What is the Meaning of Your Work?

So this is completely ripped off of John Truby's The Anatomy of a Story, but in general, if you're trying to tell a serious story with a beginning, middle and end, you should have a moral argument to make. Your message can be as simple as "selfless people live the happiest lives" or "money can corrupt a man" but there should be one nonetheless. That being said your story doesn't have to be about war, injustice, child marriage, mental health, etc. or anything "heavy" or serious like that. When your character is met with conflict, overcomes it, and becomes a new person, they (usually) improve in some sort of way. This improvement reflects what you think is how a human being SHOULD behave in society.
Again, this is how most conventional stories go

One's work could be any of the things you mentioned - however, it definitely helps to know what exactly you're aiming for your work to do.

A work can be whimsical and just meaning to entertain or get a few laughs, such as something like GamerCat. Other more serious works like Goodnight Punpun may aim to explore the psyche of troubled youth.

In spite of this, one of these works is not necessarily superior to the other just because they deal with serious themes, or because they incite more laughter from the reader.
There's value in any "meaning" a work is trying to express.

However, said "meaning" of a work is something you have to commit to--considering this, don't feel inclined to make your works involve serious themes only for the sake of them.
Overall, I think you're better off aiming to have your work be intellectually and emotionally honest. If there's an issue or a facet of life you want to comment on whole-heartedly, then do so.

I have a habit of tackling dark themes because I want to understand them more. In addition, I aim to not glorify such themes and do heavy research to avoid that. Writing for me is working with themes I want to confront personally and mixing them in a cauldron of creativity. c:

Gotta make a note to do something lighter next time xD

Ideally creation doesn't exist.
You can do whatever you want with your creation within its own rule.

My comic mentions to this topic a lot, if you're interested. This is my comic.

My opinion on it is, doesn't matter as long as you enjoy working on it.

My comic started as a way to improve my art. I've always enjoyed story telling too, and will admit that I've grown more involved in the story than originally planned, but it was first and foremost meant to just be floofy feel good wholesome romance. There are little messages scattered throughout, but this is in no ways some deep meaningful comic. it's more of an escapism device. I'm totally ok with that too. I am having fun, my readers are having fun. Not everything has to be a deep and meaningful work of art to have value in life. Not every story has to move your insides and make you question your being.

I don't think so. Just like beta said, it doesn't matter if your creations have meanings or not, as long as you enjoyed making them and can makes peoples happy by sharing them around.

I think you're all good.

I think it's difficult to tell a story that doesn't have any meaning.

I don't mean that you have to have meaning in order to tell a story, but that if you tell a story, it will end up with meaning whether you meant it to or not.

Break it down to its most simple -- let's say you have a character that faces a hardship, overcomes that hardship, and gets a happy ending. How does the character overcome the hardship? By getting stronger? By learning to be kinder? The choices you make here say something about how you think the world works. What does a happy ending look like to you? Is it friendship? Is it riches? Is it revenge? You end up with a message even if you never meant to.

And I think creators run into those meanings differently. Some folks set out to create a story to explain something that weighs heavily on their soul -- they have SOMETHING to say and they have to find a way to convey it. Some people invent stories that appeal to them and immediately realise "oh, this is me tapping into my experience with [x]" and start to form their story around that meaning. And then some people honestly don't find their meaning until they start actually putting the story together; they don't start to see the themes or the purpose of their story until they know where it's going. None of those is a more "right" way to do it than the others.

I ran a journal comic called Today Nothing Happened for four years. I had seen other journal comics that were sort of brutally honest, really raw looks at the creator's lives that I kind of admired, and envied a little, but didn't think I could make a comic like that. TNH was lighthearted, and I made a decision early on that I was going to try to never make people I knew look bad, and that I was going to avoid Drama -- if I got in a fight with someone, that would never go in the comic. Its goal was to stay sort of light and fun no matter what was going on, and in a way, that was the Purpose and Meaning of my comic, to find those light-hearted funny moments.

One of the emails I got from a reader that really meant a lot to me was actually from a soldier, overseas, someone I didn't know. He told me that my silly comic about my daily life and dumb nerdy jokes meant the world to him -- it was a small piece of something normal and happy while his surroundings were anything but. My comic wasn't full of Heavy Deep Meaning, but it meant something incredible to this person who needed it.

