On Writing

Conclusion Theme. Hopefully, now that you’ve read this book, it’s no longer the scary or confusing word it once was. You know what a theme is (the point that a story is making about how we should live our lives), you know where and how to find it (at the end of the story and

Chapter Twelve: Empathy  Strangely, though, what it seems that stories most have the power to do is make us better people. It’s true that stories, particularly group narratives, can have tremendously negative impacts (consider the stories told by racist hate groups, for example), but stories also have the power to shape society for the better.

Chapter Eleven: Social/Power Structures In all of this, there may be some interesting things going on with our background psychology. Some monkey scientists (as in scientists who study monkeys, not, you know, unusually inquiring and intellectual monkeys) have suggested that when monkeys groom each other, it’s not actually primarily about hygiene and keeping parasites/pests down

Chapter Ten: Social Cooperation Which segues nicely into our third point: that stories foster social cooperation. The act of telling a story implies an audience, someone to have the story told to, especially in the case of oral storytelling. And there’s a reason that parents are encouraged to read to their children: the act of

Chapter Nine: Memory Aids This idea of matching our observations to patterns we already know is actually a very important part of learning; in teacher training, for example, we’re constantly reminded to link new content with something that students already know, to ‘give them a hook to hang it on’ or to contextualise it, so

PART TWO Okay, so now you know how to find the theme of any story, and you’re hopefully not quite so terrified of all this theme bizzo. There’s still one thing I might need to convince you of though: Why does this actually matter? Who, apart from English teachers, actually cares about the theme of

CHAPTER SEVEN PART TWO FOR THE PANSTERS* * So called because pantsers write ‘by the seat of their pants’, making it up as they go along, without an outline or a specific plan. Pansters, exploratory writers, writers-into-the-dark: whichever name you call it by, for you, it’s all about journeying into the unknown, letting your subconscious

Chapter Seven Part 1 So you’re a writer, or a student who has to write a story for school or some such, and now you have an understanding of how theme works in other people’s work and why it’s important… but you’re not really sure how to implement it in your own work, or what

Chapter Six Alright, you’ve got your head around the idea of a theme; now it’s time to talk sub-themes. As you’ll have noticed if you’ve been paying attention (which, if you’re not, why are you reading this book right now?! Go sleep, or do something useful to reset your concentration meter!), every time we took