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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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:

Dealing with Writing Burnout

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Some people say there’s no such thing as writer’s block.

Others swear by it.

I’ve experienced a number of times when the flow of words dried up. It can happen for various reasons:

  1. I’ve come to a place in the story where I don’t know what happens next. Usually I just have to wait a day or two until it comes to me.
  2. I’ve written myself into a corner. I’ve listened to my plan for the story instead of the story itself, and written something that was taking me in the wrong direction. I have to back up and get going on the right track again.
  3. I’ve just finished something—a draft, a significant chunk, a whole novel—and I need some time off to recharge before going on to the next phase or the next project.
  4. I’ve been writing full out for a while and the well has gone dry. There again, I need to take time off to recharge.
  5. I’ve allowed life to get in the way of writing. I’ve let other responsibilities impinge on my writing time, or my writing space, or my writing brain. I’ve permitted my creativity to get drained away into the stresspool of daily living.

Every year—usually towards the end of June, but this year in mid-May—I go away for a week for a writing retreat with a small group of good friends. If I’m in the middle of a project, as I usually am, these weeks can be amazingly productive for me. I write for eight or nine hours a day and typically produce upwards of 20,000 words over the course of the week.

Then I come home to work, family, and everything that has piled up in my absence. I rationalize that I need to devote my normal writing time to catching up for a couple of days.

The couple of days inevitably turns into a week. The week turns into a month. Catching up proves to be impossible; I have to settle for triage of the undone tasks.

By the time I put the brakes on and carve out my writing time again, I’ve forgotten what the story is even about and why I wanted to write the darn thing in the first place.

Which, of course, makes it even harder to get to the writing desk the next day.

Eventually, I always manage to pull out of the spiral and get back into the story. But by the time I do, I’ve lost a lot of the advantage I gained by going on retreat in the first place. I need a retreat to recover from the backlash of my retreat!

Has this kind of thing ever happened to you? How do you deal with it?

Artists in a Market Economy

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This post is a slightly belated response to a discussion that originated with Seth Godin (discussed here) and continued with a post and comments on Rachelle Gardner’s blog. The basic idea being debated is whether writers have a right to make a living from their writing. Godin says no.

I would agree that in one sense, no one has the “right” to make a living. We all have to work hard and well at our chosen occupations. But if we do that, I personally contend we should be able to make a living at them.

Michael Hyatt commented on Rachelle’s blog that writing is a commodity, and what the writer gets paid depends on how popular his writing is. Simple market economics.

That makes sense for ordinary nonfiction and maybe for commercial fiction (although even there, I believe the writer deserves a bigger piece of the publishing pie, but that’s another post). But I would like to propose the radical idea that real literary art, like every other kind of art, is in a category all its own.

You don’t hear so much about “art” in the writing circles I travel in. You hear an awful lot about “craft,” and people go on and on about how good writing doesn’t take talent, it just takes practice and persistence and following some basic rules. That may be true for writing that stops at the level of craft; I don’t believe it is true for writing that ascends to the status of art. (Yet another post.)

The thing about art—the thing that makes it so difficult to fit into all these convenient formulas about the market economy—is that its ultimate value, its contribution to the sum of beauty and goodness in the world, is not proportional to the number of people who appreciate it within the artist’s lifetime. It may even be inversely proportional, although there are notable exceptions (such as Dickens, who was wildly popular in his lifetime).

The world has always had a hard time dealing with this reality. The problem of the starving artist is so old as to be a cliché. Various models have been tried throughout history—the gentleman artist, private patronage, government patronage, entrepreneurship, and the most prevalent contemporary model, agency (where an outside person or company takes responsibility for propagating the art and pays the artist a percentage).

Each of these models has its drawbacks, but they all (except the gentleman artist, who is probably gone for good) share one big, glaring flaw: Whoever pays the artist ultimately wants to control his output.

