Whats the best sort of theme for a story?

For a movie I love a romantic comedy, but for books I love suspense.

Hero triumphs through adversity and grows in wisdom and understanding

Hey..do not fix your mind. Do not judge the audience. It kills your creativity. I am sure, if you have an out-of-the box creative story line (irrespective of whatever the theme is) that can make people to stick along, you are a winner.

Cheers and all the best.

@janbb Yes! :-)
Agree with @santoshannamalai in that you should let your creativity pour out of you. For me, characters are key. The audience don’t come into it when writing.

Dwarf erotica crammed with sizzling gypsies!

Let your creativity run amok and the story tell itself its own way. By the way, some of the best ones I’ve read and seen combine disparate elements, such as humor with high drama—romance with intrigue.

Thanks Everyone! :)

Most of the books that I enjoy the most are billed as a romantic comedies, but they also have some sort of secondary mystery going on too (whether it’s a murder, or something drastic is found out about one or more of the characters). I love suspense, but there has to be really good character driven stories.

You can’t go wrong with a good Bildungsroman.

Sorry to be so pedantic and nitpicky, I just can’t seem to help myself sometimes but technically, the categories you list as examples, romance, mystery, supernatural, horror are actually genres. (list of genres)

The theme(literature) is ” the main idea, moral, or message” of the narrative, of the story, play or novel, etc.

And I like all sorts of types of stories as long as they’re well written.

@lillycoyote Exactimundo!

I totally agree with @lillycoyote. And it doesn’t really matter too much what the theme is, whether one of the big basic ones, such as

• man against man
• man against nature
• man’s inhumanity to man
etc.

and other relatively generic ones, such as

• the search for family
• quest for revenge
• love conquers all

or more specific ones like these:

• knowing a person’s secrets gives you power over them
• happiness is right in your own back yard
• you can’t keep a good man down

What makes a good story is not its theme but its characters, plot, and development. A strong theme gives it richness and depth, but a commonplace theme such as “love is stronger than hate” can underlie an immortal tale like Romeo and Juliet and no one will complain. You can also have a great theme, an ageless one that has animated some of the best-beloved stories of all time, and still write a flat, worthless ruin of a story.