Wally Lamb, On Character and Theme in Fiction

00:08 [Wally Lamb] Theme for me always has to emerge. I start out with a character who I might not even like very much but begin to worry about and as I'm working with this character and sort of figuring out his or her story,

00:30 I get to different levels of caring and worrying about them. I know that I'm on to something when I wake up at three in the morning worrying about this imagined person. And I always write in first person so my characters are always telling their own stories, sometimes reliably, sometimes not. But theme emerges from that material. Now, I have had

01:00 occasion to sit in on classes where people are analyzing my fiction, and I tend to feel that we all filter what we read through our own lives and our own experiences. I think that's perfectly okay if somebody wants to see something that I didn't necessarily intend because really I'm sort of figuring it out myself as I go along. I think probably

01:30 now having written three novels, I see that probably my overarching theme is the theme of people who are alienated, sometimes abandoned, but are longing for connection. A lot of people ask me, am I like my characters, and a lot of people assume that I'm like my characters,

02:00 and sometimes when people meet me after they've read my books, they're sort of surprised that I'm not so much like these sort of angry, resentful people. What I share with my fictional characters, I think, is that we are imperfect people trying to become better people.