The thesis of Christian philosopher James K.A. Smith’s The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic is simple and revolutionary: The necessity of interpretation — the impossibility of unmediated, perspective-free experience of a text or an event — is not a tragedy nor a barrier to truth, but an acceptable aspect of being a finite creature. Complete interpretive agreement, which history shows us is impossible, is not the only way to maintain the authority of a text such as the Bible or the Constitution. Smith argues that giving up the ideal of total, self-evident consensus will not lead to chaos because tradition and real-world experience constrain the number of interpretations we will actually find useful.
Hermeneutics is the branch of philosophy dealing with theories of interpretation. From Plato to today’s evangelical scholars and deconstructionist philosophers, there’s a common assumption that the necessity of interpretation is a fall from grace. In a perfect world, the theory goes, everyone would clearly perceive reality in exactly the same way. There wouldn’t be this diversity, uncertainty and incompleteness of interpretations.
Postmodernism contributes the insight that there is no pure encounter with the text, no alternative to our responsibility to choose among a plurality (though not, as Smith argues, an infinity) of plausible interpretive filters. So are our only choices a naive inerrancy or a despairing relativism? Not unless we are comparing our actual hermeneutic situation to a false ideal of perception unbounded by time, space, or the gap between self and object — in other words, measuring our perspectival knowledge against the direct knowledge available to an omniscient, omnipresent God.
Interpretation exists because we are finite creatures who cannot get completely beyond the space-time position where we find ourselves. Finitude creates a gap between two communicating individuals, and between myself and the object I communicate about. This gap produces the risk of mis-communication, and ensures that the sign can never capture the entirety of the signified.
Smith argues that the link between interpretation and fallenness contradicts the Christian belief that creation was originally and essentially good. To blame humans for not having a God’s-eye perspective is to say that finitude itself is fallen. In other words, we’re saying God made a mistake by creating individual humans with a diversity of cultures and experiences, instead of one undifferentiated God-being. This is unbiblical and, since it doesn’t fit reality, unhelpful. It produces hermeneutics that avoid self-awareness about their own limitations.
But wait, doesn’t the Tower of Babel story imply that linguistic diversity is a punishment for human pride? Smith daringly contends that God was restoring His intended diversity and squelching early humans’ totalitarian impulse to impose a monoculture. It makes a peculiar sort of sense: what would ever motivate God to make it harder for us to know Him? The fact that He brought pluribus out of unum suggests Smith is right that Christians should celebrate the polyphonic quality of human discourse.
Smith notes that “to say that everything is interpretation is not to say that all is arbitrary.” (p.163) The hermeneutics of the culture wars present us with a false choice between a single reading (of the Bible or the world) and an infinity of equally valid readings. Neither is actually an option for us. Interpretation isn’t infinite because reality pushes back. Our common experience in a shared world sets interpretive norms that “resist capricious construal.” (p.174) In other words, you can’t interpret your fist through a brick wall. Or, to use an example from Wallace Stevens, there may be 13 ways of looking at a blackbird, but there is also a real blackbird for comparison. “The blackbird is involved in what I know.”
Most of Smith’s book is taken up with tracking the false ideal of un-interpreted text through the writings of Augustine, Gadamer, Pannenberg, Heidegger, Derrida, and sundry other philosophers and theologians. If this is too “inside baseball” for you, I recommend Smith’s shorter and more readable Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?
Like many books that debunk a widespread belief, this one could have used less de-construction and more re-construction. The final section describing Smith’s alternative “creational hermeneutic” is tantalizing but too brief. The book would have vaulted from good to great if it had analyzed controversial Bible passages to show how his method can help the church live with diversity of opinion. The Anglican Communion needs you, Jim! Call your office!
