Messages and Morals

The message of Home Is Where The Heart Is (I'm writing it atm) is that it's okay to be yourself.

The message can be interpreted from your work, I have an underlying moral for 'Over Exposure' which will get revealed closer to the time, but if you don't have a moral you can easily pick out one, even from a small part of the story.

I think I just end up putting morals in there right in the middle of the story.

Sorry, most of the stories here on Mibba are my more entertaining ones, so I don't have examples just yet. :/

One I am writing right now is about the society and how many people are very uncaring to the world around them, and get caught up in their own thoughts and ideas. As soon as I develop it more, I shall post it.

Pretty much the moral of The Boy with the Protest Sign is that if you use your voice, you can save someone. It's also very anti-WBC.

For me, I believe there’s always lesson/message in something... though, whether the lesson is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is a different story. I mean, sometimes even from just looking (well, reading) what a character says, there is something I can learn. ...Well, that’s what it is to me, anyway. ^^

But hmm. To be more precise, I guess for my story, Love thy neighbour, the title pretty much says it all, but there’s also more (but I guess that will be revealed later on the story)...

For The Colour of Hate, I guess it’s where the protagonist needs to learn to accept people for who they are and to be less judgemental, as well as learning how to accept change (again, I’m sure more ‘messages’ or ‘morals’ will appear later the story, maybe...).

Obscurity - the subtext says ‘It’s not an illness, but a blessing’ and what I want to incorporate in this story is how people view people with mental illness to be ‘sick’, when it’s not always the case... uh, I’m not really explaining myself well, but I guess what I really want to portray is that people with mental illness are a ‘blessing’ (aaaannnnd again, as the story develops later on, I want to explore that notion more into depth). :)

The message of Human After All is kind of that the concept of being human is a lot more complex than we like to think it is, and what makes a human is not having forty six chromosomes or a live, beating heart.

For me stories should have an underlying message unless it's a PWP fic. Most of mine have messages concerning relationships, I believe and some have religious messages.

However, I don't usually intentionally set out to make a point, it just seems to flow from the stories themselves.

Though with Shadows Creed, I'd make an exception. I think the message in this story is to do with music and what it means to society and well it's really a big 'What If?" story.

I think the messages in the Renny Boy series are to be true to yourself, don't be a little ingrate brat, cherish what you have, and to expect the unexpected. Corny, I know.

The main message in I Can't Hang is to - again - expect the unexpected. Also, watch out for the ones who love and care about you.

Of course, Say It Like You Mean It!'s moral is that lying is bad and it can really stick you in some deep shit.

And the message in Spin is that no matter how crappy you think you have it, somebody else has it crappier.

I'm pretty sure almost all of my stories have some sort of message or moral Most of them are along the lines of, "Fight for what is right," because it's something I believe in greatly. That and "Communication is key."

I agree with him. There are a lot of crappy books out there that get a lot of attention, and after I've read them I can't even find a point in the plotline. What was I supposed to get out of that?

I guess this is just because I enjoy analyzing books and getting meanings out of them. I mean, to think about books as food, some books are like junk food. They taste good and they give you a sugar-rush for the moment, but it's not substantial. Other books are good foods, sometimes tough and chewy, and you have to work to get it down, but in the end you've got something that holds you up and makes you better.

Sometimes when I'm really exceptionally bored and there are no other books to read, I go for a junk-food book and it satisfies me for the moment. But a good food book, that gets me thinking, it inspires me, and it gets me moving for a long time. I look for those kinds of books.

Anyway, I always try to put messages in my stories. Sometimes I don't even try, it just happens. I want to make someone think about my story, you know? A junk food book won't be a classic like The Scarlet Letter, or Frankenstein. Anyway, I'm done rambling.

I take reading as a serious business and most times when I read a story, I always want there to be a message or moral inlaying in it. It could be a huge moral, or something small. My story The Girl in the Window has a lot of multiple ones that are portrayed by different character persona's. But it's more of an environmental/cultural story, aimed at a certain crowd.

I think every story has a message in it, no matter how deep or flat that message is. Even if the story is just about some girl running off with a band, there's a message to be taken from that. It just depends on how you look at it.

Most of the time I don't actively try to convey a message in my writing. It just sort of happens on accident - I still probably couldn't tell you what the message in Generation Why Bother is, to be frank. (Friends are cool? Teamwork is the key to success? Defend pop punk??? I dunno.) Same thing with Bus. I never set out to teach anybody anything with that story, though I ended up learning a lot about writing and myself through writing it.

I've never really tried to infuse my stories with a message and usually just let people get from it what they may, but I'm trying my hand at getting some deeper things across just to see what it's like.

I guess the moral of Who Knows, Who Cares is to open up every once in a while or something. I don't know, I can't really say; my main focus was just on the characters. I'm not sure if you can even learn anything from them.

And I hate to say it, but the moral of A List of Best Intentions kind of ended up being YOLO.

I was gonna make a new thread on this subject, but I guess I'll just try to revive this one, if that's alright. This is a subject that has been on my mind and heart a lot lately. I have recently been saved and become a Christian, and while I don't believe secular media is bad, it has been sort of impressed upon me that secular media should have morals and values (or at least not be, like, amoral and go against scriptural messages).

This has left me wondering if, as an author, I have a responsibility to write stories with morals and/or Christian values and/or religious themes. I mean sometimes I do write that stuff into my works, especially if I feel lead to do so, but sometimes I don't. I've always written stories like that, like half the time they do have a theme of some sort, but the other half of the time, they don't.

I guess I was just hoping to discuss this topic with some other writers. What do you guys think? Do you think writers, especially those who have faith/are religious, are under any obligation to put morals and themes into their works? Is it something they aren't obligated to do, but should do? Or is it something that doesn't matter that much?