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To Write, You Must Read

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That proposition will probably seem self-evident to most of my readers. But I recently heard an acquaintance who is the author of a fiction manuscript admit that she is “not a reader.”

I have to say, I was flabbergasted. Dumbfounded. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. To the extent that I couldn’t find words to tell her she must read if she ever wants to succeed as a writer.

As a child, I was so eager to read that I taught myself at age four. I don’t say that to brag, but to emphasize how inconceivable it is to me that anyone would not be interested in reading. So it’s difficult for me to isolate specific reasons that reading fiction is necessary to a fiction writer. Nevertheless, I’m going to try.

1. Reading gives you a feeling for language.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, language is the writer’s medium. Just as a painter has to learn to use brushes, paints, and canvas, a writer needs to learn to use words. This knowledge includes everything from the mechanics of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and usage to the fine shades of meaning and sound.

I’m convinced that my instinctive feeling for proper and improper English is primarily attributable to years of reading writers who were as skilled in wielding words as Leonardo was in wielding a paintbrush. You can learn rules in a classroom, but you can only internalize the depth, breadth, and infinite possibilities of language through reading the work of writers who have used it well.

2. Reading teaches you how to tell a story.

How would you even know what a story is if you don’t read them? Of course, we all hear stories, or watch them in movies. Certain factors are common to stories in any form, but others are specific to written stories. How do you begin a story in words? How do you develop character? How do you portray a character’s inner life? How do you integrate setting into your story? How do you convey your theme? Movies can’t teach you any of these things, because they use different techniques to accomplish them.

This is just the tip of a whole iceberg of what a writer can learn on a technical level through reading.

3. Reading acquaints you with what has already been done.

If you want to write something fresh, you need to know what has already been written. In every genre, certain stories, character types, patterns, and tropes have been done to death. These may well be the first stories, characters, etc. that pop into your mind when you decide to write a book. You can save yourself a lot of trouble if you know up front what to avoid.

On the flip side, wide reading will give you a cultural context that you can employ to enrich your writing. Allusions to your favorite writers—subtle or obvious, conscious or unconscious—will add depth and resonance to your story as they cause your reader to reflect on the connections implied.

4. Reading acquaints you with the conventions of your genre.

This is the argument I most often hear advanced for writers to read, but to my mind it’s the least important. Nevertheless, if you are going to write within an established genre, it is essential to know what readers (and, correspondingly, agents and publishers) of that genre expect from a story.

Some genres have more specific requirements than others. My understanding (second-hand, as I neither read nor write in this genre) is that category romance is one of the most restrictive, with rules about word count, character professions and personalities, and in which chapter the hero and heroine must meet, kiss, fight, have sex, etc. Literary fiction is possibly the least restrictive in terms of specific elements, although arguably the most difficult to write well.

5. Reading gives you membership in the most fascinating community of people in the world.

When I open a novel, I’m entering a new world. Not just the world the author has created within the story—though that’s a thrilling experience in itself—but the world of the author him/herself and of all the people who have read the story, are reading it now, or will read it in the future. It’s also the world of everyone who had some kind of impact on the author’s life that contributed to the story being what it is. And it’s the world of all the writers the story’s author read and loved, and the people who read their stories. When I open a novel, I’m only six degrees of separation from the greatest minds ever to live on this planet.

I imagine every reader has had the experience of making a new friend through a book. Maybe the person next to you on the plane asked what you were reading, and that author turned out to be one of your seatmate’s favorites too. Maybe you met someone on Goodreads, or at a bookstore or a library. Maybe a teacher recommended a book to you, and through that recommendation you discovered your teacher was a kindred spirit after all.

If you try to write without being a reader, you’ll miss out on this community, and the loss will hurt your writing. It will also substantially impair your chances of getting published. Personal connections are just as important in publishing as in any other field. If publishing professionals you meet sense that you’re not a kindred spirit—because you’re not a reader—you likely won’t get far.

