Archives for August 2012

Writers’ Ten Commandments #10: You Shall Not Covet

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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 #10: You shall not covet . . . anything that is your neighbor’s.

A lot of what we might say here is pretty close to what we’ve said about other commandments.

At some point, your characters are probably going to do some coveting. In #1, we talked about characters having a compelling desire for something. That could be something that belongs to the character’s neighbor—for example, his wife, which takes us back to #7.

We as writers should, in a sense, covet the successful elements of our neighbors’ writing. In fact, we should go beyond coveting and steal them, as we discussed in #8.

But there is an area in which it really is not to our benefit or anyone else’s to covet. We should never covet our neighbor writer’s artistic or professional success.

If you’ve read any writing advice at all, you’ve probably heard this before. Envying other writers is poison to the soul. Every writer has his or her own background, style, genre, level of skill and talent, and career path. We can learn from each other, but to compare ourselves to others or expect ourselves to be like others is certain death.

This is true regardless of whether you consider yourself superior or inferior to the other. If you think you’re better than another writer—even if it’s true—you leave yourself open to the sin of pride. If you think you’re a better writer than someone whose career is currently more successful than yours, you could end up with a festering sore of resentment that will make your life miserable, stifle your creativity, and alienate your friends, colleagues, and potential publishers.

If you think you’re inferior to another writer, you may well be right. We all have our superiors. Even the greatest writers might have looked to another writer as being better in some particular area.

If you take this feeling and use it inspire yourself to become the best writer you personally can be, wonderful! But if you let it depress you—if you start thinking, “I’ll never be as good as [fill in the blank], so what’s the point of trying”—you’ve just uttered a self-fulfilling prophecy and shot your writing career in the foot.

And if you use your feeling of inferiority to try to become exactly like the other writer, you’ll ruin yourself artistically. You are not that other writer. You have different circumstances, experiences, and natural endowments. You see the world, and communicate what you see, in your own unique way.

And why would you want to write exactly like her, anyway? What she had to say has already been said, or is in the process of being said if she’s still alive. You need to say what you have to say, in the way that is unique to you.

If you truly have nothing unique to say, why are you writing? Do yourself a favor and find a career with less heartache and more earning potential.

As for the whole roulette wheel that is publishing these days, don’t waste energy envying someone else’s position on the wheel. They could fall to the bottom on the very next spin—and you could rise to the top. But even if you don’t, know that the place you are is the place you need to be right now, for reasons you may never understand this side of heaven.

Worldly success is a chimera anyway. If you found out tomorrow that you were going to die of cancer in one month, would you spend that month desperately struggling to get published or to make the bestsellers list? I hope not. I hope you’d spend it lavishing love on your family and friends and tending to the condition of your immortal soul.

Many years ago in school I memorized Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “If.” One of the many items in Kipling’s list of things one must do to “be a man” (or, I would say, a strong and virtuous woman) is:

If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same . . .

Forget the triumph, forget the disaster. Just write. Write your heart out, write your best, and someday some poor benighted young writer will be coveting you.

Writers’ Ten Commandments #9: False Witness

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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 #9: You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

Bearing false witness is another way to say “lying.”

Taken from a certain point of view, all we fiction writers do is lie—or, as my friend Charise Olson likes to say, “confabulate.” We tell tales, prevaricate, lead you up the garden path. We pull your leg, bend the facts, put a spin on it. We tell falsehoods, fibs, half-truths, whoppers, taradiddles. We fabricate, deceive, invent, falsify, exaggerate. We even dissemble, dissimulate, misinform, and mislead.

On purpose. And we’re not even sorry.

Have you ever wondered why the English language has so many ways to say “lie”? We all (well, most of us) do it. We all know it’s wrong. We’re ashamed of it. It’s bad form to accuse anyone else of it directly, and painful to accuse ourselves, so we euphemize.

But writing fiction makes it okay. In fiction you can lie all you want. In fact, it’s usually preferable not to tell the truth. (See post on commandment #5.)