Whether it’s the Austrian emperor complaining that Mozart’s music had “too many notes,” the NEA refusing to fund an artist whose work isn’t politically correct, or Dickens’ readers demanding a happy ending to Great Expectations, outside control is inimical to art. An artist must be free to obey only his muse and the inherent laws of his art form if he is to do his best work. He must also have “world enough and time” to let his imagination run free, which means—guess what—no day job.

What’s the solution? Unfortunately, I have no idea. Unless someone can invent a specialized time machine that will bring the future profits from a work back into the present to feed the artist while he’s still alive, instead of enriching others after his death.

Or—here’s a radical thought—the profits of works that are selling now, whose creators and their immediate heirs are long dead, could be set aside in a foundation that would provide grants to living artists. Hey, I like that idea. I’m sure Jane Austen would be happy to support me, instead of just a bunch of publishers and filmmakers, with the posthumous profits of her work. (Jane paid for her own publishing and never made her money back while she was alive.)

But since the people who are living parasitically off the works of dead artists are not too likely to give up that self-appointed privilege voluntarily, I expect the majority of artists will have to go on starving, or else expending the best hours and years of their lives doing something that puts bread on the table so they can pursue their art in the wee hours of dawn or midnight while the rest of the world is asleep. Maybe this builds character. In my personal experience, it builds stress, exhaustion, and much less than one’s best work.

But what the hey—it’s Tradition!

A Few of My Favorite Words

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I was stuck for a subject today, so I took one of WordPress’s prompts: Talk about your favorite words. Here are a few of mine.

Widdershins. It means “counterclockwise,” and it’s the way water goes down the drain in the Southern Hemisphere. I found it in a nonfiction book by Madeleine L’Engle, possibly Walking on Water. I love it for its sound, and for its going-against-the-flow-ness, and because it makes me think of Australia and New Zealand, where I hope to travel someday.

Sequacious. This one is courtesy of John Gardner, probably in On Moral Fiction. It means “intellectually subservient,” and it describes our whole culture so succinctly.

Mellifluous. Can’t you tell what it means just by the sound of it? If not, go look it up.

Brillig. (If you don’t know where that one comes from, stop reading this blog and go read Through the Looking Glass. Immediately.) I’m not sure exactly what Lewis Carroll meant by brillig, but to me it describes a cold, clear autumn day when the red and golden leaves crunch under your swishing feet and the naked twigs are etched in intricate patterns against the stark, pale afternoon sky. (Yes, all of that.)

Elúndina. Okay, I made that one up, but for a good reason—it’s part of the vocabulary of the world I invented for my current novel, The Dome-Singer of Falenda. Elundina are powerful spiritual beings that materialize out of light and look like bodiless butterflies.

How about you? What’s your favorite word?

Advancing through a Retreat

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I just returned yesterday from a week-long writing retreat with some wonderful fellow writers on the Oregon coast. No speakers, no program, just lots of time to write and a chance to read our stuff to some great supportive critics. Oh yes, and the beach. Very important ingredient—walks on the beach.

I’ve been doing this every spring/early summer for five years now, and I’ve come to regard it as indispensable to my writing life. Lots of people talk up writers’ conferences, where you can meet other writers, listen to sage advice from the more successful ones, schmooze with agents and editors, etc. And I like conferences too. They’re useful, they’re informative, they’re energizing, you make lots of great new friends and contacts, and I’ve heard they even lead to agent contracts and book deals for some people—though not yet for me.

But a conference is no substitute for a retreat. A retreat is an escape from all obligations and distractions (especially if your location is internet-free, as ours was). It leaves you alone with that most fickle of friends, your imagination. If you’ve been out of touch for a while, you may have to woo it back, as the Little Prince did with the fox. But once you’ve got it, it’s like a honeymoon: nothing in the world you have to do except be together and see what germinates. Sometimes a honeymoon leads to a baby. Sometimes a retreat leads to a new book (or at least a good start on one).

