I know what theme is, and that is: it is a reader’s term. It is a term useful to those decoding text. When the work is all done and put in pages somehow, along comes theme. A reader examines the arrangement of the evidence and draws a conclusion or proposes an interpretation of the sometimes tangled persons, places, and happenings in the story. When I taught high school years ago, I had a skeptical sophomore (redundancy acknowledged) who called it DIM, the Deep Inner Meaning. He said it always as if the phrase were framed in golden quotation marks; it was a phrase he used to mock the proceedings. Analyzing literature (essays, poetry, and fiction) is a minor major industry and great sport, and we’ve all seen the lights go on in students’ eyes when the discussion reaches a certain level. We’ve also seen the lights go out when they turn to the page once again instructed to read foremost for meaning. Do we read foremost for meaning? Don’t answer.

I love what Annie Dillard said about theme to writers in her wonderful book on writing, that if you scratch an event a theme will arise. I’m an event scratcher. I’ve always worked from evidence up, not verdict down.

This means that I don’t know everything that is going to happen, that I do not know the ending of my stories. I don’t parse my evidence before or even as I write a draft. I include absolutely as much as my memory and imagination suggests.

As I noted in my discussion of “The Governor’s Ball,” I start with a moment. This means that I don’t know everything that is going to happen, that I do not know the ending of my stories. I start with a moment. These moments are all sorts of things; I sometimes call them collisions. I have just finished a story which started because as I stood on a friend’s porch in Los Angeles one morning after ringing the bell, I looked up the tunnel of jacaranda trees blooming all down her block and with her tall front garden agapanthus swaying around me like seaweed I felt like I was suddenly in a purple town and I heard a sort of Philip Marlowe character saying, “Sometimes this can be a purple town.” That’s all. What does it mean? I don’t know. What will the theme be? Purple? I’ll have to write the story. Joining my intuition with those purple trees and a sense of the voice that said “ . . . purple town . . .” I would have to write the story. More recently I went into a thrift store I love in Los Angeles hoping to acquire more of the beautiful shirts some guy my size had been donating there for months, and I ran into a young guy who had just bought a gigantic round oak table and he was scratching his head and looking at the little red dolly they’d loaned him to get it home. He lived three blocks away. I stood in that carpeted alcove and I felt the feeling I’ve had over a hundred times, of being beside myself, of being there and observing myself being there, and as I reached out to steady the beautiful edge of his beautiful table, I knew I was enacting a story idea. Not the story: the event that if I opened it carefully and included everything I knew while I allowed all of the things that would happen to evolve into things that could happen, I would find something out and have a story. What would the theme be? Kindness? The helping hand at the thrift store? No. The story I wrote has a theme, but I couldn’t have predicted it until I’d typed the last page.

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Excerpted from Chapter One of Lit From Within with permission of the editors, Kevin Haworth and Dinty W. Moore. Published by Ohio University Press.