What is the Theme of Your Writing Life?

I’ve been troubled by something I heard at a recent writing workshop. One of the authors said something to the effect that writers spend their entire lives trying to say one thing. I mentioned this at this month’s poetry night, and one of the writers in the audience said something like: Yeah, I’ve heard that every writer has one theme they write their entire life, and I think that’s true. To add weight to her comment, I discovered that this was a woman who had written numerous stories in her lifetime and she was celebrating her 79th birthday.

Now as a writer, I’m aware of themes and I know that some have made repeated appearances in my stories, but it bothered me to hear that there might only be one thing that I was trying to say as a writer. I mean, after all, I love words, and I feel like I have a lot to say. So, does this mean that I really have many ways of saying the same thing over and over?

I spent time running through in my mind the stories and poems I’ve written trying to boil them down to a common theme. In my poems, many of them dealt with grief. It was something very personal that I was struggling to work through, and I shared these poems in an attempt to let other people know they weren’t alone in their experience with grief. This led me to think “Oh, no. What good is knowing you’re not alone when you’re up at 3 a.m. and can’t sleep because you’re mourning over someone? And you really are sitting alone in the dark.” But my poetry has progressed. It began with a glimmer of hope that I struggled to put into my poems with the idea that if I could imagine a place of healing, perhaps one day I would find my way there. More recently, my poetry has made another change when I write about grief. The hope is more apparent, and it no longer feels unnatural to put it in my poems. In fact, it resonates deeply with me.

This led me to think about my other stories, including my horror novel, and I realized that hope danced about in all of them. I began to think about how necessary hope is to a horror story. I wouldn’t read a horror story if I knew there was no chance of the people in it making it out alive. Even in bad horror movies, you know one person will live. And it’s that hope that makes the encounter with something dangerous or evil more thrilling, because you know there’s a chance the outcome will be disastrous, but there’s the hope that your favorite characters will make it through.

A message of hope. I think I could be okay with that if that was the one thing that I spent my entire life writing about.

As I visited with my writing group this week, they helped me realize that while there may be recurring themes in our writing, they are not limited to one. We have the opportunity to voice many different things that are important to us, that we’re interested in, or that affect us. But I put this out into the writing community as a point to consider. If you had only one message or one theme that you wrote about your entire life, are you comfortable with the theme that’s currently recurring in your writing?