Category Archives: Writer and Reader
Marilynne Robinson on Poetry and Religion
Novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson (The Death of Adam) reviews Harold Bloom’s new anthology American Religious Poems in the May 2007 issue of Poetry magazine. The book itself is merely the jumping-off point for an eloquent, original essay on how poetry and religion both need and exceed the boundaries of rational analysis. Some highlights:
Any reader of Ecclesiastes or the Book of Job is aware that the canon of scripture has room for thought that can disrupt conventional assumptions about the nature of belief, whether these assumptions are held by the religious or by their critics. Indeed, religion is by nature restless with itself, impatient within the constraints of its own expression….Any writer who has wearied of words knows the feeling of being limited by the very things that enable. To associate religion with unwavering faith in any creed or practice does no justice at all to its complexity as lived experience. Creeds themselves exist to stabilize the intense speculations that religion, which is always about the ultimate nature of things, will inspire….
There is every reason to turn to poetry in order to acquire a sense of the nature of religion. The two seem always to have been intimately linked. This deep and ancient affinity cannot be accidental. One does not “understand” what Aeschylus or Isaiah wrote, because poetry is not, in the ordinary sense, “understood.” If it is great, it is lived with over time by individuals and civilizations, interpreted again and again in its impact on language and thought and the arts, and on all those souls who are sensitive to its pleasures and sufficiencies. In just the same way, religion is not to be “understood.”
Again, poetry is best interpreted by poetry. William Carlos Williams tells us vastly more about Walt Whitman than the whole tribe of his critics and biographers can hope to tell us. Whitman made Emerson far greater than Emerson was on his own. Perhaps Sophocles did as much for Homer. Likewise, to the exasperation of those rationalists who wish they would just say what they mean, religions interpret themselves in religious terms. If the Gospel of Luke doesn’t make sense to you, Augustine and Luther won’t either. Those who look into this anthology are likelier than others to have some experience of poetry and to recognize the inadequacies of interpretation and paraphrase. But religion, not only in America, has been seriously distracted by the supposed need to translate itself into terms a rationalist would find meaningful. So liberals have set out upon a long, earnest project more or less equivalent to rewriting Shakespeare into words of one syllable—if such a thing can be imagined as an effort fired by moral passion and carried out by people who would themselves confess to a deep affection for Shakespeare. Fundamentalists have responded with a furious rejection of the very thought that the Bible might operate at the level of poetry, which amounts to a literalist insistence that the text is already available to understanding in the rationalists’ own terms and which yields endless futile controversy, notably about creation. This collaboration of supposed antagonists, liberals, and fundamentalists has meant that, for the moment, religion and poetry seem alien to one another as, historically, they have never been.
But the problem of paraphrase is deeper yet. Anyone, asked to give an account of her or his deepest beliefs, will experience embarrassment and difficulty. This is true because of the way belief lives in experience. By analogy, it is impossible to know how many nuances and associations a given word has until they are discovered in the use of the word, or in the recognition of a novel inflection given the word by another speaker. Even the most familiar words exist in us in a field of potentiality to which paraphrase can never be adequate. What but poetry could arrive at Wallace Stevens’s phrase, “the the”? On the same grounds, the expectation that a straightforward account can be made of any system of belief is naive, and attempts to accommodate the expectation are also naive. This is not to say that religion is closed against the inquirer. No more is poetry. However, like mathematics and music, they must be approached in terms that are appropriate to them. If the individualism and pluralism of American culture have indeed been especially friendly to the flourishing of religion, perhaps this is true because they discourage blanket statements about religious belief, which are always inadequate and disheartening.
Read the whole essay here.
Christ-Symbol or Christ-Substitute?
Today my Bible study group listened to a taped sermon on Romans 8 by the estimable Tim Keller, a Presbyterian minister in NYC, who mentioned how examples of self-sacrificing love in books or movies can help us emotionally understand Christ’s gift to us. For instance, Keller suggested we could view Sidney Carton in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities as a symbol of the substitutionary atonement.
This reminded me of an email discussion I had with Dr. Anthony Esolen at Mere Comments last year about whether Dickens’ novels were truly Christian. Do figures like Carton, or Florence Dombey (whose endurance of child abuse finally melts her father’s heart), point us toward the realization that we need Christ as savior, or away from the gospel and towards believing that we can be saved by human love alone?
