Archives for July 2012

Writer’s Ten Commandments #5: Honor Your Parents

| 3 Comments

 

This series is about breaking the ten commandments in your writing—doing to your characters, or having them do, things you’d never want anyone to do to you.

Commandment #5: Honor your father and mother.

Judging from my Facebook feed around Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, you’d think my friends lived in some weird reverse Lake Wobegon—where all the parents are above average.

I can see two possible reasons for this:

  1. We remember, or at least talk about, only the good in people after they’re gone.
  2. Only the people with exceptional parents post about them on Facebook.

It’s got to be one of these two, because it’s a simple fact that we live in an imperfect world with imperfect parents. Some are just imperfect enough to make our lives interesting, while others are imperfect enough to make our lives miserable.

Flannery O’Connor said something like (I paraphrase):

Anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write about for the rest of his life.

Since our lives as children revolve around our parents, present or absent, this means (quoting myself):

Sooner or later, directly or indirectly, you’re going to write about your parents.

The question is whether you’ll do it honestly.

Here’s where we run headlong into the fifth commandment on a real-world level. If your parents listed toward the dysfunctional end of the spectrum, is it dishonoring them to write about them honestly?

This is a thorny question, one with a lot of facets and considerations. For one thing, it could make a big difference whether your parents are alive and what kind of relationship you have with them. It matters, too, whether they’re still the same kind of people they were when you were growing up. And it matters whether they’re likely to come after you with either a lawsuit or a shotgun if you write the truth.

But if you’re going to write about them at all—as I believe you inevitably will—it’s my belief you have to do it honestly. Because if writing is not honest, it doesn’t deserve to exist.

That doesn’t mean you have to create characters that precisely echo your own family of origin and depict what really happened there. In fact, I think it’s probably better if you don’t—both for the sake of keeping the fifth commandment and for the sake of writing your best fiction.

Unadulterated reality seldom makes the best fiction. It’s too messy, too full of contradictions. It doesn’t follow a neat plot arc. If the events of real life are translated into fiction, they’re generally either boring or unbelievable. And the ending is rarely as satisfying as we want our novel endings to be.

If you feel the need to write the true story of your childhood exactly as you remember it (which is probably not exactly as it happened), go ahead and do it. Get it out of your system. Share it with your spouse and your siblings if you want. Then burn it.

What I do suggest for writing about your parents is this:

  • Wait until you have a little distance, a little understanding, some measure of forgiveness. You’ll probably have to write your way to full understanding and forgiveness; but it’s best to get there before you write “The End.”
  • Write indirectly. Write about characters who struggle with their parents, but make them different from yourself and your parents. Give their story a proper plot arc and a satisfying conclusion. Don’t write the picture-perfect childhood you wish you’d had; but you can end with a reconciliation that may or may not ever happen in your own life.
  • Be honest about your own struggles as the child of your parents. But be honest about your parents as people, too. Put yourself inside their skin. Live their struggles and challenges. Get a grip on what made them tick. Cut them some slack—chances are you’re not perfect yourself. And if they’ve repented, let that knowledge inform what you write as well. Be truthful—but also be gracious. Be kind.

If you still feel you can’t write about your parents, even following these guidelines, without dishonoring them, you could always wait until they’ve passed on. I promise you they’ll have more perspective then.

An imperfect, or even a tragic, childhood can be a great gift for a writer. It can give you compassion and empathy, crucial qualities for a writer. It can give you the deep emotional experience you need to connect with your readers on an intimate level. And, of course, it gives you lots of material.

So if you can’t think of anything else to thank your parents for, thank them for that. Honor them by becoming the best writer you can be.

Writers’ Ten Commandments #4: Keep the Sabbath

| 4 Comments

This series is about breaking the Ten Commandments in your writing—doing to your characters, or having them do, things you’d never want anyone to do to you.

Commandment #4: Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

On the face of it, breaking this commandment doesn’t have a huge potential for improving your fiction. True, unless all your characters are faithful Christians—and maybe even if they are—some of them will probably be Sabbath-breakers. But that’s not interesting enough to justify a blog post.

