CHAPTER 23

WHAT YOUR STORY SAYS

BY NANCY KRESS

Theme. The most fraught word in literature. You can call it central concern or reader resonance or some such thing, but it still conjures memories of ninth-grade English: What is the book’s theme? Concisely state the theme, and be sure to support your statement with specific examples in a well-written essay …. No wonder so many writers go out of their way to announce their fiction has no theme. They don’t want students forced to reduce their works to twenty-five words or less of platitudes.

Nonetheless, every work of fiction does have a theme. And, as a writer, it’s helpful to know what yours is.

Three paragraphs into this article, and I know I’m already in trouble with hordes of would-be dissenters. Yes, writers frequently aren’t particularly articulate about the larger implications of their own work. Yes, the text itself is what matters. Yes, a story can “mean” different things to different people. But I’m going to discuss theme anyway, because the lack of it is what I see crippling so many new writers’ work.

But let’s not call it theme, after all. Let’s call it worldview for reasons I hope become clear as we go. And let’s see why you need to think about it—if not during the first draft, then later—in order to make your work successful.

YES, MRS. MARBLEHALL, THERE IS A PATTERN

First, it’s impossible to write a story, or even a few significant paragraphs, without implying a worldview. This is because the writer has always chosen to include some details and to leave out others. Furthermore, the writer has—wittingly or not—chosen a tone in which to present those details. That tone, too, implies a worldview.

Here, for example, are two descriptions of the same person. The first is from a police report. The second is from a short story, Eudora Welty’s “Old Mr. Marblehall”:

Caucasian female, thirty-eight, 51, 175 pounds. Mole on left cheek, near eye. Described by neighbors as possessing thick shoulders, small round head. Last seen by neighbor, on own front porch, wearing sleeveless loose brown cotton dress, green bedroom slippers, size four.

There’s his other wife, standing on the night-stained porch by a potted fern, screaming things to a neighbor. This wife is really worse than the other one. She is more solid, fatter, shorter, and while not so ugly, funnier looking. She looks like funny furniture—an unornamented stair post in one of these funny houses, with her small monotonous round stupid head—or something like a woodcut of a Bavarian witch, forefinger pointing, with scratches in the air all around her. But she’s so static she scarcely moves, from her thick shoulders down past her cylindered brown dress to her stubby house slippers. She stands still and screams to the neighbors.

The police report, through its tone and choice of details, says this about the world: Reality can be objectively observed and numerically described. The physical world is our common ground in interacting with each other. Missing persons are sometimes able to be located and therefore it is rational to devise paperwork and procedures to do so. On the other hand, the Welty description—like the story from which it’s taken—implies a different view of the world: The best way to understand something is through subjective contrast and metaphor (“like funny furniture,” “like a woodcut of a Bavarian witch,” “so static” even though she’s screaming). Ways of interacting are grounded in some unseen judgment (“This wife is really worse than the other one”) that carries with it a tone of both contempt and mystery. A factual account of what the wife is shouting at the neighbors is never explained; it’s the overall subjective impression that counts.

It’s not hard to imagine a third way of describing the second Mrs. Marblehall that would be different from both these. Her view of herself as a wronged woman, perhaps. Or the view of her through the eyes of her six-year-old son as Mama, warm and loving and dependable. Each of these would imply yet another view of the world by emphasizing different aspects of reality.

What does all this have to do with theme in your writing? Hang on. We’re getting there.

It’s not only description that implies a view of the world. So does the choice of story events and the way they play themselves out in your work. Detective stories, for example, almost always end with the murderers being identified. If they did not, most readers would get quite upset. The choice of events—investigation, deduction, resolution—carries the metaview that the world is rational, and the further theme that crime doesn’t pay. Romances, on the other hand, all offer the reassuring theme that although the road to winning love may be rocky, love is possible and worth it. This is true even when the lovers end up losing each other, as in Robert James Waller’s best-selling The Bridges of Madison County.

It’s possible, however, to visualize a different choice of ending for Waller’s novel. Suppose his two lovers had still ended up parting, but after Robert leaves, Francesca’s husband discovers their affair. Shocked and betrayed, he divorces her. Francesca then hunts down Robert who, nomad that he is, has meanwhile taken himself to Argentina and fallen in love with a Spanish girl named Rosaria. There is a confrontation, and Rosaria shoots Francesca. In that book, the view of love—the theme—would be much different than in the one that Waller actually wrote.

