Pattern Recognition in Your Own Writing

TL Hines — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:11:48 -0700

I'm finishing edits on my fourth book, Faces in the Fire, right now, and one thing that's really started to stand out for me is...well, is how my writing mind seems preoccupied by a few basic themes. The search for identity, for instance. The search for meaning and significance. (Or, as Publishers Weekly said in a review of my last book: "The human desire for authenticity." I like that.) The amazing ability of great goodness to be born in the midst of great evil.

Take those things away, it seems, and I really don't have much to write about, fiction-wise.

Stephen King, in his excellent book On Writing, said:

I don’t believe any novelist, even one who’s written forty-plus books, has too many thematic concerns; I have many interests but only a few that are deep enough to power novels. These deep interests include how difficult it is--perhaps impossible!--to close Pandora's technobox once it's open. Why, if there is a God, such terrible things happen. The thin line between reality and fantasy, and most of all, the terrible attraction violence sometimes has for fundamentally good people."

So I'm in good company; King is now up to more 50 novels, and he counts four main themes in his own work.

Still, it's a bit uncomfortable to discover some of the things that keep popping up in your work again and again. Most of my main characters are everyday, blue collar folks who are tortured by their own histories. They have a tendency to hide their own identities (consciously or not). They are abused, estranged or cut off from their parents. They struggle with paranoia, schizophrenia, compulsions and other mental disorders.

Um...so what does that say about me?

I probably don't want to know the answer to that.