I’d like to depart from my formula for this series here. Instead of showing you how to break a commandment in your fiction, I’m going to exhort you to keep this commandment in your life as a writer.

I’ve read a lot of advice to writers that says “write every day.” As in seven days a week. Usually these advisers want you to produce a standard word count, typically 1000 words per day. They want you to be a writing machine.

I want you to be a human being. And human beings need rest.

Write six days a week if you want to. (I personally do five as a rule; Saturdays are crazy at my house.) Fulfill a daily word count if you want to. But even if you don’t honor Sunday as the Lord’s day, for the sake of your writing and your sanity, take one day in seven off.

The fact is, the Lord created us to need rest, recharging, a break from our daily routine. We need this not only for our physical and spiritual health, but for our creative health as well. If you keep pouring out and out without ever putting in, the well will eventually run dry.

So give yourself a break. Take a day to worship God, be with your family and friends, enjoy nature or a favorite recreation. Let the world pour its goodness into your soul, so that you have something to pour out when you return to your writing.

Give Your Characters a Rest Too

I also think it’s a good idea to give your characters a break once in a while. Here again, I’m contradicting a lot of common writing advice, which says to get your characters into more and more trouble, keep up the pace and never slacken, never give your reader a place to put the book down.

Yes, your characters need to have plenty of trouble, whether internal or external. No, you don’t want the reader to get bored. But think about it: When you read a book that leaps from one crisis to another with never a moment to breathe, don’t you feel exhausted by the end of it? or even halfway through?

To my mind, the best books are those that slow the pace every once in a while and give both the characters and the reader a chance to reflect on what’s happening. Let your characters have time to get to know each other, reveal their hidden conflicts, their deep motivations, their hopes for the future. Otherwise all you have is one long adrenaline rush.

Think of Harry Potter. Lots of action there. Even critics of the HP books have never (to my knowledge) accused them of being boring. But are the kids actively fighting evil every single day? Of course not. They’re in school. They’re going to classes, developing relationships, goofing around in their spare time. And Rowling lets us see this.

Toward the end of each book, of course, things start to heat up. We don’t get a break again until the climax is past. And if you take the series overall, things get darker and tougher from book to book. But even in Deathly Hallows, you have a moment when Harry and Hermione dance together to the radio. You have a lengthy respite at Bill and Fleur’s house when the characters are mourning Dobby and planning the raid on Gringott’s. You have a chance to breathe, and to remember why everything the kids are doing is so all-fired important.

Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I say, “The unexamined novel is not worth reading.” Take the time, and give your readers the time, to examine the deeper underpinnings of your story.

Too much work, too much adrenaline rush, makes you old before your time. Remember the Sabbath, that your days may be long on the earth.

Writer’s Ten Commandments #3: Taking God’s Name in Vain

| 5 Comments

In case you missed the first post in the series, this series is about breaking the Ten Commandments in your writing—doing to your characters, or having them do, things you’d never want anyone to do to you.

Commandment #3: You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

We usually think of this commandment as applying simply to the casual use of God’s name as, more or less, a swear word. OMG spelled out would be perhaps its mildest form—using the form of words that denotes calling on God when, in fact, that is not the speaker’s true intention.

In this sense, we could have a nice little debate about whether it’s okay to have your characters say things you as a Christian (if you happen to be one) would never dream of saying yourself. I’ve talked about this elsewhere, so I’ll just say briefly: I think profanity of any sort should be used in fiction very sparingly. When I come across profanity in a book, it feels like a slap in the face. So I only use it when I want to slap my readers in the face (in the nicest possible way). And then only in dialogue or first-person narration—when a character is in such extremity that any milder language just wouldn’t sound realistic. But that’s my personal take. Every writer has his or her own approach.

But there’s another way to look at this commandment. You could regard it as taking God’s name in vain when a person, or character, claims to be acting for the glory of God, while his or her true motives are in fact selfish. Think of Luke 6:46, where Christ says, “But why do you call Me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do the things which I say?”