Is the problem with the whole genre of the modern realist novel, in which God must remain an implicit presence and only human action is directly visible? Aslan can function as a Christ-symbol without misunderstanding because few people over the age of five will read the Chronicles of Narnia and literally think “I need to put my trust in a talking lion.” The risk is greater that someone will read A Tale of Two Cities and make an idol of romantic love.
I have a very personal stake in this question because one major theme of my novel-in-progress is how we mistakenly seek transcendence through Eros rather than God. If my playboy protagonist turns his life around because of his boyfriend’s unselfish devotion, instead of because he has an explicit conversion experience, does that make it less of a Christian novel? (Those of you who are stuck on the gay content of the previous sentence, substitute “girlfriend”.) By emphasizing the insufficiency of human love, am I setting up an opposition between God and His creatures that is stricter than the Incarnation warrants? How can I depict a marriage that is mutually self-giving and fulfilling, and yet points to something beyond itself? Should I just let my characters be as nice to each other as they want, and let God figure out the rest?
Comments, please! The salvation of my imaginary best friend may depend on it.
In Memoriam: Lloyd Alexander
I was saddened to learn today that Lloyd Alexander, the renowned author of fantasy novels for young adults, had died May 17 at age 83, from cancer. A good long life, to be sure, but one can only hope that a favorite writer will be as immortal as his books!
I grew up reading and rereading his Prydain Chronicles, a five-book series set in an imaginary kingdom inspired by Welsh mythology, which deserves comparison to The Lord of the Rings. Like that famous trilogy, it takes a humble protagonist (a likeable, gawky assistant pig-keeper) on a hero’s journey to defeat the lord of death.
Alexander’s other fine works include the Westmark trilogy and The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen. The former series (Westmark, The Kestrel, and The Beggar Queen), which takes place in an invented European country with an 18th-century period feel, is a dark and morally complex tale of republican freedom fighters against a tyrant. It’s really mis-labeled as a young adult book; more like a Victor Hugo novel with a length and vocabulary that a mature teen could enjoy, but substantial enough to captivate and inspire readers of all ages. Prince Jen is a witty, profound fable about a young Chinese prince who roams his kingdom incognito to learn wisdom.
One thing I loved about Alexander’s books was his wise, sassy and competent heroines, a welcome update to the classics of sword-and-sorcery fiction. They’re the foremothers of Harry Potter’s Hermione. His novels are works of philosophy embodied in a humorous and exciting tale. Alexander gave young readers a vocabulary to ponder the big questions, like “what does it mean to be human rather than animal” or “when does the end justify the means in wartime”. Thank you, Mr. Alexander. I’ll miss you.
Theory: Love It or Hate It?
Two of my greatest passions in life are creative writing and Christian faith, and I’ve been wondering what it means that I approach them in very different ways with respect to the role of the theoretical intellect. In fact, the first sentence of this post was originally “…creative writing and theology,” which I changed to “…and Christianity,” and finally to a more active and experiential phrase that is more of a goal than an honest description of my spiritual life. As a writer, I flee from literary theory like a helicopter escaping a war zone. As a Christian, I spend much of my time insisting on the importance of clear thinking about theology, and trying to provide a foundation for the same.
Does this discrepancy reflect a natural difference in subject matter, or is it a sign that my religious life doesn’t go deep enough, compared to my enjoyment of my own imagination? Is this related to the fact that I talk to my novel characters when I should be praying? Sometimes I feel like I’ll never be done hunting for idolatry in the corners of my mind, hidden under things that always seemed admirable before. It’s like my bedroom ceiling during ladybug mating season. Eventually I have to put down the Bugzooka (the Buddhist answer to flyswatters) and go to sleep, knowing that I may be sharing a pillow with a few spotty little friends.
So, some thoughts. What they add up to, I hope my loyal readers will tell me.
