That Sock Puppet Won't Hunt

Times are hard, especially for a man who aspires to make his living by words.

You begin at the bottom of the editorial heap — fair enough, most people do in this trade. But it rarely gets better. To make ends meet, sometimes you teach school, sometimes you write and edit. Your professional successes are rare — and those you have rarely last long.

Yet you are determined to leave your mark on the world, as a writer of any kind, but primarily as a poet. You have things to say — things that the world must hear.

At the age of thirty-one you begin writing your masterwork, and five long years later you have it finished. Publishing is in disarray — part free-for-all, part insider’s game. You decide to self-publish your book of poems.

What's It All About?

As I labor through the early stages of writing my next novel, Proximity, I find that it’s worth considering the role that theme plays in fiction.

When we place a book in a genre, that can suggest a certain theme by itself. We can presume that a literary novel, for example, will give us some insights into human nature. A mystery will be a search for truth. Science fiction will treat the promise or consequences of technology. A thriller will demonstrate the resourcefulness of the seemingly overmatched hero. Et cetera.

But most successful novels, I think, have a central theme that transcends category. This may seem obvious when discussing literary fiction, but it is also true for most so-called “category” fiction. In all cases, the theme may be pre-ordained by the original intention of the author, it may flow logically from the overall subject matter, or it may arise on its own as a byproduct of the author’s efforts to lend depth to the story.

The End of the Hiatus

Can this really be only my second post ALL YEAR? Well, er, yes, unless you count my weekly posts on The Nervous Breakdown. Those posts will explain a good bit of what’s kept me away: being edited and designed and working out distribution arrangements for Primacy, and making good on my promise to bring that novel to the world as well as the Big Six publishers might.

Not that any of that work is finished, but it’s finally settling down into something of a routine, which means not only that there's a smidgen of time left over to get back to sharing my thoughts here on writing, but there's also finally a chance to get to work on the next novel.