About these books...

Yes and no. A compelling story is rather naturally equipped with a theme, but it isn't an accident. A story becomes compelling by drawing out its theme, rather the way a painter can make the eyes of a portrait come alive by touching the tiniest amount of paint in the proper place on the pupil.

You can accomplish these touches for a story by instinct, but you'll never understand why you fail sometimes and why other times you succeed, and more importantly, how to turn failure into success with a few edits. Writing is moderately easy. Rewriting is what divides the goats from the sheep.

How do you usually tell stories? Mime?

Here's a story you might find reassuring. Last year, around the publication of The Plot Against America, I saw Philip Roth speak and take questions at Columbia. Someone asked him about a scene in which a seemingly minor character tries to help the narrator open a stuck bathroom door -- asking, of course, after the possible symbolism of the door, the thematic significance of the narrator's being stuck behind it, and the role of this woman in trying to open it. It's her only real appearance in scene, after all -- surely what she's doing means something!

Okay so Roth answers in the same thoughtful tone, as if he's revealign the inner workings of the prize-winning novelist. And he says something like this: "Well, I got to the part at the end where she dies. And I thought, well, this death will have much more emotional impact if we've actually seen her in the book, actually had her in a scene and gotten to know her. So I went back and added that part."

Whoah duh! This is an extreme example, but it's something I kind of like about Roth -- he'll actually talk about writing on the kind of boneheaded level that writing often has to get done. If you're gonna kill someone, it helps to introduce her first -- anyone who's ever seen Star Trek is familiar with this.

Point is: the vocabulary of breaking down and analyzing literature is different from the vocabulary of building it in the first place; they're very different practices. Just because you don't feel up to speed on one doesn't mean anything about the other; hell, I can think of lots of instances where being non-conversant with critical stuff makes people less self-conscious and more effective in making art.

What you do want to worry about is whether you feel like you understand the mechanics of writing -- from that butt-obvious level Roth's talking about above all the way up to how to create subtle effects. You want to have a sense of how every decision you could possibly make will affect the whole piece. Not necessarily right away, or anything -- just write and see what happens. But that's the part that's important.

I mean, with writing, you're first and foremost the carpenter -- not the architecture critic.