(common themes in my novels)
now that i have three i can post stuff like this
there are themes that just surface whenever i write something longer. and they really do surface. it’s not conscious since i never know what the story will really be at the start. and this is strange given that all three are in different genres, and i didn’t expect them to have much in common at the outset. then again, i wrote them, so i guess it makes some kind of sense.
one theme that appears even when i don’t want it to is romantic love and marriage. especially in the first book, which i swear was supposed to be about something else. i was a caught off guard but just went with it, and then it became the centerpiece of the story. the second one i suppose makes a little more sense, since it’s about the apocalypse. what could be more romantic than the end of the world. but all the same, i didn’t really intend for it to be mostly about that, and in the end i think it is. finally, the Alice book. i guess some part of me decided to do away with all the other stuff and just write a love story. kind of.
water. this is another one that just keeps showing up. somehow it makes itself prominent every time. this is likely a very personal thing, being from a coastal country and growing up right next the mouth of a large river. plus, somehow, i end up having very intense experiences and be drawn to places with water wherever i go. and it can be anything. a little pond, an aquarium, or a stream, or the ocean, or the rain. i may be part fish.
childhood also ends up in every novel. each book tackles it a little differently and how it is woven into the plot or becomes the plot is also very different, but somehow there is always something about it, even though i have no children (yet). most especially, the endings lean heavily on the theme of children or childhood, maybe because endings are a sort of microcosmic death, and you can’t think of death without thinking of birth and vice versa (or at least, i can’t).
cameras. this one i think is a bit more conscious but not a lot. the gimmick (there is probably a more benevolent word, but anyway) of trying to do moving pictures on the page. it’s hard to explain what it is but i am interested in the social implications of movies and tv. they changed our perception of things and how stories are told. i guess i like to exploit those known idioms in writing, or subvert them. all writing is a spell and this one is very useful to cast, though probably not a good idea to overuse it. in the Alice book it got mixed into the plot, in the others it’s more sporadic.
there’s also always something about dislocation, loss of home. and trying to find a new one, or recover the old one. or else pine for it, remember it, etc. i think this is only natural as a european for lots of reasons, but anyway, it’s always there somehow. i guess i am a homely kind of person, which i knew. what i didn’t know before, but apparently it’s true, is that i am a ‘place person’. i get tied to places, like a cat. my dad once said to me when i was a kid (though i don’t remember the context) that it’s stupid to travel abroad if you don’t know your street well. this stuck with me. part of it is that i hate travelling (or at least travelling fast, as in, with the help of engines), and so whenever i go somewhere and i like it, my instinct is to just stay there. somehow this finds its way into every story, and the settings in which the action takes place turn out to be almost characters in themselves. i would never have imagined i would be that kind of writer, but apparently i am.
another thing, related to the above (and to childhood too), which is more a feeling than a theme (though it’s also a theme), is nostalgia, wistfulness, melancholy. i was always prone to it, but apparently even if i try to write something more satirical like the first book or an apocalypse like the second, or a love story like the third, it ends up there. i don’t think this is a natural occurrence, or necessary. but again, without me really thinking about it, throughout every novel there is this persistent feeling of nostalgia, and it’s central.
lastly there’s smoking. i just really like to smoke and my main characters are all smokers (and in the first, also the main antagonist, satan, is an anti smoker). everything flows better with a smoke and the world was a better place when more people smoked and when you could smoke everywhere. i don’t think this is random, or by chance, in the world or in my novels. so this is probably the only theme that is consciously added (possibly also because i smoke while i write). and if i end up writing another book, it’s almost guaranteed that smoking will be a feature.
i need to catch up with the last one !!!