Oblique strategies

Over to Katia's tonight. She fixed me dinner in thanks for me helping her with the website for her upcoming novel Crashing America. We had a nice long conversation about writing. She said the toughest thing for her to do was time -- denoting, for the reader, what's happening in the present and what in the past -- though poetic and oblique language came naturally to her. I said my previous challenge was plot, and I feel like I have a handle on that now, so my next challenge is oblique language, symbolism and theme. The example I gave was finding Crime and Punishment essentially a detective story. I could have said something similar about The Master and Margarita, the wonderful novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. I eagerly read the it for story, to see what would happen next. And indeed a naive college student could have done the same thing.

But I don't plumb novels for theme and symbols, and I find it almost impossible to work them into my books. The best I can do for now is show a theme through narrative. For instance, in my novel Make Nice [1.1 MB PDF file of my notes while writing the novel] I showed how racism touched the lives of both the cream of Hollywood society (Sammy Davis Jr.) as well as the working-class characters who worked at a sleazy Vegas motel. But as far as using symbols to echo the theme, symbols which would register subconsciously with the reader -- no. Not intentionally, anyway. So I feel my writing is too pedestrian. And so far the agents who rejected my book seemed to feel the same.

"It's something you must study and learn," Katia said. So I'll look for symbolism and theme in the novel I'm reading now -- still plowing through The Plot Against America.