That’s what happened for me this year. For the last eight or nine months, I’d been sweating over the planning stages of a novel that just didn’t seem to want to come together. I was almost dreading the retreat, because I feared it still wouldn’t come together and my sweet week would be wasted. But a week or two before I was to leave, a different—completely different—idea that had sprung up a couple of years ago came back and tapped me on the shoulder, saying, “Remember me? What about me?”

So I went on retreat and listened to this different idea. It had plenty to say—about 21,000 words’ worth in the course of the week. I hardly had to do anything except move my fingers on the keyboard. Of course, this is first draft material, and we all know what Anne Lamott had to say about that. (In case you don’t, it involves the “s” word.) So it’s possible that a lot of those words won’t survive the editing process. But still—21,000 words is a darn good start.

And not only do I have the solid beginning of a middle-grade fantasy novel under my belt (yeah, like I said, completely different from anything I’ve written before), but I also feel like a writer again, instead of an editorial/familial/volunteer drudge with no time or energy to think a creative thought. I have the momentum I need to keep writing and eventually finish something. I also have the encouragement of my wonderful writer friends to get back in the ring and keep submitting The Vestibule of Heaven, my commercial literary novel that’s been gathering rejections since last fall. Without that retreat, I would have none of these things.

So if you’re a writer, or a creative person of any stripe, be sure to give yourself the occasional gift of some time away from the daily grind to pursue your art. It doesn’t have to be a whole week, and it doesn’t have to be terribly far from home (though I recommend a distance of at least 50–100 miles or so, so that you have a little transition time and so that you can’t be expected to run back for any reason). It doesn’t have to be with other writers, although sharing a space can be economical as well as mutually encouraging.  All you need is a comfortable, quiet place and enough time to get your brain out of everyday life and into that magic world where anything can happen.

No matter how guilty you feel at leaving your family, DO NOT yield to any entreaties to take them along. A retreat and a family vacation are two VERY different things. Your family will get along without you, probably better than any of you expect, and you will have much more to give them when you return, refreshed from drinking at that eternal well. (Note: Some people do fine bringing their also-creative spouses. I haven’t tried it myself.)

What about you? What have retreats done for you?

Bridging the Abyss

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All writers, I suppose, have parts of the process that they love and others that they dread. For me, the dreaded part is getting from the raw idea stage to the place where I know enough about the story to begin writing. I’m at that place now with my WIP (work-in-progress, for the uninitiated).

I feel as if I’m standing at the edge of a precipice, with a great abyss yawning at my feet. On the other side of the abyss are the words “Chapter One” and everything that will follow them. In my hands I hold the shining sphere that is my perfect idea—perfect because I haven’t yet begun to flesh it out, a process that will inevitably tarnish it and bend it out of true. For now, it consists of a thousand thousand glittering strands, each one whole and precisely arced, none crooked or frayed or left hanging; and the whole sphere glows like a little sun, made in the image of the real sun as I am made in the image of the Creator.

My job is to build a bridge across the chasm at my feet: a bridge built on piles of research, with solid girders of story structure, paved with living planks of character development, knit together by a vivid sense of place, guided in its arc by a theme that pierces to the heart of truth. But I have to build this bridge one-handed, by the light of the shining sphere of my idea, which I must hold aloft at all times—for if it once touches the ground, it will dissolve into dust.

And then, when at last the bridge is complete, I have to step out in faith that it will hold. And here’s the kicker: I cannot carry the sphere across the bridge. I have to throw it over the abyss, and run across the bridge in time to catch it on the other side.

So you see, it’s not an easy task, this bridging, but one fraught with perils on every side. It’s a wonder, really, that anyone ever accomplishes it. And in fact, the sides of the abyss are snowy with the dust of ideas that did not survive the journey. Several of my own have ended there because their bridges wouldn’t hold.

But this sphere that I hold now really needs to make it across. So pray for me, my friends, and for all the bridge-builders of the world—for it is only the spheres that survive the journey that will ever be visible to any but their creators. And the world would be very much poorer without them.