Bilbo called himself, “thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread,” and our stories can be the same. A story can be stuffed with plot, bursting with characters, burdened down to the water by themes, and still feel hollow, thin, scraped. If you’ve ever picked up this sort of book or movie, you know how it dies. First interest- the summary was intriguing-, then dissatisfaction, then listlessness, then you set it down. You may not be able to voice a complaint, but you never pick it back up. Boring, empty, uninteresting, whatever you call it, it killed your desire for the story and its world. It felt like nothing. It lacked sincerity.

If I tell a story without care for that story, without putting the truth of the world as I believe it into the lineaments of the story, you will notice. It might take some time, but eventually…. The truth will out. Fictional stories are secondary creation, world-narratives made by men and told to other men. They therefore take on the character of the one who tells them and how they tell it. If the story is a lie, trying to draw you into a world the speaker doesn’t see and doesn’t care to see, the lie collapses eventually. It rings false.

To understand, let’s consider some examples. Modern media is saturated with insincerity. A simple example is some of the costume design in Amazon’s The Rings of Power show. The men who made that show were thorough modernists invested in their own ideologies, but they wanted to pretend to be Tolkien. They were therefore insincere in putting on the vestments of his world. Therefore, the armor of the ‘Numenoreans’ looks fake, like cheap plastic, and the elf wears a breastplate that looks like bark. Contrast this with the costumes in the original live-action movies. Flawed as they were, those movies were undoubtedly sincere in trying to communicate Tolkien’s world. The armor of the Uruk-Hai, the accoutrements of the Fellowship, the design of Minas Tirith, we remember these for a reason. They were truthful, even where they were flawed (which they were).¹

Understand this: sincerity does not mean perfection. I can tell the truth without being perfectly right or comprehensive. Sincerity requires honesty, the truth as understood by the teller. It requires a conviction and a desire to share that truth, to take it from within and communicate it outwards. Stories are communication, like all art. Therefore, a story cannot be sincere unless it is telling the truth of how the author sees the world. In the first place, this means that the people, morals, and logic of the world must cohere to his worldview. In the second, it means that the aesthetic (the beauty) of the world must cohere to his understanding of the world’s aesthetic. To communicate beauty requires perception of it; we cannot declare what we do not know.

We must separate sincerity from moral perfection, particularly in analyzing others’ work. The Iron Heel is sincere, even when it preaches socialism. Purgatorio is sincere, even when Dante is promulgating false doctrine. Declare is sincere, even when its worldbuilding takes a clearly Roman Catholic view of communion.² Two elements redeem these factual errors: first, they are truthful, even though false, because the author believes them; second, all these authors had a firm grasp of beauty, even when they denied some element of the truth with is intertwined with it.

The other essential element of sincerity is a belief that what is being written is worth the effort in itself. If the author considers the story not worth his time, it will generally bleed through into the work, teaching the reader to think the same. We will not care about the characters unless we can tell that the author cared about them; they will be cardboard cut-outs and nothing more. We must tell the truth in our stories, and we must tell it from the heart.

Because fiction is about telling the truth (through what could be but is not), to tell a lie is a fundamental fracturing of its foundation. It’s an error that may not be immediately apparent, but its influence is total. A story which rests on a lie is a story without life, without breath, without weight. The author, consciously or unconsciously, knows that he doesn’t really care about the story, doesn’t care about what it says, doesn’t believe it. This seeps out through his work, and the story dies.

The flip side is just as true. Sincerity elevates a story just as insincerity kills it. Now, sincerity alone is not enough. Bad grammar or incoherent plotting is still going to knock a story out of commission. Sincerity nevertheless teaches the reader that the mechanics of the story have purpose, weight, meaning. Somebody bled their life into this story, so it matters. Further, sincerity allows the full character of the author to enliven their work. Where a liar locks up everything in him which does not correspond to the lie (or lets it loose and breaks the story more), a truth-teller lets his understanding of the world, of God, of himself, pervade the story. Beauty becomes not a duty but a necessity for the author’s satisfaction.

Modernity has issues with this. Modernity is cynical, steeped in enough irony to kill several blue whales. Bathos replaces pathos; we have to laugh at everything specifically in order to denude it of weight. Sincere weight has to be mocked because we don’t know how to handle stuff that matters. By laughing we hope to make it matter less, whether to ignore or deal with it. In the process, laughter itself becomes devalued and thin, nervousness instead of joy. Art dies. In order to communicate truth, in order to be sincere, we must have something to be sincere about, and modernity hates truth.

I believe in God deeper than my bones. Because I believe in God, I speak of Him in every story I write. This limits me, of course. I could never write something set in Warhammer 40K, for instance, because that setting is integrally atheistic (simply put, trying to insert the true God into that setting breaks the fundamental philosophical patterns of that world). I must tell the truth; I must speak of the Lord with all my might. Further, because He is truth’s origin and basis, because He is the foundation of beauty, I can write beauty sincerely.

We must recognize, before we go, that some people won’t care about insincerity. Take Rings of Power. Some people are going to love that show just because of the name. Most likely, these are people who didn’t pay attention to Tolkien in the first place and therefore needed only the thin veneer of the Amazon counterfeit to find what they found in Tolkien. Some people, too, are going to sympathize not with the insincere Tolkien but with its modernist messages on gender and race and representation. Due to the truth-denying nature of these ideas, their inherent relativism, they survive insincerity (which may or may not be present here)³ much better than Tolkien’s worldview, which has something solid at the core. For the wokist, appearances are legitimately more important than sincerity in art (a reason that most wokist entertainment is incompetent). Some people, too, will just look at the pretty people (I assume they were pretty, occasionally) and get their engagement that way.

Sincerity isn’t necessary to get people to listen. Money, glitz’n’glam, and shock value can all do that. Insincerity, however, only buys superficial, empty resonance. People derive pleasure or outrage or ideological opium, and then they leave. The work has no lasting impact. Sincerity alone can make a story more than a sequence of words and a flash of dopamine; sincerity alone will get readers to come back over and over, re-reading and remembering and learning from your story. Sincerity alone makes a mark; it is a foundation of stone to its opposite’s sand.

The sum of it is this: we cannot ask our readers to believe a world we don’t believe, to see a beauty we don’t’ see, to honor a God we don’t honor. Stories are communication, and lies break the chain, tell our audience just how little we care about what we’re saying. If we don’t, then why should they? Sincerity, then, is crucial. We must believe what we write; our stories must have the integrity of honesty. Only in truth can beauty rise; a beautiful lie is no beauty at all, not when the lie becomes apparent. And it will become apparent. Therefore, to honor Him, to love our stories and those our stories are for, to do what is right, we must seek sincerity in all our art.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – Honestly, the fact that the movies are as good as they are (absolutely amazing, by the way) is a testament to the sheer beauty and excellence of Tolkien’s work, given the way some of Jackson’s changes mutilate the original. I still don’t quite understand how he got the scene at the Black Gate with Aragorn so wrong.

2 – Which is to say, as a magic ritual. Yes, I’m a Protestant, how could you tell? I have the same complaint about Powers’s other books- the Reformed in me cringes every time I think about the worldbuilding in the Vickery and Castine novels, much as I like them.

3 – It’s up to somebody who’s actually going to watch that schlock to figure out how sincere it is about its wokeness.