So, on a macro level, the events you choose to include in your story form an overall pattern that implies a worldview. If you know what worldview you’re actually creating, it can help you choose events that support it, descriptions with telling details and evocative tone, and characters who bear out your beliefs. All this gives your fiction a wholeness, a consistency born as much of patterned emotion as of rationality, which can vastly improve it.

But there’s more. Pattern operates on a micro level as well as a macro level, and there, too, you have more control than you may think.

GUNS AND CASSEROLES

A famous writing maxim attributed to Anton Chekhov says that if you have a gun going off in the third act of a play, it had better sit on the mantelpiece during the first two acts. Conversely, if a gun is clearly visible on the mantelpiece for two acts, it had better go off during the third. In other words, critical plot developments and people must be clearly foreshadowed, not dragged in from left field at the end of your story. And if you spend time and verbiage on something early on, we can reasonably expect that thing to figure in the climax or denouement.

Suppose, for instance, you give four early pages of a thirty-page story to Aunt Mary’s shoplifting. She stole a candy dish and a bath towel. The incident is amusing, well-written, and characterizing. Is that enough? No. You’re letting us know that this incident will be part of the overall pattern of your story, and so it had better turn out to be just that. You’d better use that candy dish, that towel, or some other aspect of the escapade at Macy’s as an important element of your climax. A story, like an Oriental carpet, is a pattern, and everything in it is supposed to contribute to the design.

However—and here’s the critical point—not all patterns are equally tightly woven. Your theme gains or loses credibility partly on the basis of the weave you create.

In commercial fiction especially, everything in the story usually contributes directly to the plot. The shorter the story, the truer this is. Objects that receive more than one mention, secondary characters, symbols, events, lines of dialogue, all relate directly to the main point in a tightly woven pattern. Such fiction pleases us at least partly because it says to us that life contains patterns, order, design.

But each of us knows, in our heart of hearts, that life doesn’t really add up so neatly. A real person’s day (or week, or year) includes hundreds of small things unrelated in any pleasing, orderly way. Real life is messily patterned, if it’s patterned at all. Aunt Mary’s shoplifting occurs right in the middle of a daughter’s illness, a cousin’s wedding, a business triumph, a lawn-care crisis, and it’s unrelated to any of them. It’s not a pattern; it’s a distraction. Real life is disorderly.

As a result, fiction that is too neatly patterned will not feel real. When everything in a story works out exactly, and each detail we see has a neat place in the overall scheme, we may enjoy the story but we don’t really believe it. It has a sterile, manufactured feel.

Some writers, especially literary writers, compensate for this by including elements that are connected indirectly, often thematically, but not directly woven into the main plot. Anne Tyler is especially good at this. Her novel The Accidental Tourist abounds with subplots and digressions connected only loosely to the main plot of Macon’s romances. One recurring element is Macon’s sister Rose’s cooking. Rose cooks casseroles, desserts, a turkey. All of this could have been left out, but it serves several purposes. It deepens our understanding of Macon’s background. It creates thematic design; much of the book concerns how people nurture each other (or don’t). And it gives the book the feel of the multidistraction that is real life.

However, fiction in which there is no order whatsoever—in which things just seem to happen without connection or thematic implication—isn’t satisfying either. Why should it be? It may look like life, but we want something more from fiction. We already have life.

The result is that every writer walks a tightrope between arranging the elements of his story in too tight a pattern or too loose a pattern. Too tight, and the story feels contrived. Too loose, and it feels pointless. And, to complicate matters more, different kinds of fiction define “too tight” and “too loose” in different ways. Romance novels usually require tight patterning; literary short stories allow very loose design.

Theme is how much order, how stringently you’ve imposed on your fictional universe. It’s also what kind of order: happy, malevolent, despairing, random, hidden-but-there, and so on.

Some writers find that they don’t know their themes until they’ve finished the first draft (I am one). They then rewrite with an eye toward balancing on that tightrope: not too contrived, not too rambling; does what I’m saying about the world below me actually add up to anything? Other writers pay attention to these things as they write the first draft. Either way, an awareness of the macro and micro levels of theme can provide one more tool for thinking about what you should write, and how.

  NANCY KRESS is the author of many short stories and books, including Dynamic Characters and Beginnings, Middles & Ends.