Everything We Hold

Photo by Vladyslav Tobolenko on Unsplash

Many years ago, I sat on a stage, ready to receive an award for my novel, Tangled Butterfly.  The woman introducing me, a perceptive reviewer, was talking, not just about Tangled Butterfly, but also about the two novels I had published earlier.  And she was doing more than talking about them; she was naming the central theme that underlay and connected them all.  The problem for me was that I hadn’t, until that moment, thought about the fact that my stories had a theme.  And I certainly hadn’t realized that each of them circled the same one!

I sat listening, amazed.  Gob smacked might be a better description.  I’d assumed all along that I had produced three separate, distinct, unique novels.  Yet this woman was standing up there telling the whole world that I had one simple statement to make! 

Even more disconcerting, I knew instantly that she was right, that in each of my separate, distinct, unique novels, I had, in fact, presented the same kind of challenge and resolved that challenge in the same way.  (And it is the resolution of the challenge that establishes the theme.)

Fortunately, the talk I was about to give was already prepared, so I stood and delivered it.  But a buzz had started up in my brain, and it followed me off the stage that day.  Marion, the buzz said, you’ve been found out.  Your career is over before it’s begun.  Clearly, you have nothing more to say. 

I don’t remember how long it took for that buzz to fade. I do remember, though, the moment when I finally said to myself, loudly enough to counter the noise inside my head, “If Hemingway could have a dominant theme, who in the hell are you to think you shouldn’t have one?”

I pushed that discovery aside and went back to work.  It was necessary to push the discovery aside, though, because identifying a story’s theme may be useful for scholars, but for me, the lowly writer, knowing too clearly what I intend to say can only be an impediment.  Fiction writing is an act of exploration, not transcription.

So, as I said, I went back to work, searching for the truth of my next novel exactly as I’d done before.  By writing it. That it would—inevitably, it seemed—be the same truth I’d offered before wasn’t mine to worry about.  Or grieve over.  Or castigate myself for my message not being larger, more varied.  It was, after all, my message, even if I hadn’t quite known I was delivering it. 

I once heard a Newbery Medalist tell of a phone call she received from her young grandson.  His class had been asked to a write a paper, identifying the theme of her award-winning novel.  Taking a bit of a short cut, he called to ask her what it was.  She thought carefully and gave him the very best answer she had.

The next time they talked, though, he wasn’t happy.  His teacher had given him a D on his paper! 

This isn’t to suggest that I think it’s nonsense to name a story’s theme.  I have enough experience both as a literature student and as an English teacher to respect the concept.  What it does say, though—and plainly—is that a writer, at least a good writer, doesn’t create stories to deliver a message.  Whatever truth propels a story is one the writer is setting out to discover for herself.  Even if it turns out to be the same truth every time.

And it often does.

We writers create stories to explore some deep longing that informs our own lives.  We follow the trajectory of that longing, seeking resolution on the page.  In the case of children’s writers, most of us dip into a child-hole, a place where our needs were never met—we all have a child-hole, however fine our upbringing—and we spin a story to fill that hole.  We are rarely aware of what we’re searching for.  We simply feel the pull of, the necessity for the search.  

Much the same is true for readers.  We read to discover a truth that matches ours.  We also read to enlarge our world.  “Mirrors and windows,” as the saying goes.  We read to find ourselves on the page and to experience a truth that may not be ours but feels true, nonetheless.

Still . . . can a story’s theme be called Truth when what the writer has to offer is so very personal?  I have long believed—as a writer of stories I must believe—that the more personal my story, the more universal it is.  No one arrives at Truth, certainly not a lived truth, by reaching for large concepts.  We find it by going inward, by searching out the most deeply hidden, the most profoundly felt, the most private. 

When we touch that place, when we draw it into the light, everything we hold is our theme.