I think, if I think about it, most writers have a single set of ideas that they hover around.
They poke and prod and push these ideas around their entire lives.
The job of writing then becomes finding original ways of restating these themes in a way that has some kind of appeal.
Larry McMurtry wrote about change, the passing of the old to the new, through the prism of the west. He did this with both fiction and non-fiction and wrote stories of the past, as well as the present.
C.S. Lews wrote about (Christian) purpose and adventure. He wrote both fiction and non-fiction too, for adults, as well as children.
Heck, this blog is only (really) about a few things too.
As was typical of Lewis—his friend Owen Barfield once commented that “what he thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything”—he was, just as the war’s momentum permanently shifted, working out a single set of ideas in multiple genres and for multiple audiences. It is therefore helpful to explore The Abolition of Man in conjunction with these other texts that are so closely related to it. And the one that makes the key argument most pointedly is English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama.
-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)
