Really creative writing

All stories should have a theme and smoking could be a good theme for a story

It’s of our time, it’s a current issue, people are interested in it. They’re interested in the effect that it has on people that smoke, the effect that it has on their relationships and possibly in the effect that it has on society.
For a long time crime was the dominant theme. But crime is a narrow field of human activity. It is restricted to criminals, their victims and private detectives or\and police detectives. By way of contrast, smoking is a wide field -a prairie. All kinds of people smoke. There are no restrictions.
Because of this, it shouldn’t be very difficult to assemble a few fictional characters that smoke - people from different social backgrounds.
A cynic might argue that in real life people from different social backgrounds don’t meet and interact, therefore it’s impossible to write a story about them. If it doesn’t happen in real life, it can’t happen in fiction.
Normally, this might be true. But sometimes an event occurs which disturbs the established social order. That event is the restrictions on smokers which are now common in many places.
These restrictions have brought smokers together, regardless of their social backgrounds. They are outnumbered, surrounded, a threatened species. And because of this they are sometimss forming relationships with other smokers, with other people who feel threatened.
This attitude isn’t difficult to understand. People who feel threatened naturally form alliances with other people who feel threatened. It’s the attitude of the early settlers in the western United States and the attitude of the Boer settlers in what is now south Africa.
The notion that smoking could be the theme for a story might seem ridiculous. But is it really so ridiculous? Several successful books have been written and several successful movies have been made about the victims of cancer. A story about the victims of smoking is merely more specialized.
The main theme - cancer, has proven to be a successful theme, tragic though it is. A writer who chose the theme of smoking could take advantage of this success, tragic though this theme is.