Themes Place in Your Story
O’Connor has done it again everyone. I do consider the queen of southern gothic fiction writing, honestly the queen of fiction on some days. But that aside, I’m referring to a point she made in her section aimed at fiction in Mystery and Manners. I was reading it again and this highlight of advice jumped out at me. I’ve been thinking a lot about how much effort and how much of my soul is going into my projects. You can relate, you’re a writer, so much goes into crafting and then you see poorly crafted things getting the spotlight and you are constantly comparing yourself and ending up in a bad cycle but in two paragraphs O’Connor eases those thoughts and fears. She said,
People have a habit of saying, “what is the theme of your story?” and they expect you to give them a statement: “The theme of my story is the economic pressure of the machine on the middle class” –or some such absurdity. And when they’ve got a statement like that, they go off happy and feel it is no longer necessary to read the story. So people have the notion that you read the story and then climb out of it into the meaning of the story but to the fiction writer himself, the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction. (O’Connor 73)
Okay, there’s a lot here but what she’s mainly expressing is about the theme of your story. Most people think theme is the heart of your…
