Write Your Novel Step By Step
Step 27 – Your Thematic Topic
In this step, you’ll explore how a thematic topic provides the glue to hold your characters, plot and theme together. Then, you’ll identify the best candidates for a thematic topic in the story materials you’ve developed so far and incorporate them into your novel.
Intellectualism is the nobility of a free society. (Something I just thunk of that might be a good thematic topic for a story).
As with real people, characters can become trapped in their routines. When a person sets up a routine in order to achieve a goal, service the infrastructure of his or her life, cope with an emotional necessity, or engage in a desired ongoing experience, the situation, reasons, passions, or even the nature of the person himself may have changed in some way that makes the routine no longer effective, counterproductive, inordinately costly, or unsustainably unpleasant.
Still, because the human mind responds to conditioning, a person may continue in their routine by sheer force of psychological inertia. And since the human mind filters out going non-threatening repetitive stimuli (such as a ticking clock or air conditioner noise – called a selective filter) a person may never even become aware that they are in a routine, no matter how difficult or unenjoyable the routine is.
Stories that explore such issues can be very involving for readers or an audience, as they not only strike close to home, but also spark internal consideration which may illuminate similar solvable dissatisfactions in their own lives.
Learn more about incorporating thematic topics in your story in our book:
Learn more about storytelling in our book:
50 Sure-Fire Storytelling Tricks!
The Dramatica chart of story elements is the equivalent of the Periodic Table of Elements in physics or chemistry. In fact, it provides guidance for how to create the specific chemistry of your story by comining different dramatic elements.
Each of the four quadrants of the chart is a different family of dramatic elements, much as the periodic table is divided into families such as the “rare earth elements” or the “nobel gasses.” Unlike chemistry, the Dramatica chart further sub-divides the families into four sub-family levels, allowing for extremely precise descriptions and control of the the topical subject matter of your story’s theme.