People need stories. My grandmother's told me often that, as a young person going through The War in Japan, the only really good thing that she had was reading sci-fi to escape and dream of something better. Some people need lighthearted stories, some people need heavy stories, some people desperately need stories that show them their own experience, some people desperately need to be challenged by the experience of others.

I think you have to tell the story that's in you, because that's the one that you can tell the most honestly. Finding the meaning that's in it can help you more clearly see what direction to go in when you're unsure, I think, so it's still useful! But I don't think you need an Impactful Real Life Allegory Of The World's Injustice in order to be deeply meaningful to someone.

I have actually no idea what the story should be, because different people have so different opinions about it (you could see right now different opinions about moral of the story, for example).
But I can tell how I'm creating my stories myself.

During my whole life, when I was in transport or walking or resting, my brain often started to produce different kind of stories and scenes spontaneously. I wrote down some of them - those which were short and had a completed small plot - and just forgot the rest. While my own personality was developing through life, the content of those stories was changing, too. Particularly, they became more NSFW, complicated and dark with time.
During the last year, while I've imagened different sort of situations, action of all kind and consequences of different sci-fi inventions, I've noticed that some characters started to recur in those games of mind. Moreover, they became more precise and alive from scene to scene. Thats how the characters and particular scenes of "the story how humanity blablabla" were formed (actually, there is already much much more stuff in my mind about this story than I can to implement in the reasonable time).
When I already had the bunch of characters and action scenes in my mind, I started to connect them. Thats how I've received the plot (there is a plot, actually, I've even written outline of it down in the notebook). Also I've often wondered how could they do this and that, and how this and that invention could appear and work etc. Thats how the world itself was formed and specified and become sort of small... setting, I dunno?
Eventually, I've started to draw comics about all of it. I don't know how it works, but when some critical mass of content was formed, I just felt the need to implement all of it somehow. It is just my own strange need, nothing more. I didn't even think about making an ideal creation and I'm sure that such a thing don't exist. But in the same time, I'm having fun when I share and discuss my story with others, because it is so interesting for me (if it wasn't, I wouldn't invented it).

In general, I think that when you do anything, the first thing which is reasonable to keep in mind about it is if it good for yourself or not. If the creation of the story is interesting for you and/or make you feel better or just relieved, that means it is good for you, it hit the spot in some way. So in this case it seems reasonable to continue.

P.S. Sorry for such a wall of slurred text ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I hope you was managed to understand at least something...

TL;DR: just create when you feel the need to do it

I think the act of creating is inherently quite meaningful.

It's great when people create stories that feel deep and meaningful, but it's also true that we need all kinds of stories at various levels. Sometimes an important message is communicated, and sometimes something is just fun or sweet or exciting, and sometimes you get a mix, and it's all valid. ^^

Ok, my hubby would claim that you talked to too many art professors right now.

Simply put art can be created for any reason and still be art. The big question is- did it give you something by making it. You the ARTIST... everyone else is secondary. It doesn't have to be planned or random. serious or light hearted. One style or another. The amazing thing about art is everyone gets different things from it.

You may draw something to work out frustration and it may make me laugh, bob think, and susan cry. You may make it contain a message and it may go over everyone's head but Billy- and it may inspire him to do something. You may make something with no intended message and it still inspires someone else.

The important question to ask is why do you want to make a particular bit of art. If it's for fun, then make sure you have fun doing it and forget the rest! If it's because you wanna try a new technique this time- then go for it and learn a new skill! If you want to create something with a message that's important to you- do it and know some people will probably not get/agree with it but that's OK. You just wanna make a picture to make a friend happy, then guess what it is still art. Heck if you just wanna doodle and see what comes out of it then do it! Amazing ideas and work comes from that and it may serve as inspiration for you another day!

In the end.... if you made it and are happy it came into existence then it is, in fact, art. Nothing else matters unless you were trying to do a specific thing.

I'm gonna put it like this. No work is above another! In regards to how it handles its themes, anyways! Somebody else can write a story relating to these heavy themes and still be garbage, you know? There's an important thing that needs to be understood about this. Heavy themes don't automatically make your story better. Include them if you want, but the idea's the same, your story's not gonna magically get a level-up just because you included that. The only thing that matters here is that you find a voice in your writing and that you deliver the story well enough with that same voice. Even if it's a relatively simple plot, you can still tell it in amazing ways.

