in the park is not a moral passage in time, but characteristic of the
|chaos that occasionally brings unlike events together.

There's a theme.

|I can't imagine why anyone would try to
|influence the reader with their idea of what is moral and what isn't.
|
|What do you think? 

I'm not convinced that "theme" and "moral" are the same thing, nor that
"moral" in the sense of the moral of a story has very much to do with
the tenets of a moral viewpoint, but grant for the moment that Garner
means them to be closely related:

If you're not going to try to influence the reader, why concern yourself
with the reader in any way?  Just keep a journal of all these random,
chaotic events around you for your own perusal.  As soon as you ask
someone to read what you've written, you are trying to influence them.

If you're trying to influence them, why should you avoid trying to
influence their moral judgment?  If there is no such thing as morality,
as you suggest, then this will have no more significant impact than
trying to influence their esthetic judgment by making them realize that
the story in hand is well-worded.  If there is such a thing as morality,
is there a more benign way to attempt to educate people in yours than by
writing stories about it?

You might note, by the way, that "Crime pays" is every bit as much a
moral, and a tenet of a moral viewpoint, as "Crime doesn't pay." Sounds
to me like the moral of your stories would be something like "Shit
happens." Perhaps not a terribly interesting moral, but a moral
nonetheless.

| Does anyone out there still use a theme in their stories?

Yep.  Myself, and just about every writer I've read.

Now I'm curious.  Why exactly do you want to write fiction anyway?


-- 
--Fred, or another blind 8th-century BC  |  sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com
        Hellenic poet of the same name.  |