But. (You knew there was a “but” coming, right?)

We write about people who never existed, but we have to make them true to what we know about human nature. We write about events that never happened, but they have to be events that could happen—at least within the story world we’ve created.

We may create entire fantasy worlds, or worlds that resemble our own with a major twist—but we can’t violate the fundamental moral rules of the universe. Rules like free will. Cause and effect. Justice tempered by mercy. The ultimate triumph of the good.

These are things you can’t lie about and make good fiction. There is a limit to how far readers will suspend their disbelief. There are some kinds of lies they won’t swallow, no matter how you sugarcoat them.

Sometimes these lies people won’t swallow are things they would accept if they happened in real life. Coincidences happen all the time, but it’s tough to make them fly in fiction. People do get saved by miracles, but if that’s the way you solve your plot problems, your readers may give up in disgust. People do drift through their lives letting things happen instead of making them happen; but if your protagonist does this, he won’t hold your reader as far as page two.

Why are we pickier about stories than we are about life? Well, for one thing, we don’t have a choice about life. We can’t return it to the store for a refund. We can complain to the Author, but it won’t do us much good.

More importantly, though, I think it’s because stories are meant to follow the ultimate rules of the universe as originally created, rather than the broken rules of the fallen world. Here on earth, life isn’t fair, and in the short run, good doesn’t always win. People have free will, but sometimes they get stuck in circumstances they can’t control. Sometimes they drift because they can’t see a path on which to act. Sometimes they act only to have what looks like destiny slap them in the face.

As fiction writers, we have to rise above the limited truth of this fallen world. We have to tell the higher Truth of the universe as it was meant to be.

To me, this is what it means to be a writer and a Christian: not to write stories in which characters “get saved” (necessarily), but to write about a universe in which the will of God is triumphant over evil. Those are the stories that resonate most deeply with the human heart.

That’s the edge Christians have over writers who know only this fallen world. I’d like to see more of us use it.

 

Writer’s Ten Commandments #8: You Shall Not Steal

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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 #7: You shall not steal.

I can sum up my advice on this subject in four words:

Never plagiarize. Always steal.

In case you’re unclear on the distinction: Plagiarism is taking a whole piece of writing—anything from a sentence to an entire book—written by another and passing it off as your own.

Stealing is taking a technique, a metaphor, an idea, a setting, a characteristic, or an element of any sort that you like in someone else’s work and reshaping it to fit your own work.

Here are a couple of quotations to help explain what I mean:

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.”
—Jim Jarmusch

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.”
— T. S. Eliot

So many artists in various media have talked about this, someone has put together a whole page of quotations on the subject, which is where I got these two. Also, to make my composer husband happy, here’s one I can’t authenticate:

“Bad composers plagiarize. Good composers steal, then hide their theft.” —Igor Stravinsky

Ultimately, our work (like this blog post) is nothing more than a collage of everything we’ve ever read, sensed, or experienced. The trick is to put the pieces together in a way that is both artistic and wholly your own.

Do you like the way Author A conveys character emotion with a gesture? Steal it! Not that exact gesture, but find an expressive one of your own. Like Author B’s descriptions? Steal them! Again, not the exact words, but let his approach inspire your own.

This is the fundamental reason I take every opportunity to exhort my fellow writers to steep themselves in the classics. If you’re going to be stealing—and you are—you should make sure you’re stealing from the best. (If you’re really uncomfortable with stealing, you could call it borrowing—but honestly, are you ever going to give the stuff back?)

