Welcome back. In this video, we will be reviewing the elements of plot and then also talking about theme. Hopefully, you've been having great success reading your novel or short story. And you worked your way through most of the plot by now, if you haven't done that, you can go ahead and listen to this lecture. But I would encourage you to come back once you finish your story, to listen to this lecture again and fill out the handout on theme that is in the resources for this lecture. So to review, the first stage of the plot is the exposition, and that's where the author introduces the characters and setting and also the conflict.

And hopefully you noticed all of those elements and wrote notes about them on the plot handout or somewhere in your notes. The inciting moment happens in During the exposition also, the next part of the plot is the rising action, where you are having conflicts build and everything is going to get, it's worse at the very top of the mountain where the climax is. And then the main character has a turning point where they make a decision that changes their life forever. After that, we go into the falling action and the falling action lets us know what happened to all of the other characters. And then we get to the resolution or denouement, and that is the end of the novel. Once you finish the story, then you get to start asking questions about why why did the author write this?

What were they trying to teach us about life? There's always some kind of lesson about life in literature and that is the theme. Okay? And there are so many different themes and literature and here are just a A few possibilities that you might have seen in your story, redemption, resurrection, the prodigal son or daughter maybe transformation, vengeance, innocence, justice, sacrifice, jealousy, friendship, love, fate, or destiny. There are many more than I didn't list. But hopefully some of those sounded like something that you saw in your story.

They can have the theme be either stated where they kind of like a fable where they just tell you the moral at the end of the story. And they pretty much say, this is the lesson that you should be learning. That is not very often that we see that in literature. So I doubt that's what happened in your story. Most of the time, it is not stated, but it's implied and that's where they don't come out and tell you the exact theme But they imply that this is the way things should be or the way things are. And they teach you about life in an implied lesson, based on what happened to the main character and what they learned, the author's hoping you will also learn that same lesson.

So really think about what happened to the main character in your story. And ask yourself what statement about life would the author possibly be trying to make or it could be a statement about humanity or the world and just think about what happened to them and what they learned and what you could learn from their experience, and that is probably going to reveal the theme that the author was trying to teach you. So once you've thought about the theme and reviewed the plot, take a few minutes to read over the handout on theme that's in the documents for the resources for this course and try to complete that so that you can really examine the theme for your story. I'm really proud of you for reading all the way through your story and thinking about the lesson that you can learn about life or the world or humanity from your story.

And I truly hope that you are excited to read another one now that you have completed this book, or short story. So in our next lecture, I will be going over how to write a review of your story so you can share with other people what you thought of it and make recommendations to them about whether or not to read the book. Hopefully it will be a positive one. If not, though, we will talk about that as well. Good job working hard and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.