My sister gave me this biography of playwright Wendy Wasserstein for Christmas. It is a masterfully told tale of a complex woman, and a fantastic profile of what it takes to make art. I'd recommend it for anyone interseted in theater, writing, creativity and women making their way in the world.
what would Oprah say?
It's not unusual for writers to have no clue what they're writing about. They may know the plot of their story or the general outline of their concept, but they don't really know what it's about in the big picture way that gives a work resonance. They may say, "My story is about a woman who loses everything she owns in a forest fire." But that's just the plot. That's just what happens. What's it about? The writer may give an answer such as, "You don't know the true meaning of what you have until you lose it." Okay, fair enough (and BTW these examples are from my novel, The Threadbare Heart, just in case you're wondering....) but this still doesn't get at the deep meaning that will make a reader laugh or cry or recommend the book to a friend -- and without this deeper meaning, the work runs the risk of being flat. What you need is something that packs the punch of true conviction. The Threadbare Heart is about how true love can transcend death and how grief itself can prove it.
This question -- what is my work really about? -- is a very difficult one to answer. It takes me years -- literally -- to figure it out for each project. Why is this so? Writing bubbles up from many layers of consciousness. There's the hyper-critical consciousness that babbles in our ear all the time telling us to give it up; the logical consciousness that helps us resolve a conflict on page 205 that we launched on page 10; and the creative consciousness that helps us decide how to describe the way the sunlight filtered through the trees. Running underneath all these layers is our unconscious, which, by definition, we're not even aware of. Our unconscious has probably been in the drivers' seat of our story from minute one, but we don't know it. We can't see it, can't hear it, can't access it. Once we figure out a way to do so (more on this in a moment), we can go back to our story and weave it together in a way that makes everything snap, crackle and pop with meaning. It's my favorite part of the writing process -- the part when I finally (!) figure out what I'm writing about.
So how can you speed up the process?
One way is to ask other people. Smart readers, editors and coaches will often say, "Gee, it really seems to me that you're writing about X, not Y." I have had this happen to me with almost every single book I've written, and it never ceases to blow me away. It's as if the person performed a magic trick -- as if they read my mind -- and I feel eternal gratitude for their feat of awesomeness.
I devised an exercise that can approximate this voodoo. I call it "what would Oprah say?" Here's how it works:
Imagine you're on Oprah. (Okay, Oprah's technically off the air now, but you get the idea...) You've written a book that has sold a gazillion copies. The whole world is atwitter. There's been an excerpt in Time magazine. There's been an author Q&A in USA Today. What Oprah says when you sit on the couch across from her is not, "What's your book about?" (because everyone already knows what your book is about. That's why you're on Oprah; a gazillion people have read it.) What she says is, "Why do you think your book has resonated so strongly with so many people?"
Write down your answers, and I can promise that they'll be pretty darn close to what you're story is really about.