Here are some of my favorite writers and a few of the things I’ve stolen, or tried to steal, from them:

  • Jane Austen: Witty dialogue, satirical comment on human nature, keen moral sense
  • Charles Dickens: Fantastic characters, character description
  • L. M. Montgomery: Description of nature
  • Emily and Charlotte Brontë: Eerie atmosphere, over-the-top emotion
  • J.R.R. Tolkien: Depth of theme, eternal significance of story
  • T. S. Eliot: Mellifluous language
  • Dorothy L. Sayers: Richness of allusion
  • C. S. Lewis: Clarity of style
  • E. M. Forster: Plight of the individual entrapped by society; witty narration
  • Anthony Trollope: Minute examination of character motivation
  • Margery Allingham: Incisive characterization
  • Leo Tolstoy: Depth of understanding of human nature
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky: Fearless exploration of sin and redemption
  • William Shakespeare: Absolute mastery of language, deep insight into just about everything
  • New King James Version Bible: Beautiful (and understandable) language, Ultimate Truth

Go forth and read, absorb, steal freely, and create something beautiful that is all your own.

What writers do you consider worth stealing from, and what would you steal?

Writers’ Ten Commandments #7: Adultery

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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 #7: You shall not commit adultery.

You knew it was coming to this. The biggie. For some reason, speculation on which is beyond the scope of this blog post, Western culture before the sixties, and Christian culture even now, seems to regard the seventh commandment as the be-all and end-all of all commandments. (Never mind that Christ said “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself” holds that distinction.) Adultery is seen as the sin of sins.

For this reason, presumably, those writing and publishing for a Christian market tend to shy away from it in fiction. Gina Holmes has taken a lot of flak for her excellent novel, Dry as Rain, because she deals with adultery head-on. I myself was told my first novel would never work for CBA because the main character has sex with someone she isn’t married to. The book doesn’t condone this activity at all—but it’s still taboo in CBA.

Frankly, folks, if you declare upfront that you’re not going to allow any adultery or fornication in your fiction—even off stage—you’re losing a terrific opportunity. Some of the greatest novels of Western literature focus on adultery. Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The Scarlet Letter, Doctor Zhivago, The End of the Affair—the list could go on and on.

The thing about adultery is that it touches on some of the deepest emotions we know: love, lust, guilt, betrayal. Adultery can shake the very foundations of not just one life, but many. It ripples out to all the lives around it. Like death, adultery, if properly handled, can give your novel tremendous emotional power.

Am I suggesting you should write about adultery as if it were okay? Not remotely. Not only would this be untrue, it would eviscerate the subject and turn it into just one more plot point. Write about adultery in all its shattering wickedness. Make sure—as Tolstoy did so powerfully in Anna Karenina—your readers understand that adultery will destroy not only their lives, but their souls.

And who knows? It’s possible that in the writing, you’ll exorcise from your own soul a quiet little demon who’s been whispering temptations in your ear.

Artistic Adultery

Now to flip the coin. There is another kind of adultery I see far too often, and it grieves me. All around me I see writers who have betrayed their first love and are flirting with, or have completely given themselves to, a false lover called The Market.

I’m going to step on some toes now, so I ask your forgiveness ahead of time. I’m not targeting anyone personally. I know every writer has reasons for what he or she chooses to write. But just let me rant for a minute.

If you are a true writer, if you were born with that in you which can find expression through fiction and no other way, then you will have certain stories within you that need to be told. These stories may or may not fit into the rather narrow confines of “what the market is looking for right now.”

Let’s trace the career of a hypothetical writer—call her Griselda. She begins by writing the stories that are clamoring to be told, only to be informed by seemingly callous agents and editors, “That kind of thing doesn’t sell.” She is writing in the first place because she wants to communicate, and communication has to be two-way—it requires a reader. So she puts her dreams on the shelf to be called for later and tries to fit her inner stories into the Genre of the Moment—whether it’s Amish zombie romance or coming-of-age dragon stories or paranormal pickle people.

Let’s say Griselda succeeds, at least well enough for the demands of the genre. Her books sell, so the publisher pressures her to write more of the same. Until the Genre of the Moment changes, and then she is expected to change with it.

Griselda hoped when she first sold herself to The Market that one day she would be able to return to her first love. But if she’s successful selling the Genre of the Moment, her publisher will be reluctant to allow her to branch out into something untried. And if she isn’t that successful, she’ll have even less chance of selling her publisher on a book that has no built-in sales guarantee.

