Theme vs. Plot in Literary Publishing

Author offers advice for short story writing

Welcome to our weekly column on the ins and outs of lit mag publishing, written by readers, writers and editors around the world.

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There are at least two major structural elements to a short story. (Or a long story, for that matter, but we will discuss short ones here.) They are Theme and Plot, and while they may seem similar, it is a superficial similarity. To put it briefly, Theme is what the short story is about, and Plot describes the mechanics that express the theme. Yes, there are other elements that express the theme, such as allusion, simile and metaphor, and symbolic elements large or small, but plot and theme are the main structural elements--the framework, instead of the walls, windows, pipes, and plumbing.

In commercial fiction, plot is often paramount, especially in genre pieces, whodunits and such, where there may be no theme at all. Not that all genre work is thoughtlessly mechanical busywork: Raymond Chandler once said that plot was only a device on which you hung good scenes, and his work has thematic complexities that are expressed through those scenes--perhaps the meaning of justice, vengeance, bitterness, and arrogance, for example, and how they drive human behavior. There's more to a Chandler novel than a dead body and some hard-to-find clues.

But in literary fiction, theme is highly important, because generally editors want to see more meaning than mechanics in a story. Sometimes they too misstep, but generally this holds true for stories directed at literary journals.

An extreme example of a story that is all theme and almost no plot is what I consider a masterpiece of short-form writing, and that is Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River."

In this story almost nothing happens. The protagonist gets off a train at an abandoned station that is the remnant of a town burned down in a wildfire. He walks along a dirt road, looking at the scenery, thinking only of his immediate surroundings, and eventually comes to a river, where he sets up camp. He eats, and the food is pointedly described for reasons I will list below. The next day he catches some fish. At the end of the story he looks down the river at the tangle of trees in a swamp, and decides not to fish among the forbidding root masses till later.

Here I self-plagiarize from my review of this story:

Almost nothing happens. A young man gets off a train at a village that has burned in a wildfire. He lingers on a bridge over a river briefly, watching the trout swim in its shade. Then he walks a long way along a deserted dirt road to a fishing spot he knows. Once there, he makes camp and eats canned spaghetti. The next day he catches two fish. The story ends with him looking at the darkness that marks a swamp, and his acknowledgment that he would have plenty of time later to fish the swamp.

Yet the story has magisterial currents of its own that proceed through measured changes that would have made Bach proud. It is accepted now that the story is that of a young man who has just returned from devastating experiences during wartime--dealing with what was in effect post-traumatic stress disorder. Hemingway had been blown up by a mortar shell during World War One, and spent a long time recovering physically in Italian hospitals.

None of this is mentioned in the story.

[...]

But before he does fish, he eats food that he carried with him: canned spaghetti and canned pork and beans, industrial products brought from the same civilization that sent him to war. He says, in a line that is in a small way famous, "I've got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if I'm willing to carry it." They are almost the only words he speaks out loud in the story.

He finishes with coffee, made in the manner an old comrade taught him, which brings on a musing about the old friend, Hopkins. Hopkins became rich in oil and left Nick and his other old friends forever. "The coffee was bitter. Nick laughed. It made a good ending to the story."

The next day he fishes, using grasshoppers of the normal color for bait. Before he fishes, he makes breakfast. In another step away from civilization, he does not eat canned food this time, but makes buckwheat pancakes, which he eats with apple butter--the sort of dressing that it would be easy to make oneself. He makes onion sandwiches with slices of bread that he cuts himself from a coarse loaf. Only then does he fish.

Theme of the story is everything--recovery from the trauma of war, symbolized by the burnt town and landscape--but it is never mentioned. The plot is nothing. It is the antithesis of commercial fiction. And it is magnificent. Yet when I read it I knew nothing of PTSD or of war besides what I had read in jingoistic textbooks. Nevertheless, I felt its power, felt that grave changes stirred beneath the forced placidity of its surface. It is a masterful work.

And it may have been hard to sell even to a literary journal. But it's a canonical work now, and an influence even upon those who hate Hemingway, because it has become part of the consciousness of writers worldwide.

I suffered a modest editorial experience of my own with a piece I wrote and published a few years ago. It was part of a group of related stories based on an unpleasant narrator, but in this case narrated by his father, and exploring the father's sensations over the son's wedding, which he fears may become distressful to the wife. This story was accepted by a literary journal at a Midwestern university, but the editor insisted on excising the last two paragraphs. He felt this "made the story stronger." And in a way he was right: it made the plot mechanics stronger.

But it undercut the thematic development of the story. Perhaps the fatalistic theme was too depressing to the editor, and he wished to brighten it up. I am not sure. We went back and forth a bit, and then—like the father in the story, in fact—I accepted that the tale could be cut, and the thematic development weakened. It's still a good story, but the original was better, and I will strive to publish the full version in a collection someday soon.

It's a fate a story of yours might meet, and I suggest a bit of fatalism to help you accept that. And patience: if you do not come round to the editor's point of view with the passage of time (and in this instance I have not), you will get your revenge when you publish a collection. Which you won't be able to publish without a history in literary rags. 

Theme matters; plot matters, albeit less in my opinion; the words matter most of all; but in any case get it published and keep writing. That's the main theme of a writer's life.

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