MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Using a theme to create a bare bones synopsis

crich70 · 06-30-2014, 02:54 AM

In one of the books on writing I have here at home the author (Lee Wyndham) mentions a method of coming up with a story via theme that I thought I'd post about. She uses one of her own short stories as an example. The theme was that "understanding and helpfulness overcome suspicion and lead to friendship." She then broke it down into its component parts:

Understanding and helpfulness - characters
Suspicion & distrust - the problem to be overcome & the conflict.
Lead to friendship - the resolution and ending of the story.

Her story was set in a Korean background and dealt with characters having Whooping Cough. She made the point that by a change of location, character & problem could lead to an entirely different story than the one she wrote using the same theme. I think myself that you can take it a step further in that by changing the characters, location and/or problem you could come up with the bare bones synopsis of not just one story but many different ones. I mean different settings are easy to associate with different genre's for example. And all you have to do once you have that basic skeleton down is to flesh it out a bit. i.e. Ask some questions as to why the problem exists and why the characters can't just solve it in 5 minutes. And flesh it out into scenes and/or chapters from there.

06-30-2014, 02:54 AM	#1
crich70 Grand Sorcerer Posts: 11,310 Karma: 43993832 Join Date: Feb 2010 Location: Monroe Wisconsin Device: K3, Kindle Paperwhite, Calibre, and Mobipocket for Pc (netbook)	Using a theme to create a bare bones synopsis In one of the books on writing I have here at home the author (Lee Wyndham) mentions a method of coming up with a story via theme that I thought I'd post about. She uses one of her own short stories as an example. The theme was that "understanding and helpfulness overcome suspicion and lead to friendship." She then broke it down into its component parts: Understanding and helpfulness - characters Suspicion & distrust - the problem to be overcome & the conflict. Lead to friendship - the resolution and ending of the story. Her story was set in a Korean background and dealt with characters having Whooping Cough. She made the point that by a change of location, character & problem could lead to an entirely different story than the one she wrote using the same theme. I think myself that you can take it a step further in that by changing the characters, location and/or problem you could come up with the bare bones synopsis of not just one story but many different ones. I mean different settings are easy to associate with different genre's for example. And all you have to do once you have that basic skeleton down is to flesh it out a bit. i.e. Ask some questions as to why the problem exists and why the characters can't just solve it in 5 minutes. And flesh it out into scenes and/or chapters from there.