How Seculars view the Church

The Church has had an interesting role in modern fiction; sometimes it preys on the innocent, and acts like the center of intolerance and spiritual tyranny. At other times, it takes the role of mercy, in the form of kindly priests or wise ministers. Mostly, it is a force of spiritual light which does not illuminate, cast against a force of spiritual darkness that darkens just like the real thing.

What are we seeing here in literature? It's complicated. The Western world has always had an arduous relationship with Christianity.  It has loved Her, and it has tried to use Her for it's own ends. In a fit of boredom it forsook her, and sampled other things. But post-Christian thought failed,* and now the relationship between the two is choked. The west looks back at Christianity with a mix of admiration and horror, and literature reflects this. Authors sprinkle kindly ministers in between radical Knights Templar. Christianity is good, bad, sane and crazy--sometimes all at once.

This is not entirely secular bias. Christians have been good, bad, sane and crazy; and we shouldn't react to their confusion by setting the Church up as a utopia--secular readers will assume that the real Church is a dystopia. Churches really are large groups of sinful human beings, some of whom have accepted Christ, and some of whom have not. It's bound to get messy.

*  It only took two World Wars, a cold war and the rise of global Islam to show us that. Aren't we quick-witted?

Heart and Head writing.

Sometimes when writing, I encounter a sort of quandary--do I write from my heart or do I write from my head? Both have their benefits. When I am having a bad day there's no question about it. I will write from my heart; lest the day poison me. But why does it matter?

Mind based writing often lends itself to comedy or speculative fiction. If I am trying to write something light, I will write it from my head. My heart is much too melodramatic to make people laugh.  I will write humor, mysteries and novels with complex plots: I will need a sharp sense of wit and situation, but not always empathy. 

On the other end of the spectrum is heart based writing. The tear jerker and the deeply affecting short story spring, weeping, from the heart. My heart is a serious place, and the deeper my emotion, the more serious my tone.  My work will flip from heart rending sorrow to divine joy. Heart based writing digs deeply into the meaning of things, and mothers vivid descriptions. Or at least it will try.

Head based writing tends to describe the bare minimum. A head-based writer will notice the ocean, but a heart-based writer will gasp at the moonlight dancing on the water. A lot of this has to do with taste. Some of us are emotional people, and many more of us are...well... completely mental. My favorite writing is a hybrid which pulls on both the heartstrings and the head ones. It often has the best of both worlds.

Studliness, Arete and Writing.

I have an awesome Western Civ professor. I have heard him refer to Xerxes, King David, Sappho, Socrates and St. Perpetua as 'Studly'. I will not comment on his use of a term generally reserved for a male horse on female historical characters--I am too tactful for that sort of thing. Usually, when he refers to 'studliness' he refers to a concept of general toughness. Cruder internet folk might have called this concept 'badass', but the ancient Greeks, who were refined internet folk, called it arete. 

We have a notion of being the best you can. This stems from the Greek arete, the idea of achieving excellency in every way possible. Arete donated a very helpful idea to the culture-- it proposed that writing is neither simply self expression, nor is it just a record. Writing is an art--and the very roots of that word tie into arete. We have to develop our writing to an expertise--a dynamic skill that we improve with practice.

Often we take this for granted, but back in the day, the idea of pursuing something so fully spread like the Plague: hardening writing and thought as it went. Since then its power fluctuated; for example-- it died a little when Rome fell, and resurged in the Renaissance. Over the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries we've killed it yet again as we allowed our culture's trust in absolute truth to decay. The advent of electronics shortened our patience and nipped our willingness to work. We need to protect (or restore) excellence, and in doing so, become excellent ourselves.

So that's your history lesson for the day.

Writing and Prayer.

How does our prayer life, our relationship with God, affect our writing?  Too often our lives are compartmentalized. But what is the point of a prayer life that doesn't affect our life?

Few Christians would actually admit that they don't pay attention to God in their normal life. It has become popular to see the Christian life in holistic terms. We want see how their faith affects all of reality more and more. That's a good thing. It adds to our testimony. However, we still struggle with compartmentalized baggage.

Again and again, we put our prayers in the Prayer Box, and our writing in the Writing Box. To a certain extent this is right, prayer and writing can be different things. However, if we block God out of an area of our life, we steal from Him. We are His children, and He is loath to lose even one part of us. 

 So how do we let Him in? All relationships naturally affect our writing in some way, but the one we share with the indescribable Triune God has to rank the highest. The answer is simply to spend more time with God than anyone else. Then He will take precedence in your writing.

