Write About Now

Leading with Story, Not Theme or Character

Hopefully my own agent won't penalize me for reading the blog of another, but Rachelle Gardner posted something today about fiction queries that includes a suggestive observation. First a quote, then some commentary by yours truly:

"One thing I see a LOT are the queries that tell me about the 'theme' of a novel but not about the story itself. 'My novel deals with many issues Christians deal with—sin, forgiveness, and redemption.' Uh-huh. So do 99% of all novels, Christian or not. What's the story? Or they might talk about the characters: 'My novel is full of quirky people with unique personalities...' Excellent. But what do those quirky characters do?"

She goes on to offer advice on how to craft a good query, but let's stop right there. The key question in that paragraph is right in the middle -- what's the story? -- but there's a certain type of writer who has a hard time answering. I know, because I'm one of them. My friend Deeanne Gist taught me this lesson a few years ago. We'd just met. Her first novel was coming out, and I was busily at work on my never-ending Constantinople thing, so it was only natural for us to ask about each other's books. She answered succinctly, then waited for my response, which was a long, rambling muddle about theme, genre, technique, and the challenges of historical fiction. Um, yeah. But what's the story? Once I overcame my bafflement (I'd been trying to impress, after all, not confuse) it dawned on me that if I was ever going to sell a novel, I'd have to be able to lead with the story.

Common sense, but that doesn't make it easy. For those of us who want to tackle a specific theme, or want to write about a particular character, leading with story might not feel right. But Rachelle Gardner is right. No matter how eloquently I elaborate on theme in the abstract, my description could fit a hundred other books. And "quirky" characters engage us when we meet them in action, not when we hear about them second hand.

The trick is to tell a story that embodies the theme and reveals the characters, so that leading with story brings theme and character along. Without theme and character, the story would be an empty rollick. Without story, theme and character are no better. So when you have a hard time -- as I did -- leading with the narrative, it might just be that the story isn't ready yet. When it is, you won't have to talk about theme and character separately, because they'll be embedded in the tale.

Drifting (Again)

Bob Robinson posed a question in response to my Comment Q & A:

I wonder if revolutionaries are not just individuals or if there may also be movements that happen, either with intentional conspiring (people bucking the "bad examples" together) or with separate moves of individuals being led by the same Spirit of God (that maybe God himself is the one who wants a revolution). When is it the "spirit of the age" and when is it the Spirit of God?

Instead of giving a straight answer, I thought it might be nice to dredge up an old post from Notes on Craft, written when the passages from T. S. Eliot and Evelyn Waugh that inform my answer to the Comment questions first took root in my brain. So with no further ado . . .

DRIFTING

Maybe readers are better off giving contemporary authors a wide berth. With the classics, you encounter books that have stood the test of time. Each of them is a voice in the great conversation and, taken together, they balance each other out. Read widely enough and a kind of synthesis emerges. That's what T. S. Eliot says in his essay "Religion and Literature." With contemporary art, though, you don't really experience the back-and-forth dialectic. Time has not yet thinned the ranks, so instead of a counterpointed conversation between individuals, spanning centuries, in today's books -- whenever today happens to be -- you get a chorus of the zeitgeist. As Eliot points out:

... the reader of contemporary literature is not, like the reader of the established great literature of all time, exposing himself to the influence of divers and contradictory personalities; he is exposing himself to a mass movement of writers who, each of them, think that they have something individually to offer, but are really all working together in the same direction.

This is a daunting consideration if you happen to be a contemporary author. On the one hand, I hear Eliot's advice and it rings true. As a reader I set great store by old books. But as an author I wonder if this doesn't cast a shadow over my own efforts. Am I just another cog in some contemporary 'mass movement,' or am I one of the few individuals? Eliot considered it harder than ever in his own day to be an individual, and I don't imagine it's gotten easier since then. I would be flattering myself, I suspect, to classify myself in the sacred camp, which means that by passing along Eliot's advice with approbation, I am in essence telling you not to bother to read my work. At the very least, you should wait until I'm dead and history has had an opportunity to give its verdict.

Drifting

Maybe readers are better off giving contemporary authors a wide berth. With the classics, you encounter books that have stood the test of time. Each of them is a voice in the great conversation and, taken together, they balance each other out. Read widely enough and a kind of synthesis emerges. That's what T. S. Eliot says in his essay "Religion and Literature." With contemporary art, though, you don't really experience the back-and-forth dialectic. Time has not yet thinned the ranks, so instead of a counterpointed conversation between individuals, spanning centuries, in today's books -- whenever today happens to be -- you get a chorus of the zeitgeist. As Eliot points out:

... the reader of contemporary literature is not, like the reader of the established great literature of all time, exposing himself to the influence of divers and contradictory personalities; he is exposing himself to a mass movement of writers who, each of them, think that they have something individually to offer, but are really all working together in the same direction.

Theology's Influence on Art

Last week, I cleansed the palate (so to speak) by insisting that God has not revealed any rules for good fiction. This means there is no Christian formula for "correct" art. Really, this should come as no surprise to anyone. We might talk about "writing from a Christian worldview," but that's a broad category. When it comes down to details of craft, it offers relatively little direction. That doesn't mean, of course, that our beliefs do not influence our work. They do, on every level: content, form and style. The question is, "How?" To get to the bottom of it, I've been wandering like a blind man with a lamp through Athens. Actually, it wasn't Athens at all, but somewhere a bit closer to Jerusalem: Westminster.

Suffering to Make Christian Art

I've been thinking about the nature of Christian art again. What is it that makes a particular work of art Christian? There are so many different answers to that question. Some say it depends on the faith of the artist, others that it depends on the ideas inherent in the work -- or its "worldview." One line of thought is that anything good or true is inherently Christian, since all goodness and truth finds its source in God.

