Does Your Theme Contain Character, Conflict, Resolution?

For a theme to work and the story, which will revolve around the theme, it has to contain three things…

1. Character

2. Conflict

3. Resolution

What’s the reason for this?

If your theme doesn’t contain these three essential elements, then you won’t be writing a proper short story. It might turn out to be an essay instead.

Because without…

1) Characters

You can’t achieve emotional depth. Readers become engrossed in stories because of the characters in them. They either become the character (sympathize), or read about an interesting person (empathize).

Emotional depth is achieved when readers use their imagination and senses and/or experiences to live the story through the characters.

2) Conflict

Your story will be boring. Why? Without conflict, something to stir things up, nothing happens. And a story, in which nothing happens, is one not worth writing about.

Your characters don’t lead carefree lives. Well, not in the instance you are writing about them. In that part of their lives they are faced with a problem. They want something and can’t get it because of the conflict, which is preventing them to do so.

And it’s that conflict and the struggle the characters has to undergo that keeps us readers interested and in suspense. Will the character succeed or won’t he? And when is this all going to happen? And how is it all going to happen?

3) Resolution

Something that starts has to finish, one way or another.

Once you have created great characters, which the reader will come to care about, and you have placed them in conflict, that conflict at the end of your story has to be resolved. The characters will achieve their goals or they won’t.

That doesn’t matter.

You can end your story as you please and as it suits your story – but you have to end it. Ending the story means resolving the conflict.

Does your theme contain character, conflict, resolution?

©  Nick Vernon

Quotes

"There will come a day, if you persist, when your pen will move nimbly and you will feel elated, and exclaim to yourself: Now I know that I can write,"
ARNOLD BENNETT

"Jilly Cooper has been described as 'insecure and ludicrously sensitive': characteristics of any successful writer,"
MICHAEL JOSEPH

"Writing is a dog's life, but the only one worth living,"
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

"If you write from the heart, you are writing at the very best of your ability,"
BERNIE ROSS

"I can't write a sex scene. In my first book there was one four-letter word, and my mother saw it and told me off about it. I wrote a sex scene and when Doubleday (publishers) saw it they just laughed at me. They said, 'You don't need it. You are a story-teller,'"
JEFFREY ARCHER

"When I was ten, my dad bought me a second-hand typewriter and I typed out these little tales and stitched them in a folder with a hand-painted title. When I was twelve I submitted one - about a little horse, I think - to something called The Children's Mag and it was actually published. I have never stopped writing since,"
BARBARA TAYLOR BRADFORD

"Write hard and clear about what hurts,"
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath,"
F.SCOTT FITZGERALD

"Don't allow yourself to get fussed over how to begin. Don't sit staring at a blank screen,"
DONNA LEVIN

"Raising questions and then supplying plaudsible, yet unexpected answers, this is the job of the storyteller,"
DAVID GERROLD

"Fiction fatigue - expect it, and don't let it ruin your story,"
ANSEN DIBELL

"I would never write about someone who is not at the end of his rope,"
STANLEY ELKIN

"Give the readers a book with people they care about and they will queue up to shake the author's hand,"
NORMAN COUSINS

"An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke,"
F.SCOTT FITZGERALD

"Always remember your reader, or else you are talking to yourself,"
NIGEL WATTS