🚀 go-pugleaf

KVJLC@ASUACAD.BITNET (Jon L. Campbell) writes:
> 
>    My problem with this, is that writing a story with a theme implies
> that every story has a moral to be told.  

You are using the concept of "theme" from high school English -- theme
is a pithy little sentence summarizing the semantic content of the
story, a point, or, as you put it, the moral of the tale.  This is way 
too simplistic.  In general, forget everything you were taught in high
school English class -- remember "is it man verses man or man verses
nature"?

As Fred has already pointed out, your concept of life as random
coincidences would, if embodied in your fiction, be a theme.  An 
exploration of how life in a small isolated society would change affect 
personal relationships -- sex aboard a spacecraft, to 
put it crudely -- would be another.

In general, stories with themes that, however loosely, be covered in a 
single sentence will be short stories.  Novels are much more complex
things, covering many different ideas, subplots with their own
obsessions, characters, etc.

Theme is important.  Don't think of it as the moral -- think of it as
the worldview embodied by the story.  (Note it may or may not be an
actual part of the worldview of the author, but itself a fictional
construct.)

> What do you think?  Does anyone out there still use a theme in their stories?

Oh yes.  I'm working through several different obsessions.  Most
involve the collision, often forced or even violent, of two different
cultures, and/or the slow adjustments afterwards.  I look forward to
exploring many different possibile results over the next decade.

	Larry "Often they go BOOM" Hammer
--

                         \   The work is rather too light, and bright,
LNH@physics.arizona.edu   \  and sparkling; it wants ... a long chapter
sometimes a Wombat         \ of solemn specious nonsense. -- Jane Austen