Theory & writing: I get so discouraged when poets launch into jeremiads against literary movements that differ from their own preferred style. The world will not end because someone is writing free verse or using less than 17 syllables in a haiku. Poets whose writing explores problems at the boundaries of language despise poets whose work could be understood if you read it aloud on the bus, and vice versa. Poetry may be at special risk for this phenomenon because it’s already more meta-textual than fiction, more concerned with its own workings; also because the crumbs of academic security and public acclaim are so much smaller that the pigeons squabble over them more fiercely. Intolerance is never pretty, but the “One True Religion” attitude seems particularly absurd in creative writing, which is by definition personal, original and idiosyncratic.
I write to find out things I don’t already know that I know. Anne Lamott’s excellent book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life compares writing a novel to taking dictation from the little boy who’s playing in the basement of your subconscious. At least for the first drafts, you just listen in while he’s doing his thing; you don’t give him an outline of the themes his make-believe is supposed to embody. Theory would get in the way. By the same token, I’ve come to believe that I shouldn’t set out to write an “innovative” or “experimental” poem. Innovation, if it happens at all, arises naturally out of the need for a new form to express a new thought, and often isn’t crowned as a breakthrough till years later.
I love Bird by Bird mainly because it validates the novel-writing process I’ve discovered for myself as the most comfortable and productive one: namely, having absolutely no idea what I’m doing, but complete confidence in it anyhow. Other books by equally good writers would give the opposite advice. I don’t care. All I need to know is that someone did it my way and didn’t die. I have no need to insist that all writers go through my particular dharma door.
Theory & faith: In my religious life, what came first was my childhood sense of wonder and my passionate longing for something that lay just beyond the horizon of human perception. In that respect, it’s not unlike the leap of faith I take as a writer. The ineffable draws me onward. Only the desire implanted unshakeably in my heart tells me that my journey will lead somewhere worthwhile. The absence meanwhile is a bittersweet pleasure, a spur to forward motion, a space in which to embrace my role as lover and seeker.
One of the beauties in which I see God’s presence is the beauty of theology. Long before I found Christianity convincing, I fell in love with its harmonious intricacy, its ability to address life’s most important questions within a system that was satisfyingly complex yet coherent. Perhaps I don’t see the same beauty in a lot of literary theory because the latter is about second-order questions. Theology is not God, and isn’t always prayer, but it goes right up to the limits of the sayable. It knows where the action is. Literary theory is words about words, theology is words about Reality.
There’s also an anti-intellectualism in today’s religious climate that’s mercifully absent from how we think and talk about literature. Few people expect to become good writers without studying the thoughts and methods of one’s predecessors, and learning how to think critically about one’s preconceived notions. If the same level of intellectual seriousness was expected in our religious life, I wouldn’t need to spend so much time defending the very idea of the Nicene Creed, not to mention its content.
Writers are expected to master their shame and fear in order to learn from tradition. Though the diversity of acceptable techniques increases at the more advanced levels of the craft, there’s wide agreement on some basic standards that quality writing should follow. There are respected authorities in the field. A beginning writer who rejects the notion of authority, who feels invalidated by the suggestion that anybody has something to teach her, would be advised to get her ego under control.
The church, by contrast, too often coddles that kind of immature personality, either from a loss of belief that there are any standards for Christian faith, or from fear that doctrinal specificity will lead to fatal dissension. The stakes are higher, it’s true. The Thirty Years’ War wasn’t waged by rival MFA programs. Still, I think the liberal churches in particular could learn something from the self-discipline and detachment that their members expect from themselves when they’re wearing their “academic” hat instead of their “Christian” hat.
I care more about unity in theology than in literary theory because for me, religion is about describing our shared reality, while writing creates a multiplicity of alternate realities that reflect different small pieces of the human condition. Also, the church as community needs something loftier than the roof-repair fundraiser to unite around, while the writer’s work is solitary.
At a time when fewer and fewer Christians can articulate why the Trinity, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection make a difference in how God’s forgiving love transforms our lives, it’s hard for me to get past the task of rebuilding an intellectual foundation for belief. I need this foundation to create the community that will safely support me on my scary walk toward God.
