Are all your stories the same story?

In a “conversation with the author” at the back of Run by Ann Patchett, she says that all her books are about the same thing:

“In fact, I only write one book. I just write the same book over and over and over again -- which is my attempt to plagiarize The Magic Mountain....a group of strangers are thrown together, not in a tuberculosis sanitarium in Switzerland, but this time on a snowy night on a Boston street. It is the theme I will always come back to. It’s what compels me: what is our connection to strangers? What is our responsibility to strangers? Who do we love, and who do we take in as our family? That’s Bel Canto -- certainly that’s all of them.”

Run, by the way, is a fantastic read, and a novel that coincidentally pays tribute to Ted Kennedy in various ways.

I just finished The Magician's Assistant, also by Patchett, and I agree with her: same story, totally different setting and characters. I love her books more now knowing that this is how she sees them, different facets of the same gem she’s carrying around inside her.

So of course I’ve been asking myself: what is the one story that all my stories are about? What is that jewel I keep circling around, some question or compulsion or quandary at the center of my writing?

I’m early down the road in my own writing, but so far I see I have a fascination with the scraps of magic hidden in our everyday lives. By magic I don’t mean ghosts and fairies. More I mean the exceptional, awe-inspiring, path-bending, assumption up-turning moments we stumble on and how they offer the chance for us -- ahem, I mean, my characters -- to step into a wider view of their lives.

Like Mary finding the rose garden and then Colin in The Secret Garden. 

Like the stolen shoes falling out of the sky onto Stanley’s head in Louis Sachar’s Holes. Or later, how Stanley and Zero's intertwined family histories are unearthed from the bottom of dried-up Lake Green.


Like that movie, The Upside of Anger (2005), about the woman (played to perfection by Joan Allen) who thinks her husband has out-of-the-blue run off with his young secretary. The whole movie is about this woman’s journey through her own rage and how that rage transformed her even though it was based on a complete delusion.

The universe delivers these openings for us to re-write the story about our lives -- health scares, a passing comment from a stranger, an old letter we find filed in the wrong place, a puppy abandoned in the woods, a nasty argument with a loved one, a rejection letter.

What do we do with these openings? Do we recognize them as openings? How do we shape our own story around them? Am I a victim or a hero? Fabulous or a total loser? Totally alone or a child of the universe? Is that person an asshole or doing the best they can? It takes surprisingly little to knock us to either side of these narratives.

Because I’ve been known to over-analyze the juice out of everything, I’ve also been wondering: does it help or hinder the creative process to ask this kind of meta-question about what our capital S story is? There are so many unconscious streams at work when we write. Is it helpful to try to make them more conscious or should we just sit back and enjoy the ride?

We are cautioned -- especially as writers for kids and young adults -- not to push our agendas, not to get too heavy about “message” because readers can smell that a mile away and the story will collapse under its own weight. But this issue Ann Patchett raises is a bit different than what’s the moral of your story. It’s more about what drives us to want to tell the story in the first place. Or what’s the heat that warms our stories from beneath?

So, do you have one story that all your stories are about? And do you think it helps to know or would you rather not know?