'Theme' Is a Scary Word

I have always hated having to identify themes in books. My slacker nature, perhaps. Or fear of being wrong and looking stupid in class or at book groups, maybe.

As a writer, someone who is supposed to be infusing a piece with meaning, this antipathy to theme is a Problem, capital P on purpose. (I'm making a distinction between writer and journalist. Simplistically put, for hard-news stories journalists make an effort to keep their opinions about meaning to a minimum.)

You have to have a theme in your piece (Why? See next paragraph), and a theme usually boils down to a big, vague, one-word Eternal Truth, like: Failure. Joy. Loneliness. Or a pithy sentence: Friends adapt. Love conquers all. A dog’s love is the best.

Truth? Who am I to figure out the truth, let alone hand it out to someone? I faced that question in my first year of the MFA program. The answer is: Get over it. If you want readers to connect with your piece, to have it mean something to them, to resonate with them emotionally, it has to Mean Something.

I’m still (STILL!) queasy about themes. Here’s how I deal with it:

• I use caps on words like Truth to make them seem vaguely archaic and ridiculous. For me, it lightens up the seriousness of it all. It's like that advice given to nervous speechmakers about imagining everyone in the audience in underwear.
  

• Instead of theme, I think in terms of The Big So-What. Translated: The big question every story has to answer is “So what?” Why is this important? There HAS to be an answer, or the story is a string of words on the page. Example: When some big rock star died, a friend of mine remembered that she had seen him when she was a kid standing in a music store. She'd looked over and, boom, recognized him trying out some guitar. End of episode. She wondered if she should pitch the story to a paper. No. There's no good answer to "so what?"
  

• As I write, I keep in mind the question, “What is this story about?” This avoids both “T” words, Theme and Truth. And when you answer this question, it can’t be in terms of what happens in the story. That’s the answer a third-grader is likely to give his mom when she asks what a movie is about—“It’s about this boy who wants a dog, then he finds a dog that came from outer space and the dog can talk to him and then the dog tries to organize other dogs to satisfy the Great Dane and the boy tries to help so that all the dogs won’t be recalled to the mother planet. . . .” Nah. The movie is about “friends help friends.”

OK. Enough on a stressful topic! Go write something, already!

category: craft

Motion vs. Action

From Ernest Hemingway, the advice: "Never mistake motion for action."

My attempts at housework spring immediately to mind. But when it comes to creative nonfiction, Papa Hemingway's tip is useful for reporting and writing.

Reporting: Writing down everything (or taping it) is good, but what stays in the story has to move the story forward. You have to sift through all that motion--everything said and done--for scenes that have a bearing on the heart of the story. And don't spend so long researching that you never get to writing.

Writing: A story's scenes have to have purpose--and add up to something. When I was in sixth grade, I wrote a play about life in Argentina, which we were studying. The play was full of scenes that imparted all sorts of information about life in colonial Argentina. My teacher read it and asked, "But what's the point?" Information isn't enough.

And not writing: Ever gotten to the end of a full day and not been able to cross anything off your "to-do" list? (In those cases, I add everything I did and cross them off.) Annoying as it can be, the clock keeps ticking regardless of how you fill up the time. As Thoreau put it, "It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?"

category: craft

Tidbits: Truth / Enhanced Narrative

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind.

- Emily Dickinson, poet (1830-1886)

How I apply that to narrative: keep the reader hooked till the end of the story.

* * *

A notice was just posted on WriterL, a paid e-mail list on literary journalism run by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jon Franklin and his wife, Lynn, directing people to an example of how narrative can be enhanced online. The Plain Dealer is running a seven-part series by John Mangel called "Plagued by Fear"; accompanying it online are documents, links to science Web sites, audio, additional photos and extensive footnoting. It's currently online at www.cleveland.com/plague.

categories: craft, reading

Humans Want Stories

As a journalist, I'm interested in telling a story that's true, but in a way that makes it as compelling as fiction. As a person, I'm drawn to quirkiness, whether it's in the living, the dead, or the inanimate.

In the mid-90s, I had a good career going as a freelance writer and editor, but I was getting restless in what I was writing. Out of nowhere, I got a flier for the first Mid-Atlantic Writers' Conference on Creative Nonfiction, featuring John McPhee. I went to see McPhee because I knew he was famous (I did manage to read something of his before the conference). And I learned about creative nonfiction (CNF), which is sometimes easier to define by listing what it's not: not poetry, not fiction, not pyramid-structured straight journalism. CNF tells stories that are true using the tools of fiction (dialogue, story arc, suspense, etc.). It's a type of writing that has been variously called literary journalism, feature writing, literary nonfiction, and nonfiction narrative.

I liked what I heard at the conference, so I enrolled in a low-residency master of fine arts program (Goucher, class of '99) in creative nonfiction.

An MFA is what's known in academia as a terminal degree. There were times in getting the degree that I thought it would kill me, and times when I wanted to die (can frustration be a cause of death?), but a terminal degree simply means that the MFA is the highest degree attainable in that field. In general, there's no Ph.D. to go after. After the MFA, there's just a leap into more writing.

Here, I want to give myself a public deadline for writing narratives. It's so easy to let all my time go to editing reports and writing "how-to" articles. My goal is to post a piece a week. Sometimes a personal essay. Sometimes pure reportage. Sometimes just a scene.

I also firmly--concretely, granitely, drought-hardened-mud firmly--believe that blogs ought to be more than navel gazing. In this blog, I'll post information pertinent to the craft of writing narratives that are true. Current arguments. New books. Resources. Notes from my MFA classes. Places online to poke around.

Stick with me. Although I can't promise a tidy ending, we'll see where this goes.

category: scribblings