Don't hold your breath for any answers from me. I think it's an important question, but my take on it shifts more often than I'd like to admit. Maybe my perspective is like a many-faceted diamond, catching light at different angles as it turns. Or maybe I'm just confused! Whatever the case, this mix of commitment and uncertainty keeps me reading about the subject. I search and I search, knowing that in this life I may never find. And I admit it's a selfish quest. I want an answer of some sort for purely personal reasons, so that I can get my aesthetic fingers around the problem. If you think about it, some sort of concept about "Christian art" is certral to the idea of being a Christian artist.

Structure and Direction in Fiction

What comes first -- being an artist or being a Christian? Most of us, I suspect, would rank our identity as believers first. Art, after all, is something we do, while being a Christian is something we are. I've long suspected, though, that like so many dichotomies, this one is false. It's a bit like asking what comes first -- believing God or obeying him? The Bible doesn't treat these as two distinct categories. If you love me, God says, keep my commandments. Part of being his is doing what he gives us to do. In that sense, for certain of us, putting art first is putting Christ first, and vice versa -- or ought to be.

This comes into focus for me when I think about the Bible's story of creation, fall and redemption. We forget too easily how all-encompassing the doctrine of creation is. God made it all. Nothing that is was made apart from him. No exceptions. We can't go anywhere -- in space, in time, in imagination -- he doesn't already inhabit. That's as true for moons as it is for mountain peaks, for caves as it is for culture. Creation is total, an umbrella that covers everything we know apart from God.

Irony and the Sublime

"This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, men of the West!" When Aragorn leads his outnumbered army to the black gates of Mordor, why do we long to march with him? When Henry V, in Shakespeare's play, delivers his rousing St. Crispin's Day speech -- the prototype for Aragorn's words and so many others -- why do we, knowing the odds, wish more than anything to be numbered among the "happy few"? We share Henry's scorn for the "gentlemen in England now abed" who will one day "think themselves accursed" and "hold their manhoods cheap" when the heroes of Agincourt speak of that battle. What is it that makes these noble sentiments so appealing?

And what about the marines of the Wager? You may not be familiar with their story, but Robert Louis Stevenson recounts it in his essay "The English Admirals":

There was no room for these brave fellows in the boat, and they were left behind upon the island to a certain death. They were soldiers, they said, and knew well enough it was their business to die; and as their comrades pulled away, they stood upon the beach, gave three cheers, and cried 'God bless the king!'

Why did these four marines act so nobly? Stevenson dismisses the idea that they did it for fame or glory. As far as they knew, no one would ever come to hear of their story. They did it, Stevenson concludes, for their own satisfaction:

"Literary" as an Adjective

"Literary" is one of those terms, like "Christian," that will always have a little play in the definition. Two reasons: (1) the people who use the word in a positive sense do so in a variety of different ways, and (2) critics impose at least part of the range of meaning, and their definitions often incorporate distortions. I won't even attempt to untangle the nuances. If there was a checklist for determining what is literary, then it really would be just another genre. But I'm going to throw out some thoughts, for what they're worth.

1. In spite of the fact that the debate is often framed as "literary vs. genre," the two concepts are not antithetical, and they aren't mutually exclusive. Literary novels often incorporate genre elements, and genre novels often achieve a literary sensibility.

Artistic Development: 2 Stages or 3?

My undergraduate years can be neatly divided into two periods: the time when I had no friends, and the time when I did. The first era took up the whole of my freshman and sophomore years, and since I was friendless, I spent most weekends barricaded in my dorm room reading book after book. At the time, I hoped to graduate college and go to work for the CIA, ridding the world of the Red Menace, so a lot of my reading consisted of spy novels. I read John Le Carre, of course, but I also read a lot of Robert Ludlum -- enough to realize that each of his books was essentially the same book, and that the best of them all (The Road to Gandolfo broke the mold. It was only natural, then, when it came time to pen my first novel, that I feel back on a familiar form. My epigraph came from Chaucer, but the plot and characters were pure Ludlum, albeit leavened with a cynicism I'd picked up from reading The Second Oldest Profession.

Developing Taste

Another chart for another theory. This time, it's all about taste. To each his own, that's what they say, but there's no denying some people have better taste than others. But can you quantify such things? I doubt it. Still, it seems to me that there are three stages in the development of taste, and they go something like this. First, there's the "I know what I like" stage, which is where we all start. It's an uncritical acceptance of whatever we happen to love or hate, with no effort to defend or justify our feelings, and little or no interest in governing principles. After we leave this stage, we often look back on it as an Edenic innocence, a pre-critical time when we could simply enjoy.

Innocence is corrupted by knowledge, and the knowledge of the second stage revolves around three poles: the past, the popular, and the provocative. In each case, there are positive and negative polarities. I've tried to illustrate these in my chart. Some people, in developing their taste, christen nostalgia, accepting the premise that the old ways are best. They say "yes" to the past. This affirmative expresses itself in different ways depending on the discipline in question. When it comes to books, they'll prefer the classics. When it comes to clothing, they'll have a predilection for vintage. When it comes to art and architecture, the older the better. They value old things because they are old, first and foremost, the assumption being that we've lost whatever was good and we need to recover it. Of course, there's a negative polarity to this pole as well. Some people reject the past because it's the past, prefering instead whatever is current and new. Old ideas, old habits, old notions of beauty -- all of it is anathema, all of it dated. Again, it isn't so much the value of the individual expressions, it's the fact that they're old that makes them undesirable.