When I was a freshman in college, I took my first creative writing class, a small two week workshop that was part of a summer study abroad program. For the class, I wrote a very bad sci-fi/dystopian short story about two soldiers who come across an abandoned library. They have a long philosophical discussion about books, reading, knowledge, etc., and through it we realize that their society is post-literate and no longer has books. At the end of the story, one of the soldiers, the more Romantic and philosophically-minded one, decides to stay in the library and devote the rest of his life to reading.
As expected, my fellow students tore me apart in the workshop, half of them picking apart the shoddy premise behind my story, the other half focusing on my overly pedantic writing style. The teachers, meanwhile, told me to try not to be so literal. I could express a moral point about books and knowledge if I wanted, but I shouldn’t have one of the characters literally say the story’s theme in a grandiose speech.
The “library story,” as I’ve come to call it, points to a larger problem that characterized my early fiction: I was never very good at being subtle. I always had an obvious political, social, or moral point that I wanted to get across, and inevitably my characters became mouthpieces rather than complex beings (in another early story of mine, a character literally says, “Don’t you think there should be more to life than making money?”). This is probably why a friend once told me that they always thought I’d make a better politician than a writer.
My epiphany on how to effectively integrate my political points within a fictional narrative didn’t come until many years later, in another creative writing class. Our teacher assigned us Flannery O’Connor’s essay “Writing Short Stories,” and reading it, I came across the following passage:
When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning. but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully.
More than anything, it was the phrase “experienced meaning” that made me understand. For a long time, I’d been frustrated with the idea of using fiction as a means to express a political point. So many teachers and fellow writers and discouraged me through their critiques of my lack of subtlety that I’d come to believe it was better to simply tell a “human story” and leave the politics to the politicians. But what O’Connor was making clear here was that it was perfectly possible for a story to have a theme or “meaning,” as long as that meaning was “embodied” in the story. The meaning we got from fiction wasn’t the literal articulated messaging of a politician or a pamphleteer—it was meaning embodied in the experience of reading the story. Thus, if I’d wanted to make my library story more effective, I should have done a much better job developing the other elements of the story—the details of the setting, the backstories of the two soldiers, the rules of this futuristic world (all things which the other students had pointed out during the workshop). Most importantly, I should have made their dialogue more realistic to their world instead of having them deliver philosophical sermons about the importance of knowledge. And if I’d done everything well, my readers would have understood the political point I was trying to make without me needing to have one of the characters literally say it.
In her book of essays Interior States, Meghan O’Gieblyn addresses the issue of subtlety in writing, in a piece first published last year in Tin House. Specifically, she notes how her own work was often critiqued in writers workshops for being overly subtle (in many ways the very opposite problem that I faced). “My classmates were vocal about the many problems lurking in my stories: the character’s motivation was not clear; the backstory should be addressed, not alluded to; the conclusion was too cryptic.” Because her essay collection is largely about her struggles with religion after she abandoned her evangelical faith, O’Gieblyn ends her essay by connecting subtlety to the idea of faith: “Perhaps this is another way of saying that subtlety is a transaction of faith. The artist must have faith that her effects will be perceived the way she intends; the reader must trust that what he detects, beneath the surface of the text, is not merely a figment of his imagination.”
I was struck by this compelling analysis, perhaps because I recognized how unwilling I’d been as a young writer to put my faith in readers. I’d assumed that unless I stated my theme explicitly, the readers wouldn’t get it. Perhaps this was because as a freshman in college, I wasn’t yet a very good reader myself and didn’t always understand the subtle thematic elements of the literature I read—and so, I wrote with the assumption that all readers were like me, freshman in college still learning how to draw meaning from texts. Luckily, as I’ve grown older and more experienced as a reader, my writing has changed, and I’ve come to understand the value of O’Connor’s lesson. As she put in that same essay:
People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like the string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with. They think that if you can pick out the theme, the way you pick the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open and feed the chickens. But this is not the way meaning works in fiction.