On Thematic Preoccupations in Fiction

Or, on addressing unanswered questions, over and over again

Photo by Olga Tutunaru on Unsplash

Many authors return to similar themes over and over again in their writing, as if trying to untangle a particularly stubborn knot. You know this. I know this. And yet, I think it can still be something of a surprise to recognise these thematic preoccupations in your own work. After all, they're not always what you expect.

Over the past year, my main fiction project has been a novel set just after the First World War, in which an aspiring fashion designer catches Spanish flu, develops disabling post-viral symptoms and has to find a new way to live. It's been quite an emotional novel to write, as it's drawn on my own experience of building a life around chronic illness. When I set out to write it, I wanted to tell a story that reflected an everyday reality for millions of people that's rarely explored in fiction. What I didn't set out to do was to write a novel about control, but – perhaps unsurprisingly – it  ended up being a big theme of the narrative. After all, there are many ways in which other people try and control the main character and her illness, and many more ways in which she seeks to grasp control back for herself.

When I finished the second draft of the manuscript back in the autumn and sent it off for the first round of feedback, I spent the following few weeks playing about with new ideas. The main concept I was exploring centred around a 1950s boarding house and a resident fascinated by big theories about quantum physics. I tried fitting the threads together in a few different ways, but it didn't quite have the 'spark' I wanted it to have. Besides, though it was set in a totally different decade with a totally different plot to my post-viral novel, I couldn't shake the thought that I was essentially telling the same story over again: a woman fighting to regain control of her life. Ultimately, I decided the idea needed more incubation time and set it aside in time to start the third draft of the post-viral novel.

By the time I finished the next edit at the start of February, the 1950s characters had been superseded by a new shiny idea. This one is set in the 1930s and arrived more fully-formed than the last one. It definitely feels like it has the spark the 1950s boarding house didn't (yet!) have and, almost before I knew it, I'd dived into the research, written a synopsis and started setting out a scene-by-scene outline. Again, it's completely different to both the other stories... but could it be said that thematically it's about a woman trying to regain control over her life? Well, yes. Yes it could.

To be fair, I don’t think this is just me. A large proportion of fiction could be distilled down to a question of control. Us humans like to be in control (or at least, we like to behave in ways that make us think we are) and most of us probably crave more of it. And yet, it is true that I'm clearly particularly drawn to telling stories of this kind.

It's not hard to work out why this is. The more debilitating my health restrictions have become, the less control I have over the world around me. Of course, this isn’t helped by time spent adjacent to the publishing industry, which is famously a place where writers have to surrender a great deal of control. I probably just need to accept that right now I'm driven to tell stories that allow me to wrestle back control for my characters in a way that I can't in real life.

While this post was sitting half-formed in my drafts folder, I read Jodie Robins' post Life Imitating Art, which, coincidentally, was exploring her own recurring theme in fiction.

Life Imitating Art

Jodie made the excellent point of connecting the themes each writer returns to over and over to the advice to write what you know. In other words, that we writers are telling these stories in order to somehow answer the lingering questions we have about a certain aspect of our lives.

There's a new blank document calling my name, so – with all these thoughts in mind – I'm off to type the first few tentative words of a story that might just answer some questions I didn't know I had.