The River of Story Always Flows Forward

By Dinty W. Moore

I have always recoiled at the idea that stories are written with a theme. The word “theme” seems retroactive, something awarded to the writer by an English professor somewhere, not an essential part of the writing process. Even more troubling to me as a teacher is when students say, “The meaning the author wants us to grasp is ….” — as if a story, poem, or memoir is simply a puzzle to be solved.

The word that works for me when discussing the greater, richer aspects of a story or memoir is RIVER, because rivers are deep, they are powerful, they always flow forward, changing speed and depth, but downstream they go, toward an inevitable end not yet visible to those of us floating along on our rafts …

… or those reading a story.

Twain understood this, of course, as does Cheryl Strayed. (Her river is the Pacific Crest Trail.)

Leo Tolstoy may have said, “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”  The quote’s provenance is in some dispute, but its accuracy seems clear.

When reading, we are following the author’s journey. That journey may begin with an outsider’s arrival—maybe cancer, or grief, abusive behavior, or in adoption memoirs, an actual stranger. And the journey itself may not involve a raft or hiking boots—but still there is forward movement, through medical treatments, relationships, reaching out for help, or simply a journey of understanding. And all of these stories end with an arrival into some a new circumstance.

Without a deep, resonant river of meaning running under every page, our stories are just a collection of facts, or incidents.

They want to be so much more.

How to Find Your River of Meaning?

Well, I wish I could say it was easy, but this is among the many maddening, glorious struggles of writing. Our metaphorical rivers are something we discover along the way, in our first drafts if we are lucky, in re-working our fourth or fifth drafts more likely. We don’t impose our underlying rivers of emotional resonance on the work; most often they reveal themselves to us.

But I can offer a good idea of where to look. (Or, to be more accurate, where to feel, to sense, to intuit your river.)

These rivers are tightly connected to the specific and complex questions we are asking about our own experiences (in memoir) or what our main characters fervently desire (in memoir and fiction.)  Rivers are currents of emotion, not ‘interpretation’ or ‘the moral of the story.’

The first step to finding your river of underlying emotion (I like to call it the Invisible Magnetic River) is to know you’re looking for it.  The second is to write from the heart, and to trust it will appear.

Why Your River of Meaning Matters?

Finding these currents of emotion flowing underneath our stories is what allows us to revise most effectively. Once we grasp our emotional story/river, we begin to understand which scenes, chapters, images are serving the essay, memoir, story, novel (or poem or play) and which perhaps are not.

Joseph Conrad has written: “A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.”

Novelist Richard Bausch, paraphrasing Conrad, takes it a bit further: “Every really good story, no matter how short or how long, carries something of its justification for being and all its attendant parts in every single line. It is a unified created work of word art and that is why it is so difficult to do.”

I love that description of the indescribable quality that sets a great work of literature apart from all of the others, that enables mere words to take our breath way, to make us cry, grieve, shiver, or deeply understand something new about life  It hap[pens when the author creates “a unified … work of word art …” with the primal river of story running under “all its attendant parts in every single line.”

That’s a tall order, but it is also precisely where we need to aim.
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Want to explore the Invisible Magnetic River more thoroughly and work with prompts that will help reveal the river of your work in progress? Join Dinty for a CRAFT TALKS webinar, “The River of Story Always Flows Forward,” February 7^th at 2 PM Eastern time ($25 / replay sent to all registrants). More Info/Register Here   

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Dinty W. Moore is the founding editor of Brevity, author of the memoirs Between Panic & Desire and To Hell With It, and the writing guides Crafting the Personal Essay and The Mindful Writer, among other books.