How to Select the Proper Topic

for Either Poetry or Fiction

I have learned repeatedly--because I am a slow learner--that it is necessary to choose the proper subject for any literary composition.  A proper topic must be close but not too close to the core of an author's being.

Every time I have tried to write about personal grievances, that work was substandard to understate the matter. Perhaps the strength of emotions  and the felt need to defend a position blocks the kind of analysis that makes good literature.

The trick is to choose subjects that the writer can be emotionally invested in without being so invested that anything comes across as a whine or a defense.

I have never been able to write well about either romantic partners or my relationship with my mother.  But I can write reasonably well about some of the perspectives my mother and I both share. My mother and I share an abhorrence of war--my mother raised  two sons and felt great relief when they passed draft age--the draft can be resumed within 90 days, after all.  Therefore, I could write reasonably well about draft resistance.  That idea, much influenced by my mother, became the ballad "Cherokee County Draft Dodgers," a topic that is close to my thoughts but is not so close that the topic kills objectivity. 

In this ballad, set during World War 1, fathers in Cherokee County, Georgia, hide their draft-age sons in the woods. When soldiers from a nearby military base round up their sons, the fathers saw through the beams of Steele Bridge, causing the miltary vehicles holding their sons to fall into the river.  The fathers pull their sons out of the vehicles, but their actions caused three men, soldiers, to die.  Thus, the poem reflects on the moral conundrums inherent in resisting a government.  During World War 1, Army pay was 30 dollars per month. Men earning more than that amount could apply for a financial hardship exemption. Those earning less--like those sharecroppers in Cherokee County, were stuckk.  Probably, those soldiers killed may have been workers in the North's sweat shops and were in the mllitary because they, too, earned less than 30 dollars per month. 

A paternal uncle, who died when I was an infant, had lost a leg and an eye at Anzio during World War II.  I had never met this uncle and knew about him third-hand. My biological father told my mother about him--she had never met him either--who told me. That family connection was at once close enough and yet distant enough to produce a poem that was reasonably powerful but that did not cripple literature by my need to defend a position.

A third poem of mine that I like is "Knit, Purl," which is based on the story of a friend's father, who as an American soldier during World War II, liberated a concentration camp and struggled with depression for the rest of his life, a disorder that sapped all happiness out of family life.  Perhaps because I have family members who struggled with depression but had never met the friend's father, I had just the right amount of both closeness and distance to write effectively.