Writing: What It’s About

Whenever you mention to someone that you’re writing a novel or script or short story, among the first questions is the inevitable “What’s it about?”

I hate trying to answer this question.

It’s not that I don’t know the premise of my work; on the contrary, I usually spend a great deal of time putting together an elevator pitch (Twitter pitch, these days), a query, and a synopsis. Lately, I even find myself doing that before I get too far into the draft itself — boiling down the plot is another way to clarify my thoughts before I commit to them.

It’s also not that I know the other person is asking mainly to be polite — along the same lines as “So what do you study again?” “What are your plans after high school/university?” and “I’ve never met anyone with that job. What’s it like?” Hey, you asked, you’re getting the answer. Tough.

It’s not even that I’m embarrassed by my answers, although, let’s face it: no matter how awesome your novel is in its full glory, it’s gonna sound idiotic reduced to a sentence. “A boy discovers he’s a wizard destined to battle the evil Dark Lord who threatens his world.” “A prince learns his father was murdered and can’t decide whether or not to kill the murderer.” “A cheerful sea sponge and his dopey best friend have silly adventures at the bottom of the sea.”

Yeah. I wouldn’t waste time on those either. Except… I do. Because they’re better than the summary of their parts.

Anyway, I’ve got over the awkwardness of mealy-mouthed one-line recaps and the weird looks I sometimes get when people realize I’m write genre fiction.

No, I think what makes me wince is the whisper that bubbles up in my brain when I hear the dreaded question.

“Oh, what’s it about?”

I don’t know.

I can tell you the premise, such as it is. I can describe my protagonists, at least the way they are at the moment. But what a story’s about… well, that sounds so important. So personal.

To me, what my story’s about isn’t the permutations of characters and circumstances that click together into a plot. Or the setting or the magical conceit that makes the whole shebang possible.

My story is about themes and feelings. And I don’t — won’t — know what those are until it’s done. Which may be never.

At the start of a story, all I know about what it’s about is how I thought of it, which is usually pretty different. This story is about how I would totally hate to go to Hogwarts in the Harry Potter universe and would probably wind up in Slytherin. This story is about how Sherlock-Holmes-versus-Jack-the-Ripper pastiches are totally uninteresting unless the Ripper is either an important real-life person, or, better still, a member of the Holmes canonical crew.

The characters start off as archetypes of my own personal roster of characters I care about. I know more about the purpose they serve in the story than their personalities. It takes lots of writing time to figure out who exactly they are — especially when they’re similar to me.*

It’s only once I really get the characters, once I see the shape of the story after a few drafts, that I start to understand what it’s about — what it means to me.

Because the plot and the characters have always felt like things I make up. I take them apart and put them back together in different ways. But what a story’s about — its beating heart — has always felt like something I discover. When I take apart my story, it’s because I want to rebuild it closer to that heart, either because I noticed places where it doesn’t quite match up or because I explored some more and found a new feature that my story ought to reflect.

It’s kind of like the bit in the second half of Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, in which Bastian unwittingly loses his memories by transforming them into parts of the Fantasian story. Each memory becomes something specific — for instance, his memories of being a chubby, unathletic kid power his transformation into a strong, chiselled hero. He doesn’t know which memory becomes what. He’s not even aware this is happening until the very end, when it’s almost too late for him to save himself and his real life. But without his real-life feelings and experiences as batteries to power his fictional creations, he has no influence on Fantasia.

I think one of the novels I’m working on now is about being smart and lonely and learning to accept that you will have feelings and there will be conflict, but that messiness gets you closer to strength, not farther from it.

I think another is about how it feels to watch people you love slowly die of old age and terminal illness.

I want another to be about Impostor Syndrome and learning to walk the line between confidence in the value of your skills and realism about the areas you need to grow. But as I write it, the feeling just isn’t clicking. So maybe that one will be about something else. What else? Psssh, who knows, right now?

I’m still exploring what makes my stories live and breathe for me. But I know it’s not the TV-Guide summary I give of their premises. Heck, I come up with dozens of those each week. It’s much harder to find the feelings that strike a chord inside me and say: this is what makes the story real.

If you ask me what my book/play/novella’s about, I’ll probably just give you the plot rundown; I’m not an idiot — I know that’s what you’re after.

Even if it’s not, I probably won’t talk to you about what the story really means to me. That’s… kind of personal. If I could talk about it in a compelling, productive way, I probably wouldn’t be writing a story about it.

But finding out myself is the life or death of the fiction I’m working on.

* Side note: Some writers find questionnaires helpful for this — filling in their character’s physical appearance, personal history, and psychological fundamentals. I’m on the fence about those. Sometimes they’re useful to me, but I find I have interesting/solid answers only once I already know the character well enough to write his or her voice well. Hmmm.

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