6. Reading shows you what can be achieved.

Those striving in any field of endeavor need to be inspired by the greats who have come before them. You need a sense of what is possible so you know what to strive for. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, unless you’re a born genius like Shakespeare or Dickens:

You will never write better than the best authors you read.

Why Fiction?

This list is far from comprehensive, and it doesn’t even touch on the most basic point of all: Why would anyone who doesn’t love reading fiction even want to write it? If it’s because you have a message to convey, a point to make, there are many better ways of doing that than through fiction. Fiction is (ideally) art, and art does not exist for the purpose of conveying a message or making a point. Art doesn’t so much answer questions as ask them. If you think you have answers, hire a co-writer or ghostwriter and write a nonfiction book, or a blog, or go on the radio and speak your mind.

But please, don’t waste your time writing fiction.

The Literary Ladies Guide to the Writing Life (review)

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I’ve just finished reading a book called The Literary Ladies Guide to the Writing Life, by Nava Atlas (Sellers Publishing, 2011). It’s a beautifully designed mixture of excerpts from the letters, writings, and talks of a dozen classic female authors with summary meditations from Ms. Atlas. And it’s charming, surprising, inspiring, and an all-around must-read for any female author. Non-writing admirers of these ladies will also enjoy an intimate glimpse behind the scenes of their genius.

The authors—Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Willa Cather, Edna Ferber, Madeleine L’Engle, L. M. Montgomery, Anaïs Nin, George Sand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf—offer comments from dry to bitter to encouraging to ecstatic on subjects ranging from becoming a writer to conquering inner demons to combining writing with motherhood to rejection, acceptance, and money to handling success.

Some of their situations are notably unlike our own. From the late 19th century to the mid-20th, it seems to have been significantly easier to make a living by writing than it is now—even for a woman. Not to say these women didn’t work hard—they were their own slavedrivers, for the most part. But in that milieu, hard work, excellence, and persistence were almost sure to pay off eventually, whereas now there are no guarantees even for the most dedicated genius.

And on the flip side, these women all faced active discrimination the likes of which have almost disappeared from the current literary scene. (Atlas does quote one statistic that claims male writers still make significantly more money than female writers, but we must all admit the situation has changed greatly for the better.)

But when it comes to matters of the pen and of the heart, all these literary ladies are completely kindred spirits to women writing today. They struggled with other responsibilities, feelings of self-doubt, sometimes opposition from family and friends. They endured rejection, personal and artistic misunderstanding, and the dark side of fame.

Some of them wrote from the heart, while others wrote what their market demanded and produced wildly popular classics—to their own complete surprise (e.g. Little Women, Anne of Green Gables). Some, notably Virginia Woolf, were literary pioneers who were never entirely confident as to whether their work was genius or garbage. Some made a handsome fortune in their lifetimes; others barely got by. But all have a lot to say that can help contemporary writers through all the rough spots of our writing lives.

(One caveat for the terminally particular like myself: This book has a lot of typos. I find that odd given the number of people credited in the acknowledgments who had a hand in making the book—was none of them a proofreader? However, the beauty of the design and the content made up for the typos in my estimation. And that’s saying a lot.)

I found the book quite inspiring. All these famous writers were regular gals—they put their bloomers on one leg at a time like anyone else. They started from nothing, with nothing but a dream and the boldness to pursue it, and they earned a permanent place in the literary pantheon. It gives me hope that if I work hard enough, I may someday be able to do the same.

Playing God in Fiction

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Ask a group of fiction writers why they enjoy writing fiction, and chances are a substantial chunk of the answers will have something to do with how much fun it is to create our own little worlds and play God in them. As long as we’re playing God, we may as well do it right—treat our characters the way God treats us.

1. Pull them out of their comfort zone.

Think back to when you first committed your life to God. You probably had a lovely little honeymoon phase when everything was sweetness and light. But then things started to get stickier. As you drew closer to God, He began to peel back the layers of your personality to show you things about yourself you’d much rather not have known. He began pushing you to be a better, braver, more trusting, more risk-taking, more loving, more sacrificing person than you ever believed you could be.

