Actually, Pynchon of all people has one of the best lines about this. In one of his very few nonfiction writings about his work, he talks about an early short story he wrote titled Entropy. Entropy, of course, is the central Pynchonian metaphor and a concern for all of his mature work, but early on he tried to write a story about it with the word in the very fucking title and he has this great line about it: “The story is a fine example of a procedural error beginning writers are always being cautioned against. It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol, or abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.” -WF

Check out other work in the Racists of America series here.