Imagine being a writer in a society where good books and bad ones were given equal and superficial respect, and reading too much of either type was suspect; where English teachers and literary critics were routinely mocked, in pop culture and within schools themselves, as crushing the natural beauty of creative souls with their arbitrary rules of grammar and exposition. Writers shouldn’t have to be that lonely; Christians, even less so.
Relevant Magazine on What Makes Art Christian
Relevant Magazine columnist Dawn Xiana Moon lays down a challenge to Christians about relevance, faith and art:
Many contemporary Christians tend to make one of three errors when dealing with art: One, we declare anything that doesn’t explicitly proselytize, anything that depicts brokenness without redemption to be depraved or unworthy of Christian notice. Or two, we decide that the secular world really does have better art, so we copy it, boldly and without apology or thought into our own creativity. Or three, we try so hard to be relevant that we adopt the attitude and worldview of the culture that surrounds us—instead of being the proverbial salt and light, we end up as dust with nothing to offer in the way of hope, because there is only a perfunctory difference between those of us who claim to follow Christ and those who don’t….I’m reminded of my visit to Wheaton College last week, where the main exhibit at their Billy Graham Museum was a selection of Warner Sallman‘s portraits of Christ. I found them sentimental and crude in a mass-culture, over-processed way, lacking both the subtlety and majesty of fine art and the unsettling individuality of “outsider” or folk art. The exhibit made me feel out of place there; was the church big enough for me and my novel? Reminding myself to be charitable, I reflected that millions of Christians had found Sallman’s work deeply meaningful. Were they wrong — was I the one with a prideful intellect and hardened heart? And still the paintings entirely failed to move me. Their power, perhaps, resides only in this: When you love someone, you cherish any picture of them, even one that doesn’t do them justice. Imagine being surrounded by people who love Christ that much. If only they had better taste…
Don’t misunderstand—there is a place for explicitly Christian art and age-appropriate material, and many of the masterpieces do focus on biblical themes. But to assume that all art must conform to this model is frustrating to artists who have an allegiance to Christ yet want to produce work that speaks to the entirety of the human experience. And it deadens the critical thinking capacity of people in the Church, deadens their ability to see and experience part of the nature of God. It also leaves many hurting, unable to ask for help or even admit their failings—what they see in the Church is happy music and people with seemingly perfect lives. Once a new creation in Christ, suffering and pain disappear, right? Wrong. Let’s be honest and admit it….
The last position is born out of frustration with the first (and sometimes the second). Tired of being marginalized in the Church and afraid they won’t be accepted in either a secular or religious world, artists disassociate themselves from the label and praxis of Christianity because their work is unacceptable by church standards—and in the mainstream, “Christian art” translates into “bad art.” Few empathize with this position on the fringe of two worlds, so they drift. Cynical from their past experiences with hierarchy and legalism, followers of Christ become reluctant to define their beliefs at all, leaving only spirituality with a vaguely Christian twist. In an effort to sound intelligent in a world that mocks supernatural belief, Christians downplay doctrine and theology….
Thomas Hallstrom writes, “Jesus told stories. Some were good and some were dark. Some ended with redemption and some ended with confusing questions. But He wasn’t afraid to tell stories that might turn people away. Many times people walked away after hearing the story, never to return (the rich young ruler who was told to sell all he owned). Other times, the story led the listener to an experience with the living God.” Art does not need to be didactic to be effective. In fact, as soon as it becomes didactic it often loses its effectiveness. It fails to communicate. The purpose of art is not necessarily to provide the answers—it’s much more powerful to ask the questions and allow an audience to seek the answers themselves. Jesus promised that those who seek will find, and we should trust him. He meant it when he said it.
If our art isn’t relevant to the entirety of our experience, the fullness of our lives—good, bad, scared, profane—then it cannot be relevant to the people around us. It will not be relevant to our culture. We need this art, need it desperately. In expressing our creativity, this piece of us that is also a piece of the character of God, we share in His nature. And that can only draw us closer to the One in whom our hope remains.
Marjorie Maddox: “How to Fit God into a Poem”
Part I
Read him.
Break him into stanzas.