And that’s just what a good writer does to her characters. If we left them in their comfort zone, there would be no story. Take any story you like, even the sweetest stories of childhood, like Winnie the Pooh. We have Pooh pursued by angry bees or stuck in Rabbit’s front door or falling into a pit meant for Heffalumps. We have Piglet facing his terror of Heffalumps to rescue Pooh, or giving up his house to Owl. Definitely out of their comfort zones.

And if you look at more grown-up literature, you have Frodo leaving the comfort of the Shire and ultimately heading into Mordor. You have Fanny Price leaving her family to face all the terrifying grandeur of Mansfield Park. You have Anna Karenina’s placid if less-than-contented life turned upside down by passion. Comfort zone? That’s for those left behind.

2. Give them free will.

Non-writers tend to think writers are a little nuts, or at least exaggerating, when we talk about our characters as if they’re independent entities: “My character just won’t behave.” “I thought I was going to write X, but my character wanted to do Y.” “My characters are taking over the story—I have no idea where it’s going.”

If you write fiction and you’ve never had such an experience, you may be keeping your characters on too tight a rein. Yes, you created them, but now they exist in their own right—in some bizarre mystical sense we can’t quite understand. If you want your story to ring true, to be the best it can be, you need to give them their head. Let them find their own way and make their own mistakes. That’s what God does with us, after all. And provided you’ve given them a good heart to begin with, they’ll turn out all right in the end.

3. Give them what they need, not what they want.

In the Lord’s Prayer we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Not “Give us this day our sports cars, our Prada, our iGadget 16, our McMansion.” God has promised to give us what we need. He never promised to give us everything we want, either on the material plane or otherwise.

Our characters, being human, want all sorts of things that aren’t the best for them. They may want a peaceful life in their comfort zone. They may want worldly success, not knowing it would ruin them spiritually. They may want the love of the wrong person. It’s our job to make sure they don’t get these things—or, if they’re really stubborn, to let them attain their false desires and then take them away. In the end, our characters have to end up with what they really need in order to become better people.

This is the flip side of “give them free will.” We let them do what they want, but we control the results.

Think of Emma Woodhouse. She thought she wanted to be the benevolent dictator of her social circle, directing everyone else’s love life while remaining unattached herself. But of course, that life would only have intensified all her flaws. What she really needed was marriage to a man who would never let her get away with being less than her best, and Jane Austen made sure she got it.

4. Rescue them only at the last minute.

How many times have you prayed for God to save you from some situation—a financial crisis, a life-threatening disaster, or just an everyday contretemps—and found yourself biting your nails, wondering if He was really going to come through this time? Then at the very last possible second, He swoops in and delivers you, usually in some spectacular way you could never have predicted. Who says God doesn’t have a sense of the dramatic?

A wise fiction writer will do exactly the same. We’ll let our characters get themselves up to their necks in a pool of quicksand surrounded by ravenous lions, with cobras slithering toward them across the mud, before we drop them a line from a hovering helicopter.

The lava of Mount Doom was licking at Sam and Frodo’s furry toes when the eagles swooped in to carry them off. Harry Potter had to go all the way to death and back before he could defeat Voldemort. The White Witch had her wand out to turn Edmund to stone when Aslan finally appeared to save the day.

Don’t save your characters too soon. Stretch them to their limit. It’s good for them, and it’s good for the story.

What would Jesus do?

So next time you’re stuck in your novel, wondering what to do next, ask yourself, “What would God do with me if I were in that situation?” Then try doing the same thing with your characters. Not only will you get a better novel, you’ll get that secret thrill that comes from playing God—in just about the only context where you can get away with it.

How do you, or how do your favorite authors, play God in your/their fiction?

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.

Writer’s Ten Commandments #5: Honor Your Parents

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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 #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

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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 #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.