The fine art of murdering one’s own story with a butcher’s knife is old and well-respected in the high halls of Hollywood. One of the recent trends in that direction has to do with rampant and all-infecting cynicism. Movies apologize for themselves, stumble over sideways to acknowledge they aren’t perfectly realistic, and then proceed to beat the watcher over the head with instructions as to how they should react, what they should think. After a few such stories, though, the watchers wise up. The stories don’t take themselves seriously, they don’t take their audience seriously, and they definitely take their authors, with all their opinions and personal troubles, seriously. As a result, the audience stops caring, and eventually, they start to resent the authors. Nobody likes the guy who whines about his problems and never bothers to listen to anybody else. So how do we avoid this? We take our stories seriously (most of the time), we take our audiences seriously (all the time), and we work towards humility.

Taking the Story Seriously

Creating a story is an act of secondary creation (as term by Tolkien and myself¹). This means that when you create a story, you’re establishing a world and a narrative that is real in respect to itself (this is true even if the story has absolutely no sci-fi, paranormal, or magical elements, like with historical fiction or contemporary, as the events of the story didn’t happen, however realistic their environment). The reader enters into the story and perceives its elements as real-within-it. He suspends his realization of the story’s unreality, replacing it with an agreement that ‘this is real, if only to itself’.

There is a requirement for all this, though. In order for the reader to make that agreement, he must see that you are willing to hold up your end of the bargain and give him something that is real-to-itself. If a story is perpetually undermining its own reality, perpetually calling him back to the primary reality, he’s going to be very tempted to listen to that call, leave the story, and stop caring. Words on a page don’t matter until they become a character-who-is-a-person, and in primary reality, the character is just words on the page. Therefore, the story must take itself seriously; you must take the story seriously.

The story taking itself seriously works itself out in many different ways. In the first place, it requires the story to remain consistent to its own rules, free of primary-reality authorial intervention.² In the second, it requires the tone, characters, and theology of the story to behave as if the reality of the story is a primary reality to itself. Therefore, the tone must convey not just that ‘this is happening’ but that it matters what is happening and that it’s happening. Therefore, the characters must act and react towards their surroundings and fellows under the assumption that what they face is real, must act according to the rules of their characters (what you’ve promised the reader they will do, value, and feel) in interaction with the world, without knowledge they couldn’t have, without detachment that’s really the author’s. Therefore, the theology (theme) of the story must not be sprayed painted onto it by characters or events that turn towards the reader and lecture them. The theology must instead be woven in, made integral.³

There are exceptions to this rule, albeit superficial ones. In some cases, the secondary reality is intended to be satire, meta-narrative, or children’s moralizing. In such cases, the ‘take it seriously’ rule might demand that you violate the borders of the secondary reality. That is the point, after all, and taking the story seriously requires shaping everything in it to achieve the intended effect.

Take the Reader Seriously

The second part of this caution is to take the reader seriously. Sometimes when we’re writing, we’re seized by the impulse to try and hammer something home, to make absolutely sure the reader gets it. It’s an understandable impulse, but it’s also very dangerous, for several reasons. First, part of the joy of reading a story is noticing and assembling the subtleties together into a picture which you, the reader, are sure is very nearly right. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, but the pleasure of it lies as much in being justifiably wrong as in being right.

Second, when we as authors decide to carefully explain everything, we tend to come off as patronizing, stupid, arrogant, or some combination of the three. We sound, in other words, as if we think the other guy incapable of tying his own shoes, as if we’re incapable of the same, or as if we think that everybody else might as well be incapable of tying their own shoes. It’s all the same in the end: the reader conceives an instinctive dislike for you and your writing. Nobody likes reading a story that spends a lot of its time saying, “You’re so much less intelligent than I am,” or “You need to have this spelled out in detail to have a hope of getting it.”

Third, taking the audience seriously opens up a path to a lot of fun for us as authors. I love working subtle indications into my story- foreshadowing, etc. Further and fourth, subtlety is often a lot more effective than blunt force. If I tell you that a guy is really mad, it doesn’t hit with the same force as if you figure out from the clues I leave that he wants to introduce the protagonist’s head to a sledgehammer. Implications and subtleties convey the world much more clearly than summaries, and with much more nuance. Characters, theology, foreshadowing, character interaction, all these grow exponentially with just a little bit of subtlety.