Now we’re getting into some fertile ground for great characters. Maybe not your protagonist, but quite possibly your villain or a secondary character. Pecksniff in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit is this sort of hypocrite—a man we love to hate, who uses everyone around him in his quest for money and social position while claiming to be oh-so-disinterested. Bleak House has several examples of characters who claim to be doing good—even sincerely believe they’re doing good—while in fact they are wreaking havoc in all the lives they touch.

To use a more contemporary example, Meg Moseley’s fine novel When Sparrows Fall
includes a character who abuses his position of authority in a congregation to steal from his parishioners, manipulate their lives, and occasionally seduce them, all the while proclaiming himself a holy and prophetic man of God. This novel has generated some controversy, but I feel it is greatly enriched by this realistic depiction of a spiritual predator.

I can think of a third way of taking the Lord’s name in vain in fiction, and it’s something I hope you’ll never do. This way would be to depict God, or His action in the world (aka Providence), in a way that is not true to His character. To depict God as unloving, or His universe as fundamentally flawed, chaotic, and irredeemable, is to take His name in vain in the worst possible way.

This perspective is common in post-modern fiction, but it makes for bad fiction and even worse theology. Far better, as we said last time, to depict a universe radiant with the glory of the Resurrection.

Writer’s Ten Commandments #2: No Graven Image

| 1 Comment

In case you missed the first post in the series, this series is about breaking the Ten Commandments in your writing—doing to your characters, or having them do, things you’d never want anyone to do to you.

Commandment #2: You shall not make any graven image, bow down to it or serve it.

I’m going to cheat a bit on this one. To the best of my limited understanding, the original intention of this commandment was pretty much an extension of #1, “have no other gods before Me.” The Lord specifically did not want people worshiping images of anything He had created in place of worshiping Himself.

But we already talked about idolizing people or things other than God in the previous post, so I’m going to address only the first phrase of the commandment: “You shall not make any graven image.”

Well, if you extend that to apply to arts other than sculpture, making images is pretty much what fiction writing is all about, right? We’re creating our own little worlds, which may or may not be made up of the same elements as the world God made. It’s our job to make those worlds, those images, as convincing, as moving, as emotionally involving as possible.

It’s our job to be mini-creators.

It sounds a little presumptuous when you put it this way. But I don’t think it is, really. God created us in His image and likeness, and one crucial element of that likeness surely is creativity. When we create our own fictional worlds, we’re just expressing the image of God latent in all of us.

There’s another sense, a subtler, deeper sense, I’d like to bring out here, too. At fiction’s best, the writer is not only creating a little world; he is creating a world that images God. Not a world to be worshiped in place of God—a world to lead the reader closer to God.

A skillful writer who is also a believer can infuse a bit of grace into any element of any story: a character, a setting, a plot line, a metaphor, the choice of just the right word. Whatever is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is noble in a story carries the image of God, even if His name is never mentioned. In fact, the stories in which His presence is imaged rather than directly stated are often the most powerfully redemptive of all.

Think of Lord of the Rings: The trilogy itself makes no mention of any God-figure. There are no believers or unbelievers. But good and evil are there; courage, love, mercy, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice are there; redemption is there in spades. God breathes through every line.

Go forth and make your graven images—graven with a pen on paper (or a keyboard on silicon). Make them beautiful, make them true, and they will be graven on your readers’ hearts forever.

Writer’s Ten Commandments, #1: No Other Gods

| 4 Comments

Before you panic, let me explain: In this series of posts, I’m going to be talking about breaking the Ten Commandments in your writing. In other words, doing to your characters, or having them do to each other and themselves, things you certainly wouldn’t want anyone to do to you.

The plan is to write about each commandment. I cheated by starting with #6, “You shall not kill,” which gave me the idea of doing a series. And I may end up skipping a commandment or two, as some are less relevant than others.

The First Commandment: You shall have no other gods before Me.

Here’s what I hope you won’t do to break this commandment: Don’t make a god of your writing. Or of yourself as a writer, or of other writers (or agents or editors), or even of your characters. By all means, keep God in His rightful place in your life and your career.

But within your novels, if all your primary characters have God firmly in the center of their hearts and lives, you might not have much of a story.