Besides, I'd argue it's okay and borderline necessary, to have light-hearted stories. That variety in what we can read is fun, and frankly, I wouldn't want everything to have some deep underlying meaning.. that'd have to be exhausting after a while. You can write a story about a leaf blowing in the wind instead of the trials and errors of human society and the implications of it for the future generations- you see what I'm getting at? If you wanna be the person who wrote the former rather than the latter, I'm all for it! The world's dark enough as it is, let your story be a happy place for yourself and others if you want~

It can literally be any of those reasons, dude, that's what's beautiful about art and expressing yourself through it! It's not confined to these rules of what mindset you have to be in before you make anything, you can just go for it because you wanna. On the flip side of it, many people can interpret that art in different ways, and that's where stuff can get interesting.

We all know that one idea of modern art. You know, the type where someone can literally just paint a canvas blue and sell it for millions. There's people that can see it as an experimental piece of texture work, there's people that can see an expression of sadness through the way the brush ran across the canvas, and others.. just see a waste of blue paint. People can make up their own meaning for "meaningless" work and fill in the gaps themselves if needed. You don't need to justify everything you make with a purpose, and if you have to apply some valuable meaning to it, you can just make it the fact that it's your creation and that you're happy with it. You shouldn't need to overcomplicate it further than that or stress yourself out over it.

It goes back to what everyone's saying so far. If you're happy making a story and you're having fun with it. That's all the meaning it needs. Hey, let's make it simpler, if you just wanted to make something, that can be enough as well. Go further on it if you want, but I think that should be at the very base of everything we make. Hope that's a halfway decent answer for you~

I don't think there HAS to be a moral or a point to a work. I'm sure there are great stories out there that don't really have any morals or points but they're still great. For example, The Big Lebowski is pretty much just a comedy movie that doesn't exist to teach you any lessons; it just exists to make you laugh and it does a good job of it.

For my own stories, I tend to like to put things in it things that worry or bother me personally. I once wrote a character who was really terrified of the future because it's something that I worry about, too. At the end, he faced the thing that terrified him in his future and he got to move on with his life. I usually prefer stories like this where a writer communicates their own doubts or insecurities about something because it makes the story feel more genuine and real.

But not all stories have to be deep or have a message as I said earlier. Disney movies are usually pretty simple and in my opinion pretty flat, but they're still incredibly enjoyable despite their very simple messages and the viewer can still get something rich out of them.

My personal philosophy:

(I'm not religious though)

Ideally I am able to joyfully keep working even while knowing there is no real meaning behind it. But that's easier said than done, so sometimes I still struggle with the existential crisis thing.

At the same time, I do want to create things that genuinely benefit people. And I've thought about this a lot, to be honest. What kind of art or story can benefit people the most?

Is it enough for something to simply be beautiful? Frankly, art and stories are so cheap nowadays - by that I mean there is so much of it that I wonder if people have become somewhat desensitized due to sheer overexposure. As an artist, it's nice to believe that the thing I spend hours creating will really inspire someone, but most of the time someone will look at it for a few seconds, hopefully crack a smile, and then move along as if nothing happened. If that's the best that I can do, so be it, but I have to wonder if that's really it, you know?

I also don't want to tell stories just for the sake of entertainment or as a device for escapism. Firstly, because so much of that already exists that it seems redundant to make one more story like that when there are already millions of others that can fulfill basically the same need. Secondly, because I think escapism isn't the best way to deal with life. Rather than making something comfortable that helps people forget about their problems, I'd like to make something that inspires people to face their problems - that changes their actions in real life. But how to do that - I'm not sure at all...

TL;DR I want to make people's lives better beyond just providing entertainment but have no idea what I'm doing.

Meanwhile I just keep practicing so that if/whenever I figure it out, my lack of skill won't hold me back.

Thoughtfulness, meaningfullness and impact can manifest in many ways. Not only with serious or deep topics.

A lighthearted story can help a person to rest their mind after a long day. People can bond over watching a comedy. If a story wakes up the interest of people and fulfill its purpose (it could be many things, to entertain, to make people think, escapism, to teach a life lesson, etc...), then that story is meaningfull for them.

Thoughtfullness depend more on how deeply was thought. Even the most absurd and silly work can be brilliant master piece if it`s properly executed.

As many people already said, tell the story you want to tell, you have higher chances of being meaningfull if you follow the message from your heart.

This is a story with lots of fantastical elements and magic system and angels, but in the end its not about any of that. To put it as simply as I can; It's about flawed people trying to hold onto the better parts of themselves. Dunno if it comes across, not yet at least since I barely began to scratch the surface.