  Although it would be cool if God decided to split the sky and give us instantaneous, perfect writing, we will probably still have to learn the rules of grammar, style and character building. God didn't give us heads so we could make targets out of them.  Instead, prayer will make us more Godly writers. It will help us avoid worldliness in our writing-- and conversely--will help us avoid preachiness, which often comes from attempts to shove God into the story without relating to Him.

We can have the strongest prayer lives in the world, and still write stories that make William Shakespeare cover his ears and curse in his grave. Praying is not a magic token that we can exchange for anything we want. It is a conversation with God, who will do what is best for us despite our waspish complaints.

In the end, praying will give us satisfaction while we write. The Holy Spirit illuminates the dark portions of our hearts, the more we commune with Him, the more clearly we will see reality. Readers will pick up on that fulfillment. Think of Lewis, Bunyan or Chesterton, and what gave those authors the ability to affect so many with their work.  

Originality Clones.

If writers try so hard to be original, than why is so much of their work identical? Answer: because they all try too hard to free themselves from the banal.

Here's a question; what is originality?  If we define it as a completely unique creation, sprouting solely from our heads like Athena from that of Zeus, then our pursuit of originality will prove disastrous.  We will all sound the same: like fangirls of our own supreme genius.

In the end, the man who looks outside himself for answers wins. We create the works of greatest beauty when we open ourselves up to God, other people and the our vast, wonderful world. Originality does not come from within. It comes from without. There are many ways we can get it, and only a few of them have to do with ourselves. Empathy trumps almost all else in writing. The moment "originality" squashes empathy, real value packs up and leaves, and disdain mars our work. Humility nurses great authors. Pride mothers great destruction.

"One sees great things from the valley, and only small things from the peak" - G.K Chesterton

"What moves us in writing that has regional or ethnic roots...is the sound of voices far older than the narrator's, talking in cadences that are more than ordinarily rich." -William Zinsser, On Writing Well

Enter the Guardsman

Lets take a moment to salute the most unappreciated character in all of fiction--the humble guardsman. Stop for a moment in your vicious writing and consider this. The humble guardsman always gets the short end of the stick. An alien octopus or rogue assassin always targets him if he works for the good guys, and If he's working for the bad guys the heroes often kill him.  He has an unforgiving job,... and the audience doesn't even root for him.

As Christians, should we really treat our minor characters like that?  Every human being has a living soul, and even though our fictional characters are not real, they still represent human souls. Often we consider our tertiary characters as unimportant because they don't affect the plot; however, I'm starting to think that since Christianity claims that all people are made in the image of God, we ought to see our minor characters--who represent people--as valuable.

 Those guardsmen represent in a way the ordinary people that we meet every day. The people that you meet once, talk a bit to, but never really get to know. They're the unfamiliar faces we see every day, but still possess their own unique lives and their own unique stories. However, even though we encounter them for a brief period, they are human beings and deserve our respect. Treating tertiary characters like humble guardsman with disdain breeds disdain towards unfamiliar people. You do not have to put a long backstory about the guardsman in order to make them seem human. The moment you do that they cease to be a tertiary character. Rather, you should include brief snippits that show the guard's humanity.



Quis Custodiet Ispos Custodiet? 

Dire Wolves

The train stops, and the rhythmic chugging of the train engine gives way to silence. Suddenly, you hear a howl in the dark. This happens in an excellent children's book The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and it's amazing isn't it? You can't beat wolves for sheer spine chilliness. Other great authors, Tolkien, Stoker and Lewis all make excellent use of wolves as enemies. Perhaps that's because our ancestors had to deal with wolves on a daily basis. I have no idea.

You will hear people say that,  in real life, wolves don't actually attack, let alone eat, people. If you routinely go camping in the Rockies, this is good advice,  but not as good if you write in a medievalesque period. Wolves today do not carry the same dread that they did in the days of yore. The wolves in North America have grown to fear humans after centuries of getting shot by rednecks, and the wolves in Europe are too scarce to really pose a danger to anyone. But once upon a time, not so long ago, wolves posed a real danger. Wolves killed 3000 people in France alone. Half of those wolves did not have rabies.

Most of these attacks involved children, a few included lone women, or less often, a lone man; something many people forget when writing of wolves. No wolf would ever attack someone with a weapon. Wolves are opportunistic predators, and thus they only pose a real danger to the weak. They would never think of attacking an armed man... much less a train; however, you do not enjoy books like the Wolves of Willoughby Chase for their realistic descriptions of predatory habitats. You enjoy them for their stories.