Whichever theme you choose, all elements, which make up your story, dialogue, conflict, scenes, etc should be written with theme in mind.

Your theme should progress story.

If you find that anything in your story doesn’t progress it, it should be cut when you are in editing stage.

Before we see an example of elements written with a theme in mind, let’s think of a theme and a story….

The theme is…

‘Arrogance Leads To Humiliation’

Very briefly, this story is about a character that believes he is better than his colleagues.

His goal is to get promoted to a managerial position. What will prevent him from reaching his goal, is fact that management are aware of his arrogance and they don’t believe, with his attitude, he is right person to manage staff.

To meet his goal, character will take on more work than he can handle. He will do this to prove to management, that he is right man for job. But in end, he will make a grave error and his arrogance will lead him to humiliation.

Now let’s take a look at elements of this story…

Dialogue

It’s no use coming up with a theme and not using it. Short stories are about a character or characters and about one situation or happening in those characters’ lives.

By concentrating on that one thing, our stories are focused. You will need to focus to maintain a level of intensity and sticking to theme enables us to do that.

Let me give you an example…

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Scenario One

Let’s say your story is about a young man (main character) who is being harassed (one situation) by school bully (secondary character.) Let’s place setting in grade school.

Now if we focus on that single happening and in our story say….

•What started bullying

•What main character felt, confronted with this problem

•What main character did to overcome this problem

•If main character won or lost against bully…

Then we’ll be focusing only on that incident which is what our story is about.

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Scenario Two

Now if we took that situation further and in our story said that this character grew up and was bullied in high school and then later by a colleague…

That will be listing three incidences, which will weaken our story because we are not focusing.

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Remember a short story is short.