On Writing Craft,
Creativity and Inspiration
by Alexander Slagg
Build the Story and
the Themes Will Come
“Good fiction always begins with
story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses
to story.”
—Stephen King, from “On Writing”
One of the inaugural duties of a newly hired editor in book
publishing is to manage the slush pile. As the low editor on the totem pole at
my first editing gig, I was burdened with this thankless job. It was a burden
because I received 10-12 unsolicited submissions a day by mail and e-mail that
I had to sincerely review and turn down. It was thankless because, indeed, no
one thanked you for crushing their dreams of hitting the literary jackpot, even
if you were polite about it. And overwhelmingly, the precious kittens and
playful puppies I was tasked with stomping on were children’s book submissions.
No kidding. I can’t tell you how many new mothers and
fathers are out there, trudging through another late night feeding or Saturday
morning diaper run, and suddenly come up with a surefire kids’ book idea. Now,
moms and dads are awesome—we wouldn’t be here without them. I’m a dad. But not
all of us parents are dynamic storytellers. In fact, most aren’t.
The primary problem with 95 percent of these children’s book
submissions was that the author put the cart before the horse. They came up
with a theme, or more cringe-worthy, a moral, and then wrote the story to
highlight it. As my good chum (kidding) Stephen King points out, this is
backwards.
Predetermining a story's themes sets limits and boundaries
on where a story can go. It fences in the free will of creativity, not allowing
it to wander where it needs to go for the story. This approach confines the
spontaneity of the writing process that makes it fun in the first place,
sitting down with no clear idea of how you'll get a character or the plot from
point A to point B. But an hour or two later, you've done it. The end result of
overthinking a story before writing it is that it reads stiff and wooden,
lacking the loose flow of natural storytelling.
Good storytelling is a trek through a verdant jungle, a
voyage across a churning sea, a hike through a sunburnt desert canyon. It's a
journey. Overarching meaning and theme cannot be known until the writer has
traveled the length of the story. Only afterward, in a position to reflect on
what has transpired, can these archetypal elements be noticed and identified.
The thing about themes is that they are born out of the
subconscious world. As writers, we are the Greek poet Orpheus traveling into
the underworld to reclaim our wife, Eurydice. The one commandment Hades gives
us in return for our lost love is don't look back upon her as we climb back to
the surface. We must trust that she is following us back to life. The themes in
our stories will be revealed once we have completed our writing journey.
But it we short circuit the process—if we determine the
themes too soon—we meet the same fate as Orpheus. Our stories will be doomed
from the beginning. And we'll end up in a cave in some Thracian backwater,
plucking away on a second-hand lute with wine-stained hands, lamenting the
greatest story never told because we thought we knew the big picture before we
even set fingers to keyboard.
Touching on
various aspects of the writing process, Reflections from the Well is more than
a rote column, it’s a literary lounge where writers and other creators are
invited to share their own experiences. Share your comments with Alex for
possible inclusion on the LWN blog or in his next reflection at
aslagg@literarywritersnetwork.org.