The truth is, most people—even well-intentioned, pious people—functionally worship someone or something other than God. It may be another person—lover, spouse, child. It may be a career, an addiction, a goal such as money or power. It may even be a false idea of God, or a vision of themselves as good pious people. The enemy can get awfully subtle in the ways he encourages us to break the first commandment.

Whatever it is, your characters will probably begin their stories by having some false god. To be compelling, a character has to want something very badly. It could be God—great stories have been written about people passionately seeking God—but in the beginning, at least, it probably won’t be. It will probably be something along the lines of human love, acceptance, success, or maybe just survival.

Plot happens when someone or something gets in the way of the characters’ attempts to achieve their goals. If you don’t have a goal, or you don’t have obstacles, you probably don’t have much of a plot.

If you’re writing from a Christian point of view, your characters may discover that they can only attain their goals with God’s help, or that the goals are ultimately not as important as they thought they were. Or they may attain their goals and find they aren’t as happy and satisfied as they thought they would be—in which case they may turn to God to fill that hole in the heart that only He can fill.

That can be a great way to end a novel. But it’s probably not a great place to start.

 

When Good Characters Die

| 8 Comments

What are we really mourning when we mourn a character’s death?

When we mourn for a real person, we’re usually grieving for ourselves, because we will miss having that person in our lives. If the person’s life, or our relationship with him, wasn’t what it ought to have been, our mourning may be embittered by regret. If the person dies at the natural end of a good life, our grief (if we believe in the resurrection) is tempered by the confidence that she is at peace.

But when we mourn a fictional character, it isn’t quite the same thing. If we miss the character, we can always go back and read the book again. She will live forever in the pages that precede her demise.

Also, our relationships with the characters are not really an issue—unless you get into books a lot more deeply than I do. For Meggie in Inkheart that might have been a concern, but then Meggie  herself is a fictional character. Let’s keep these things in perspective.

We do sometimes mourn characters who have died as a result of their own poor choices. Hamlet, for instance. But think about it: When you look back at the whole play of Hamlet—not immediately after watching or reading it, but at some distance—is it his death you focus on? It isn’t for me. You might say Hamlet died because he had nothing left to live for. It’s everything that happens before his death that causes us to mourn for a wasted life.

A Death Most Moving

When I think about the deaths in literature that have affected me most deeply, I realize they touch me for one (or both) of two reasons:

  1. The character has sacrificed himself to save others.
  2. The character will be deeply mourned by other characters with whom I identify.

Dumbledore. Fred Weasley. Jean Valjean. Gandalf (apparent death). Beth March. Matthew Cuthbert. Bambi’s mother. Jeremiah Land.

It also makes a difference how well we know the character himself and how lovable we find him. I didn’t cry as much over Sirius Black, even though his sacrificial death devastated Harry, because I hadn’t had as much time to get to know and love Sirius—and neither had Harry.

For Those Left Behind

The point I’m trying to make here is that when we mourn for fictional characters, just as when we mourn for real people, our mourning is not so much for the one departed as for the ones left behind. We project ourselves into the characters of Harry, or George, or Frodo, or Jo, or Anne, or Bambi, and feel the same devastation they feel.

Of all the deaths I’ve mentioned, the one that tears at my heart most painfully is that of Fred Weasley—because I can’t imagine how George will go on without him. He won’t even be able to finish a sentence, let alone run Weasley’s Wheezes, without his twin to bounce his thoughts off of, to be the ever-present echo of himself. I can see why some Weasley or other had to die, but I really wonder what J. K. Rowling was thinking when she chose one of the twins. (Note that she didn’t dwell on George’s reaction—it must have been too painful even for her.)

Ultimately, though, we have to forgive her, because Fred died, as one of many, to save his world from Voldemort. His death had meaning, as did his life.

As a reader, then, if you mourn for fictional characters, don’t feel badly about it. You’re exercising your compassion muscles for when you need them in real life.

And as a writer, if you feel compelled to kill someone off and want that death to have the maximum impact, choose someone the main characters will be devastated to lose—but make sure his death means something. Let your readers’ grief be permeated with the light of resurrection.