At some point, the dead feeling in the center of Griselda’s chest—which she felt but forced down when she first sold herself—will become unbearable. She’ll start scribbling her true stories on napkins in restaurants, carving them into the bark of trees, having them tattooed on her upper thighs. She’ll beg her muse to forgive her and take her back.

But muses are touchy—sometimes even touchier than spouses. Once you’ve betrayed them, you run the risk of never being able to get them back.

Once you start writing for The Market, you may never be able to write, let alone publish, the book of your dreams.

Can I promise you the book of your dreams will sell? No. My own haven’t yet. But I can promise you this:

Even if it never sells, the book of your dreams is the only one worth writing.

Nothing else is worth all the sacrifices a writer has to make—time, money, recreation, sleep, friendships, even family. Yes, that’s what I said—nothing else.

Now shoot me.

Writers’ Ten Commandments #6: You Shall Not Kill

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

Commandment #6: You shall not kill.

Why can’t fiction be nicer than life, all sweetness and light? Why do good characters have to die?

Caveat: I’m not talking here about mysteries and thrillers, in which you have to have dead bodies to advance the plot, and some of them may need to be more or less sympathetic. I’m talking about stories in which death occurs other than as the main event.

Off the top of my head, here are several reasons characters have to die:

  1. Death is part of life. If a serious novel that spans any length of time is to be realistic (in the deeper sense of emotional truth, not the realistic vs. fantasy sense), chances are the protagonist will lose someone close to him—parent, friend, spouse, sibling, favorite aunt, mentor.
  2. Death catalyses change. The death of someone close to us never leaves us quite the same. It may completely change our pattern of living, as when a child loses a parent or a husband his wife. It may leave us with regrets that will cause us to reexamine our values. It may cause a character to contemplate revenge, or it may lead him to forgiveness. As a near certainty, it confronts us with our own mortality. It temporarily strips away our excuses and defenses and takes us to a deeper level. This may lead to a subtle or dramatic shift in priorities, habits, and mores. If you need to force your protagonist to move forward, the death of a loved one is a surefire way to do it. Would Frodo have gone on to Mordor alone if Gandalf had not apparently perished? Would Harry have struck out on his own to find the horcruxes if Dumbledore had still been alive?
  3. Death can be redemptive. A character may directly sacrifice his own life to save another’s physical life—as in Charlotte’s Web, where Charlotte uses the last of her strength to spin the web that saves Wilbur from the chopping block. Or the redemption may be more subtle. In Little Women, Beth March contracts the scarlet fever that ultimately takes her life while nursing a poor family, but her death also sets an example of patience and faith for her sister Jo that helps Jo find her true path—a spiritual redemption.
  4. Death engages the reader deeply. See previous post. If you write it well, and if you kill the right character at the right time in the right way (i.e. so that the death has meaning), you can create an event of unmatched emotional power.
  5. Sometimes death is the only possible resolution. How could Hamlet end other than in death? When a character has reached the end of his road, you’re being untrue to your story if you don’t let him die.

The Post-Modern Sensibility

A couple of years ago, I had the privilege of taking a fiction-writing class taught by Davis Bunn. He was addressing people who write for the evangelical market, which often succumbs to the temptation to “pretty up” life for the purposes of fiction. Davis emphasized to us that this approach does not work for the post-modern reader.

Readers nowadays know that life is not pretty. We expect the fictional worlds we enter to be less chaotic than reality, to make more sense and have more obvious structure and meaning; but we do not want them to be artificially pretty, serene, smiley-face places where characters do not even yell at each other, let alone die.

To make a fictional world real for contemporary readers, you have to resist the temptation to tie up all the loose ends. Some of the protagonist’s goals should not be achieved, or should be achieved at tremendous cost—such as, for instance, the death of a loved one. Triumph must be tempered by tragedy, or readers just won’t buy it.

As a seed must fall into the ground and die in order to create new life, so a character or two may have to die to give life to your story.