: Re: Is it bad idea to directly state the message/moral of a story? I realized I tend to state directly the message/moral of the story in my stories (as dialogue in most of the cases). My plots

@Lee1909368

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Ayn Rand was pretty explicit about the morals of her stories, and she sold twenty metric gajillion copies of her novels, so it’s clearly an approach that can work. But I think it’s an inferior technique. If the events of your story clearly illustrate the moral that you’re hoping to express, you don’t need to state it explicitly (although if it would be in-character for one of your characters to make that kind of observation, that’s acceptable). If the events don’t illustrate the moral, then stating it explicitly is making an unproven assertion.

The Israeli novelist Amos Oz once said that if he has a question and he knows the answer to it, he writes an essay, but if he has a question and doesn’t know the answer, he writes a novel. That’s an approach worth considering, too.

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