I like strange words; I like them so much I create at least one or two new ones for every story, not even counting the names. I cannot, however, take full credit for the terminology I’ll be discussing today: ‘secondary creation’. The term derives from J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay, ‘On Fairy-Stories’, which, though it never uses the exact words, does discuss the concept of creating a ‘Secondary World’. My use, however, is a bit more expansive than Tolkien’s. ‘Secondary creation’ refers to the process and results of creating a fictional, internally true reality which is derivative of, subordinate to, and reflexive upon our reality, to the process of creating a story.

In his excellent essay, which you should definitely go read right now¹, Tolkien writes, “Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker’s art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the storymaker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’.² He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world.” The essay speaks of a secondary world primarily as relates to fantasy or fairy stories, creations which present a reality different to and parallel of (not conflicting with) our reality. The term ‘secondary creation’, as I use it, speaks with slightly more generality of all fictitious worlds, not just fantasy ones, including mundane worlds which differ from our own not by rule but by event, such as A Tale of Two Cities or Jane Eyre. These stories, while they do not posit new rules for the world, do posit events which did not happen, do treat these events as, within the bounds of the story, true; they can therefore be understood under the same general schema as ‘Secondary Worlds’, internally true in their facts as much as any tale of Arda.

Before we go further into understanding ‘secondary creation’, we must first understand what ‘Primary Creation’, the implied corollary, actually is. Primary Creation is what God made. Primary Creation is us and the universe we live in, as well as the spiritual world we do not as yet clearly see. Primary Creation, precisely defined, is that which God created ex nihilo by the Word (Gen. 1:1; John 1:1-3). God, He who is alone self-existent, created ‘Primary Creation’; we, a part of that Primary Creation, act in imitation of Him to produce ‘secondary creation’, to which we hope others will grant Secondary Belief, as Tolkien calls it, with the suspension of disbelief. Primary Creation, of course, has at least one important positive quality which secondary creation lacks: the means, methods, and material of its existence are all found within or established by God’s power (this does not mean they are of God’s power; they are created and preserved by but not constituted of God and His will).

Secondary reality- the result of secondary creation- has three important elements in its relationship to Primary Creation³: derivation, subordination, and reflexivity. Let’s go through them.

Secondary reality derives its content, medium, message, and deviations from Primary Creation. Stories are built by humans (a portion of Primary Creation) using the concepts and facts of the world around them. They are communicated through mediums composed of components of this Primary Creation, whether paper or parchment or sound wave or photon. They derive their moral weight from a reflection of the world around them, building environments in which the morality God reveals to us (which, granted, is honestly closer to an aspect of His character than to Primary Creation, to Creator than created) can be seen in another light (at least, if the author knows God; if he does not, the moral system he portrays will inevitably be a distortion, as per Romans 1:18-23, of the revealed character of God (a deviation of theme)). Even the deviations from reality, whether in plot (historical or realistic fiction) or in character (say, artificial intelligence) or in setting (fantasy and sci-fi), even these deviations are made precisely as responses to Primary Creation, intentional changes reliant upon Primary Creation’s standard for meaning.

Secondary reality, as a result of its derivation of all its components from Primary Creation, also derives the meaning it conveys from analogy to Primary Creation. This fact should not surprise us; it is simply an aspect of creation. If your friend tells you he has a blue car, and you haven’t yet seen his blue car, you understand the meaning he conveys by analogy to other blue things you’ve seen- water, eyes, flags, etc. So too when a story tells you of a brave hero who strives against a hideous reptilian drake, you understand what the characters and actions are by their correspondence to what you already understand, even if the combination thus presented is one you have never personally witnessed. This pattern holds true particularly for moral meaning; you can’t get out of a story a moral understanding without reference to the moral categories established by God (Ps. 24:1).

Secondary reality’s subordination to Primary Creation consists in its inferior power to define the rules. Stories are true within their own bounds, within their own worlds, but not outside those worlds except insofar as they correspond to Primary Creation. If a historical novel, for instance, provides the correct date for Marie Antoinette’s execution, but posits that her husband lived on to old age (in contravention of history), they can both be true within the story, but outside only the first one is true of Primary Creation external to the story. One exception exists, though it operates upon secondary reality, not Primary Creation.⁴ Moral truth may be applied to a secondary reality in contradiction of its own internal moral dictates. Why? Because to accept a false morality, even internal to a story, is to accept a lie regarding the nature of our omnipresent God to Whom all our lives are to be a paean of praise and joy, as per Westminster Shorter Catechism.⁵ False moralities can be accepted as the beliefs of characters or persons external to ourselves; to do otherwise is often falsehood. They cannot, however, be accepted as our own positions, even explicitly curtailed within fictional bounds.

Secondary creation’s reflexivity is where we stop inspecting how Primary Creation flows into secondary creation and start considering where the current reverses and secondary creation speaks to Primary Creation. Reflexivity refers to the fact that stories present worldviews, often with more thoroughness than any book of systematic theology, with more subtlety and (hopefully) less propositional formatting. Stories, in transforming the elements of Primary Creation which they use, endeavor to show the reader how he ought to view those elements, in his own life and in others. Stories tell of man’s relation to man, to the world around him, and to his God above him. Even when a story speaks upon another story, secondary creation speaking to secondary creation (a process which is most clearly seen in ‘derivative works’, like the multitude of more-and-less faithful Shakespearian descendants, impressively variable Arthurian romances, and all the other fanfiction-adjacent works of art to be found in this world), even when secondary creation seems to act upon other events of itself rather than Primary Creation, the story is still acting upon Primary Creation, whether by combining with, drawing from, or acting through the art it comments upon to speak to the reader.

‘Secondary creation’ is an imitation of Primary Creation, and isn’t that a humbling thought? God, who made heaven and earth, to Whom the mightiest king is no more than a mite (Dan. 4), whose reigns even now in ever more glory, with justice and with righteousness (Is. 9:7), this God has given us the privilege of imitating His creating work. Every story (even narrative nonfiction, given man’s fallibility) participates in some form of secondary creation.⁶ We create worlds using the tools and pieces God has given us (derivation); we build within these worlds entire systems foreign to our own lives, or just events we have not ourselves lived through, and in all this we strive to portray the truth of God (subordination); and we speak through these stories of the essential truths surrounding the pieces we have borrowed from God, of God Himself and His relation to us, to the world around us (reflexivity). In all three, though, we act in imitation; though our work is different by virtue of being imitation and not original, by virtue of our creatureliness and His glory as Creator, we are given the opportunity to act in accordance with His nature, of which ours, even in its current broken state, is a reflection.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – The essay, which I highly recommend to any author or reader, is available here for free or here on Amazon.

2 – Quoted from sub-section ‘Children’ in ‘On Fairy-Stories’. See above for links.

3 – I have realized in writing this article that I use ‘creation’ here to mean both the process of creating and the thing which is created. Attempting to change this terminology would just get confusing, particularly in future uses outside this post, so context clues will have to be enough.

4 – I have consider the laws of logic as transgressible if the secondary creator deems them so, though only insofar as comports to the exception in the following section. Alice in Wonderland, for instance, is free to portray a secondary creation wherein logic operates… oddly (although it is hardly absent).

5 – ‘Q. What is the chief end of man? A. The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ The full text is linked here.

6  – This article, in all honesty, has probably used ‘secondary creation’ more as a pretext to talk about what fiction’s limits are than to actually define the term. The definition, nevertheless, will come up in more than enough places to justify its integration here.