Demystifying the process of fiction writing

WRITING: Writing an analysis of a piece of fiction can be a mystifying process. First, literary analyses (or papers that offer an interpretation of a story) rely on the assumption that stories must mean something.

How does a story mean something? Isn’t a story just an arrangement of characters and events? And if the author wanted to convey a meaning, wouldn’t he or she be much better off writing an essay just telling us what he or she meant?

It’s pretty easy to see how at least some stories convey clear meanings or morals. Just think about a parable like the prodigal son or a nursery tale about crying “wolf.”

Stories like these are reduced down to the bare elements, giving us just enough detail to lead us to their main points, and because they are relatively easy to understand and tend to stick in our memories, they’re often used in some kinds of education.

But if the meanings were always as clear as they are in parables, who would really need to write a paper about them? Interpretations of fiction, after all, would not be interesting if the meaning of the story were clear to everyone who reads it. The paper would become superfluous.

Thankfully (or perhaps regrettably, depending on your perspective) the stories we’re asked to interpret in our classes are a good bit more complicated than most parables.

These stories can’t be easily reduced to one specific meaning that every reader can agree upon, but instead they use characters, settings, and actions to illustrate issues that have no easy resolution. They show different sides of a problem, and they can raise new questions about a problem.

Nothing against the parable, but if stories all led to clear lessons or meanings, there wouldn’t be much reason to read them more than once, study them closely, or talk to others about the impressions they get from a story. In short, the stories we read in class have meanings that are arguable and complicated, and it’s our job to sort them out.

It might seem that the stories do have specific meanings, and the instructor has already decided what that meaning is. Not true. Instructors can be pretty dazzling (or mystifying) with their interpretations, but that’s because they have a lot of practice with stories and have developed a sense of the kinds of things to look for.

Even so, the most well-informed professor rarely arrives at conclusions that someone else wouldn’t disagree with—and often for good reasons.

In fact, most professors are aware that their interpretations are debatable and actually love a good argument.

But let’s not go to the other extreme. To say that there is no one answer is not to say that anything we decide to say about a novel or short story is valid, interesting, or valuable. Interpretations of fiction are often opinions, but not all opinions are equal.

So what makes a valid and interesting opinion? A good interpretation of fiction will:

Avoid the obvious (in other words, it won’t argue a conclusion that most readers could reach on their own from a general knowledge of the story)