What Writing Fiction Is Teaching Me About God
Writing fiction is escapist...but it's an escape out of materialism and into God's kingdom
None of the images I considered for this piece felt exactly right. Maybe blankness will.
Writing fiction is one of those activities that feels foundational to who I am, both as a Christian and as a human.
As a human, fiction writing has been with me since the beginning. I first thought I might like to be a writer when I was eight. I started my first novel at 12, and it was a vital respite from the more brutal aspects of my childhood. By the time I was a teenager, I was pitching my novel to agents and was convinced that I wanted to be a professional author.
When I found God, my desire only deepened. On the one hand, I realized that I didn’t need to be a professional novelist: I had other callings, and as long as they still gave me plenty of time to tell stories, I was happy to let those become the ways that I earned money. But I also saw more deeply why I’ve felt called to write fiction all of these years: I want to write in the style of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling, which is to say, I want to use my stories to help people find God.
One of those people I want to help, it turns out, is me. I’ve been writing stories for over two decades now: first as an atheist, and then as someone who dabbled in Eastern spirituality, and then as a Christian. But looking back, it feels as though God has been using this foundational thing about me all along to teach me more about Him.
Here are four things I’ve learned about God, and about my walk with Him, through telling stories.
1) Expect the Unexpected
When I write, I’m usually going off of a loose outline. But pretty often, when I actually sit down to write, that outline gets blown to Hell…and something much better takes its place.
I’ll give you an example. For the past two months, I’ve been writing a character who washes up in a strange village full of people who he’s heard terrible things about. These villagers have also heard terrible things about his own people. In my outline, I focused a lot on this character winning over the villagers and becoming friends with them. But then as I sat down to actually write, I realized something: he actually has his own intense hatred of, and distrust for, the villagers. That distrust takes a lot of time and energy to work through.
As a result, my outline for this part of the story got blown up. What I thought was going to be one simple scene turned into six, and there are still traces of dislike towards the villagers that makes a lot of things harder. When I let myself lean into that instead of trying to stick to my rigid plan, the story became a lot deeper and more authentic.
This has primed me to see God a new way, too. So often, I’ll have plans for the day. God will have other plans. His plans are better than mine. And when I surrender my plans and simply let Him guide me where He wants (which can lead me to some pretty strange places)...my life can start to look pretty wonderful.
2) Unexpected Wisdom
The woman who taught me how to write fiction (via her courses, not 1-on-1) was named Holly Lisle. She used to talk about “muse bombs.” The idea goes like this: you’re plugging along, writing first draft, and suddenly you feel called to write something into the scene that’s completely unexpected. Maybe it’s a particular character’s necklace that you can’t stop describing. Maybe it’s that a new character just walks onto the scene. Maybe a character casually mentions the Mourning Mountains, which until this moment you as the author didn’t know existed.
Holly stressed that you shouldn’t try to stifle these “muse bombs.” Instead you should pay attention to them. She was an atheist, but she had a bicameral theory of the mind, and she said that your muse often knew a lot more about the story than it was letting on to your conscious mind…and if you were willing to tug on the thread of these muse bombs, you could find gold. The necklace that your muse insists that you pay attention to might have hidden powers. The Mourning Mountains might be a group of sentient, miserable peaks in which the main character gets trapped.
In the story I’m writing now, I’ve seen this too many times to count. So often, I’ll think that I’m going to spend my day thinking about X part of the story. But instead, God pulls my attention to Y aspect. That doesn’t make sense to me, but if I’m willing to take a leap of faith, I’ll find that exploring Y is an extremely profitable thing to do. It’s the bicameral theory of the mind, only instead of the muse knowing the story very well and only sharing tiny pieces with my conscious mind, it’s God.
This theory of writing has trained me to take leaps of faith even if they don’t make sense to my conscious mind. I’m a recovering porn addict; and long before I had a conscious theory for why watching porn would be bad for me, I felt God inviting me to fight the addiction. On a happier note, last summer when I was looking for a job, I felt God consistently inviting me to rest. That didn’t make much sense to my conscious mind, but it turned out to be the best thing I could have done (both for my career and for my relationship with the divine).
There’s a mystery to writing fiction, just like there’s a mystery to my walk with God. When I learn to accept that mystery, and to tug on threads without really knowing what they’re going to lead to, really cool things start to happen.
3) Work and Belonging
This is a hard article to write, because the truth is that writing fiction hasn’t come as easily lately. I’m knee-deep in a theological epic fantasy romance story, and the first couple of sections went swimmingly. I was writing 3-4 scenes, or about 10,000-15,000 words, per week. But for the past couple of months, what was once a firehose has come only in fits and spurts. Last week I wrote two scenes, and I only kept one of them. This week, all I did was rewrite the one scene that I didn’t keep. I like what I’m getting, but it’s been dispiriting to feel a trickle where I’m used to a river.
I don’t think I’m alone in this dispiritment. I think in the West we’re prone to conflating our work with our worth: I did a lot this week, therefore I have worth. I suspect this can be especially tempting for those of us who feel we are on mission with God, and who regularly see God show up in our work. I’m so used to co-laboring with God on this story, of feeling connected to Him when I write, that in my current semi-drought I feel adrift and disconnected from His love.
But even here, I feel as though God is working. Because the truth is that I’m not disconnected from His love. I could never write a single word of fiction again, and I would still not be disconnected. In this period, I feel as though God is reminding me that I am His, whether I currently feel that way or not. This is quite the gift.
4) I’m Not Made for This World
I think writing fiction, like reading fiction, is inherently escapist.
But I don’t think that’s bad.
When accused of writing escapist fiction, Tolkien responded that there are two types of escape:
“Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.”
One way I’ve come to think about this distinction: when I escape from XYZ circumstances in my life, does the escape make my eventual return to XYZ more or less bearable? When I was using porn (which is escapist in the “Flight of the Deserter” sense), after each binge I’d come back to earth knowing that I had made my life concretely worse. By contrast, when I escape into fiction and I there find God, I return to my earthly circumstances to find that I’m much more equipped to handle them. Writing fiction makes writing nonfiction, being a good husband, and being useful to prison inmates all infinitely easier.
It’s the Escape of the Prisoner, but it’s an escape out of secular materialism and into something much more true.
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