# Find the Subject Beneath the Topic

The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life

By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman

Practice 15 · Part 2: Material, purpose, and form

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> Distinguish the topic from the subject: what a work depicts is not always what it is about.

Writers take the topic for the subject all the time. A writer says the novel is about a road trip and then revises the road. An essay is about technology and never reaches the dependence or loneliness that made its author choose the topic. Topic is the answer given at a party, and a writer who stops there tends to polish the depiction and leave the point alone. Announce the subject in the first paragraph instead and the piece may have nowhere left to go.

Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” approaches its subject in disguise. The opening stanza sounds like advice: losing, it says, is an art anyone can pick up. The poem then lists what there is to lose, from door keys and an hour badly spent to a mother’s watch, two cities, two rivers, a continent. Stop at almost any stanza and you would say the poem is about losing things, and you would be right about what it depicts. The last stanza breaks the register. It begins “Even losing you,” and the cheerful instruction can no longer be kept up; the final line interrupts itself with a parenthetical order to the poet to write it down, and then comes the word the poem has until then used only to deny. The inventory was the topic. The subject is the loss of a person.

Vivian Gornick’s *The Situation and the Story* is a book about personal narrative, but she applies its distinction to literature at large: “Every work of literature has both a situation and a story.” The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot. The story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer, the thing one has come to say. One of her examples is a poem, Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” where the situation is a seven-year-old sitting in a dentist’s office and the story is a child’s first experience of isolation. Topic and subject map roughly onto her terms, and like her distinction they reach beyond memoir. Topics matter, and a subject can be stated openly.

James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” has both at work in one text. It opens with dates: on the twenty-ninth of July, 1943, his father died, and a few hours later his father’s last child was born. More than a month earlier there had been a race riot in Detroit. A few hours after the funeral service, which fell on Baldwin’s nineteenth birthday, another broke out in Harlem, and the next morning the family drove to the cemetery through streets of smashed plate glass. When *Harper’s* printed the piece in 1955 under the title “Me and My House,” a reader could have taken it for an account of a family death and a riot.

Baldwin’s story arrives later, in plain statements. His real life, he realizes, had been in danger “from the hatred I carried in my own heart.” By the end he is holding two ideas that seem to oppose each other, acceptance of life as it is and refusal ever to accept injustice as commonplace, and he understands that the fight begins in the heart. The father is dead and the city is burning, and the essay is about what hatred does to the one who carries it.

Knowing only the topic, a writer finds anything adjacent eligible, and the work grows by accretion. With the subject in hand each scene or paragraph can be asked what it does for it, and since the subject is what a reader carries away after the details fade, it is in effect what the work delivered (Practice 16). Some work is honestly about its topic. A report on a flood is about a flood, and forcing a deeper subject onto such work is a kind of vanity. The subject a writer names may also be wrong, a rationalization, and readers may find another; when they do, the question is whether the work supports it. A work can hold more than one subject, as long as one governs.

**Practice.** Complete this sentence about your current Work: “This Work appears to be about ___, but is really investigating ___.” Then list three scenes, sections, or stanzas and write one line each on how it bears on the second blank, and mark any that cannot say. Write the sentence again with a different second blank and see which version accounts for more of the draft; a section that bears on neither is a candidate for Practice 13. Stop at twenty-five minutes. Whichever version accounts for more of the draft is your working answer to what the Work is about.

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