{"id":11557,"date":"2025-08-20T06:59:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T10:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11557"},"modified":"2025-08-19T15:01:21","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T19:01:21","slug":"treating-themes-like-shy-forest-animals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11557","title":{"rendered":"Treating Themes Like Shy Forest Animals"},"content":{"rendered":"
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So many thought-provoking insights were in the George Saunders interview I wrote about last week<\/a>, I saved a few for today. One issue he talks about is how politics and themes enter his writing. Not deliberately. He calls the writer mind the one \u201cthat wants to pull the big manure truck with your politics and your thematics in it and dump it on the reader.\u201d We\u2019ve all read novels like that, that hammer home their point again and again, as if the reader is too dim to get it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you can keep that conceptualizing mind quiet, Saunders believes, your themes and politics will behave \u201calmost like really shy animals.\u201d He recommends simply ignoring them, pretending you\u2019re not interested in them when they come out of the woods. If you instead concentrate on the story you\u2019re telling, these ideas\/themes\/whatnot will be there. They\u2019ll leach in, coming in \u201cso honestly, and they won\u2019t be abstract, but intimately linked to action and character.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe that\u2019s why, not deliberately, but completely subconsciously, I didn\u2019t even recognize how much the theme of prejudice (and its ill effects) had seeped into my novel, Architect of Courage<\/a><\/em>. I hadn\u2019t set out to write a book about prejudice; in fact, I hadn\u2019t even realized so much of it was there, in one way or another, until after the book was finished and I was working on blurbs and synopses. You can\u2019t hide who you are, I suppose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This topic reminds me of how much I admired Brad Parks\u2019s crime novel, The Last Act<\/a><\/em>, which he wrote in furious response to Wachovia and Wells Fargo Banks\u2019 laundering of drug cartel money (which I learned about only because he included an incendiary author\u2019s note). The book itself says nothing to convey his outrage; on the surface it\u2019s an entertaining crime story, with nice twists, but it lays up next to that theme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saunders believes it\u2019s a matter of being patient with the writing and letting the story go where it wants to go (the idea of a story having its own wants is a little hard for me; it\u2019s easier to think of letting your subconscious mind work hard), and not forcing it. When an author pushes a story in a particular direction you can run into the problem of, \u201cOh, she did that goofy thing for plot reasons, not because it makes any sense.\u201d Saunder would probably disagree, but in mysteries, sometimes the plot does<\/em> need to go in a certain direction, yet it cannot seem that the author is steering it that way. If it\u2019s too blatant, readers feel manipulated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Television shows, working against constraints of time and possibly imagination, make transparent plot-driven choices all the time. Why do tv police officers always decide not <\/strong>to call back-up? Why do young women wearing long nightgowns and carrying a candle that will inevitably blow out go down in the basement at night to investigate a mysterious noise? These are plot-driven actions that are character-driven only for people who are irresponsibly reckless. We watched two different Scandinavian tv mysteries in a row where a woman officer decided to trail a dangerous suspect in her car at night in bad weather despite her colleagues on the radio saying, \u201cWait for back-up!\u201d Since one of the main reasons people enjoy reading fiction is finding out \u201cwhat happens next,\u201d the more the what\u2019s next isn\u2019t obvious, the better off the author is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So many thought-provoking insights were in the George Saunders interview I wrote about last week, I saved a few for today. One issue he talks about is how politics and themes enter his writing. Not deliberately. He calls the writer … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[174,29],"tags":[1277,2291],"class_list":["post-11557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-writing","tag-george-saunders","tag-theme"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-30p","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11557"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11559,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11557\/revisions\/11559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}