What characters have you mourned for most? Do you agree with my conclusions?

Eat Your Words

| 13 Comments

A Deceptively Silly Syllogism

A: You are what you eat.

B: You have no doubt, at some point in your life, eaten your words.

C: You are your words.

The premises, obviously, are figurative. But the conclusion is nevertheless true.

Words are not just sounds that come out of our mouths. They both reflect and shape the way we think, and thus, who we are.

Words of Power

Read any fairy tale, fantasy, system of mythology you like, and you will see that words have power. Wizards do magic by means of words, whether for good or ill. Names contain and determine a person’s destiny.

If you want a better authority, look at the Bible. God created the universe through His Word. Do you suppose all power drained out of words after that? Far from it. Jesus assures us we will be held accountable for every idle word we speak (Matt. 12:36).

I will leave it to others more spiritual than I to exhort you to be careful of the content of your speech and to speak the truth in love. I’m going to focus instead on what I’m good at: the form of our speech.

Words Matter

The culture of “it doesn’t matter, it’s only [fill in the blank]” has definitely taken over with regard to the form of our speech. Most people—and I’m sometimes guilty of this myself—seem to choose words almost at random and fire them into the ether, blindly hoping the recipient will somehow sift through the morass and discern what the speaker actually wanted to say.

Jargon, slang, buzzwords, catch-phrases, clichés, and profanity dominate both spoken and written conversation. They flow through our ears making little impact, and they tell us nothing about the person we’re speaking with—except that that person either has no original thoughts, or doesn’t care to take the trouble to express them in more precise speech. Words like this have no power to penetrate the armor we encase ourselves in when we move among our fellowmen—in fact, they’re part of that armor.

As a writer, I’m forced to pay close attention to my words. If I get lazy and use any of the shortcuts listed above, my prose will lose its force and sink forever into the mire of mediocre writing. If I don’t say precisely what I mean, my readers will not figure it out. They will either keep reading without understanding, or they will stop trying and read the work of some other writer who communicates more clearly.

Wouldn’t you prefer the people you communicate with to receive the precise message you intended to convey? Wouldn’t you like to use real words, fresh words, words that have the power to break down the barriers between people and create true relationships?

Watch Your Mouth

If your speech is full of professional jargon, it may indicate your primary focus in life is on your work—and you don’t much care about anyone outside of it. If your speech is full of the slang belonging to a particular group, it may mean you want to declare your belonging to that group—and shut out those who don’t belong.

If your speech is full of profanity, what does that mean? It may mean you want to belong to a group that uses profanity—which, these days, is practically everybody.

When I was an adolescent, profanity was a form of rebellion, a way of saying to “the Man” that we didn’t care about his rules, his artificial standards, his superficial, hypocritical piety.

Now my generation has grown up and become “the Man.” In many cases, our kids can’t be using profanity as rebellion, because they’ve heard it at home all their lives. Now it’s not so much a way of saying “I belong to this particular minority group” as a way of saying, “I don’t want to be different from the majority.” It used to be nonconformist; now it’s the new conformity.

But what does it do to our brains if we say “s—” when we really mean “stuff”? On some level, it means we actually regard all of God’s marvelous and beautiful creation as nothing better than excrement. What does it do to our hearts if we use “f—ing” as a strong pejorative? It means we have devalued the sacred act of communion between a husband and wife into something not only valueless, but about as negative as you can get.

You Are What You Eat

So I exhort you, my friends, to follow that ancient and sage advice, “Think before you speak” (or email, or text, or Tweet, or post on Facebook). Think not only about what you are going to say, but about how you are going to say it. Use words that reflect, perhaps not the immediate, actual state of your heart, but what you know the state of your heart should be. Use words that respect the mind and heart of your listener.

Use words you won’t have to eat later.

 

This blog is part of the Orthobloggers Synchroblog for July 1, 2012.

Orthobloggers is a loosely associated group of Orthodox Christian bloggers. A synchroblog is an event in which many bloggers post on a single general topic at the same time—in this case, “How we use our words.” Other sites participating: