Ras: Big Ideas, Part 2: The Potato Chip Principle

Yesterday’s post argued for the importance of a story’s theme. As the screenwriter Barry Levinson said, a theme is useful because once you understand what your theme is, it helps you decide where your story is going.

But when you’re writing a story, where does the theme itself come from?

I like ideas, but I’m no Donald Barthelme, so for me, a story rarely derives from an idea. My stories almost always begin with characters in situations, often involving a conflict. I’m not thinking theme at all when I start out. I’m imagining characters who interest me and what they’d say and how they’d act and how one event leads to another. At some point, without my asking the old cerebral cortex for help, ideas will begin to filter in from who knows where. Like a lot of writers, I’m a pack rat who will use any scrap of thought or conversation as fodder for a story.

If ideas arise in this fashion, consider them a gift from your subconscious. Go with them. Drop them into the story as they occur to you (We’re talking first draft here.) When you rewrite that draft, you may want to expand upon them and begin to use them for deeper structure. The ideas may suggest new scenes, new conflicts, an array of riches.

One example of this process at work is a scene in a novella of mine. The two main characters, Hurk and Lonnie, the narrator, are a couple of gravediggers. What they bury are dogs and cats. Here’s an argument they get into about the proper way to place animals in a mass grave as they stand next to a mound of dead animals and a freshly dug hole.

(WARNING: ANIMAL LOVERS AND FANS OF TED THE CAT MAY WANT TO STOP HERE.)

Hurk picked up a orange cat by its hind leg and tossed it down in the hole.

“Wait a minute,”I says,”you got things backwards here – big dogs go on the bottom, cats and whatnot on top.”

“Lonnie Spriggs,” he says, “where was you raised? Everybody knows you got to fit the little suckers into the corners and tight spots down at the bottom. You got to pack ‘em in, like you’re packing a trunk.”

“Didn’t you ever ask your self,” I says, “How come in a can of peanuts the biggest nuts always work their way up to the top and the littlest ones always wind up on the bottom? Same is true for cereal in a box. That great Dane has got to go on the bottom cause he’s gonna be swimming up to the surface.”

Hurk was like a Malamute I seen once with one of them little French poodles in his mouth. Once he took a notion in his head, you couldn’t shake it out of him. I tried every which way to make him see the sense of it, but you could sooner teach algebra to a hog.


Both of us was getting pretty edgy about the sandwiches, so finally he says let’s throw fingers. Hurk flung a tray to my deuce so we did it his way. King, a rickety old German shepherd with very bad ears, wound up on top.

Leaving aside questions of literary quality, the dialogue arose in this way: Hurk and Lonnie are great friends, but they’re always arguing so they need things to argue about. When they start to bury animals, a story I’d read recently in a popular-science magazine flashed into my head.

As I remember, there was a dispute among physicists about a common problem – how disparate physical entities in jostling situations sort themselves out. Call it the problem of the potato chip bowl – why do the smallest morsels always wind up on the bottom? Since Lonnie is marginally brighter than Hurk, I gave him the explanation here, and indeed his warning about the proper burial of the biggest dog turns into a key plot point later in the story.

This dialogue of the gravediggers, I hope, is a diverting bit of low humor, but that’s not all the story gains from their argument. It was while working on this passage that I realized that a good overall theme for this story might be something like, How do we know the truth of any human experience? And what, actually, is that thing we call truth? This is deep philosophical musing worthy of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and all the gang. And I had stumbled into these big epistemological questions just by trying to think of something for two gravediggers to argue about.

The eventual title of the story became “The Truth, Mainly” – an allusion to the opening of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which Huck says: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.”

It’s important to understand that having a theme does not mean that your story can be reduced to a one-sentence message or moral that it aims to teach. Quite the reverse, a good theme is more about raising questions than offering answers.

In “The Truth, Mainly,” the arguments of Hurk and Lonnie never get resolved. If the reader walks away with any attitude toward the concept of truth, I hope it is, Beware. Beware especially of assuming that you have knowledge of the truth.

It was only years later that the gravediggers in Hamlet occurred to me.