Would the Protagonist Read Their Own Story?
That’s a vital question to answer if you want your story to resonate. Now, of course, the theme should speak to the protagonist’s needs. But does the story uniquely appeal to its main character, as a real person living that story?
Mark Haddon points this out in reference to Pride and Prejudice:
“Jane Austen writes about people with desperately restricted lives and codified by iron rules,” he said. “The first thing she does is to choose a genre, the romantic novel, which is exactly the kind of book those women would read if they were reading books.”
How great is that? Even the genre of the work itself serves the overall message and theme of the work.
It shows you how cohesive a story can be. Speaking to the relevancies of the audience places characters in the audience’s world. Stories that are relevant to the characters that drive them, however, draw people into the story’s own world.