How long should a theme be

To identify the central idea or theme, one must also look at the other elements of fiction plot, characters, setting, conflict, etc. In order to understand the central idea or theme of the story ask yourself the following questions:.

Remember, there is no one way to express the central idea of a story but some statements are definitely better than others. Point of View. Conflict Lecture. Tone Lecture. Get a break down of how to create a theme statement through a thematic statement template.

Explore good and bad examples of theme statements to further your understanding. First of all, a theme statement or thematic statement describes a central idea within a piece of literature. This goes farther than just the theme topic of love, for example , to clarify the exact statement about love an author was making. A theme statement typically has three different parts. The thematic idea is the easy part of a thematic statement to find. This is a significant concept or topic covered in literature like loyalty, poverty, friendship, gossip, or equality, to name a few.

To find the theme idea, you just need to think back to the action and characters. An easy way to think about this is to think of the sentence:. Using your knowledge of the story, you need to formula what the author was trying to say about that theme idea. For example, for The Fault in Our Stars , it would look like:. Throughout the story, you can see this theme in the way Hazel and Augustus face and triumph over their impending death.

The qualifying clause in your thematic statement is optional and a more advanced skill for theme statement creators. This part of the theme statement provides the reader or your teacher with a bit more explanation or information about your statement. In most literary works, there could be more than one theme. Novels and plays, especially, are long enough that different readers could pick up on different thematic ideas throughout.

It is best to state the theme in a sentence. Instead of saying that a story is about "love" or "innocence," what is the point that the story is trying to make about "love" or "innocence"? Many of Aesop's fables end with an explicitly stated moral, or theme.