Don’t get me wrong. Some people will misunderstand you. It may be fatigue or hunger or hurry. It may be willful, the work of an agenda on the reader’s mind. It may be because they are legitimately stupid or because they’re not skilled in understanding literature. All too often, it’ll be a result of your imperfect communication. As authors, we have to get over that. Communicate clearly, yes, but once you’ve done your part, trust God that the people who need to will do their part and interpret you well. Of course, that leads into part three….

Humility

Pride is a lie, and humility is the truth. Humility, therefore, is not merely self-abasement. That is a form of pride, when unmerited, a direction rather than a state. Conversely, self-aggrandizement isn’t humility (or truth) either. Humility is recognition of and life according to one’s true estate and nature in light of God.⁴ It’s essential for writing, as it is for many occupations.

Humility means on the one hand a willingness to accept rebuke and to recognize that one is more important than one’s neighbor. The Greatest Commandment said we are to love our neighbors as ourselves (and therefore ourselves as our neighbors, we just have an easier time with loving ourselves) (Matthew 22:36-40). For an author, this means that we must accept some people will hate, deride, or misunderstand what we write. It also means recognizing that sometimes they have a point.

Humility means on the other hand a consciousness of where you have indeed written well, where your story does indeed deserve to be taken seriously. It means standing in the midst of your secondary creation and saying that while inside the story, the secondary creation is real. It is not and will never be perfect, of course; no man’s work is. It is real to itself, though, and humility demands that this be recognized, not apologized for. In other words, humility does not tell us to apologize for the existence of stories in the stories themselves. If the story is worthy to be told, tell it, and apologize later if you make a mistake. The story must take itself seriously, must recognize its own reality and not bow in self-deprecation (that’s pride talking, because to say you’re less than you are is to place your judgement above God’s).

Humility has another aspect most essential to an author: the ability to stand in somebody else’s shoes. Authors have to be able to set aside their own egos and perspective, to put on the life of another, and to look at the world through their eyes. Somebody who cannot do this will only ever write one character, themselves, and that poorly. A story where the author was too full of themselves to leave their perspective behind in understanding their characters is going to be a bad story, because the characters will all be the author wearing a skin suit. This does not mean that you must give up your value and perspective when you write the character, though. It means simply that you must understand the character from the character’s perspective before you can look at the character from your perspective, before you can know the truth well enough to evaluate it, not because the character’s perspective is more true but because the character’s perspective is the character, is what you’re evaluating.⁵ This skill, dependent on humility as it is, is integral to writing a story, and I can’t emphasize enough that you must learn it, at least in some measure (we all have some ability here, but we can always do with more).

Conclusion

In the end, God gave us stories. Therefore, we must tell those stories as stories, not pretenses we’ll abandon at the slightest push-back. God created the world, and we create stories in imitation of Him; our secondary creations are not so polished as His primary creation, but in honor of Him we must treat them as real-in-themselves nonetheless, as He would have us treat His primary creation, the universe and us and the story thereof, as real-in-itself, though all under Him and His sovereign, preserving hand. He too created a story with an audience, first Himself and second His creatures, angels and men and dumb beasts. So too we share our stories with an audience, and because we are creatures, we make mistakes in doing so. Yet we trust Him to use our stories to glorify Him, and we respect our fellow creatures whom He made in His image by treating them as people with brains in their heads, hearts in their chests. In all this, He calls us to humility, to be humble as He is humble, to see ourselves as we are, poor wretched sinners, to see Him too as He is: the perfect and sovereign Savior, who alone can bring us life. Let us therefore bring Him glory, not counting ourselves too high (for He alone preserves us from damnation) or too low (for He deigned to save us) but holding Him ever infinitely above all that we are and will be.⁶

Happy New Years Day and God bless.

Footnotes

1 – Check out my article here and read Tolkien’s essay here.

2 – Yes, I know that the author is always the real motive force, given the author is the one deciding everything that happens. Go read this article for a lot of talk about that.

3 – Check out this article for more on how and why theology must be a part of your story.

4 – I confess that I’m getting much of this from C.S. Lewis. Unfortunately I don’t know which of his books, so I just recommend you go read Screwtape Letters, Pilgrim’s Regress, The Abolition of Man, or one of his works of fiction. (I don’t really recommend Mere Christianity, as it contains some very poor theology.)

5 – This skill is really important in real life too. In cases of competition or opposition, for example, smart strategists learn ‘strategic empathy’, the skill of understanding the opponent’s priorities, mindset, knowledge, and abilities in order to understand and predict their movements.

6 – I speak as a Christian to Christians. To those who have not the right to set their hope upon Him, I say this: “Repent and believe, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt. 3:2; Mark 1:15).