Give him a pet albatross
and a bon voyage party.
Glue archetypes on his wings with Elmers,
or watch as he soars past the Slough of Despond
in a DC-10.
Draw wrinkles on his brow with eyeliner
until his beard turns as white as forgiven sin.
Explicate him.
Call him “Love.”
Translate him into Norwegian.
Examine original manuscripts
for proof of his kinship to Shakespeare.
Make him rhyme,
Cram him into iambic pentameter.
Let him read War and Peace ten times
and give a book report to third graders.
Edit out references to sin
and insert miracles.
Award him a Nobel Prize.
Then, after you’ve published him annually
in The New Yorker for thirty years,
crucify him. Proclaim it a suicide.
Part II
Let him whirl through your veins
like a hurricane
until your cells gyrate,
until you salivate at the sound of his breath.
Let him bristle your nerves like cat hairs
and laminate your limbs.
On All Saints’ Day, meditate
and wait patiently.
Then, he will come,
then, he will twist your tongue,
pucker your skin,
spew out his life on the page.
Read more selections from Maddox’s collection Weeknights at the Cathedral (WordTech Editions, 2006) here. Read a review in Arabesques Press here.
Christian Wiman on Poetry and Religion
Christian Wiman, editor of Chicago’s venerable Poetry magazine, shares some brilliant thoughts on poetry and religion in the Winter 2007 issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. This article (unfortunately not available online, so subscribe now!) is taken from his upcoming book Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. Some highlights:
Language can create faith but can’t sustain it. This is true of all human instruments, which can only gesture toward divinity, never apprehend it. This is why reading the Bible is so often a frustrating, even spiritually estranging, experience. Though you can feel sometimes (particularly in the Gospels) the spark that started the fire of faith in the world — and in your heart — the bulk of the book is cold ash. Thus we are by our own best creations confounded, that Creation, in which our part is integral but infinitesimal, and which we enact by imagination but cannot hold in imagination’s products, may live in us. God is not the things whereby we imagine him.(For an elegantly written book on the latter theme, check out George Steiner’s Real Presences.)
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You cannot really know a religion from the outside. That is to say, you can know everything about a religion — its history, iconography, scripture, etc. — but all of that will remain inert, mere information, so long as it is, to you, myth. To have faith in a religion, any religion, is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and symbols says something true about reality. This doesn’t mean that the words and symbols are reality (that’s fundamentalism), nor that you will ever master those words and symbols well enough to regard reality as some fixed thing. What it does mean, though, is that “you can no more be religious in general than you can speak language in general” (George Lindbeck)….I would say that one has to submit to symbols and language that may be inadequate in order to have those inadequacies transcended. This is true of poetry, too: I do not think you can spend your whole life questioning whether language can represent reality. At some point, you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them. You have to believe that poetry has some reach into reality itself, or you have to go silent.
Blogging will be light this weekend because I’ll be attending the feminist anti-porn activists’ conference at Wheelock College. Of course the biggest question on my mind this afternoon is “What should I wear?” So far I’ve packed my leopard-print sequinned hat, camo pants and a crucifix. Let ’em wonder.
Walter Mosley’s Advice to Novelists (from Poets & Writers Magazine)
Best-selling author Walter Mosley lays out some strategies for the first-time novelist in the latest issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. The full article is not yet available online, but all the writers who read this blog should be subscribers anyway — what are you waiting for? Here are some highlights to whet your appetite:
The most important thing I’ve found about writing is that it is primarily an unconscious activity….I mean that a novel is larger than your head (or conscious mind). The connections, mood, metaphors, and experiences that you call up while writing will come from a place deep inside you. Sometimes you will wonder who wrote those words. Sometimes you will be swept up by a fevered passion relating a convoluted journey through your protagonist’s ragged heart. These moments are when you have connected to some deep place within you, a place that harbors the zeal that made you want to write in the first place.A whole book of writing advice from Mosley, This Year You Write Your Novel, is forthcoming from Hachette Book Group in April. (But do I have time to read it and follow his advice to write 90 minutes a day? And here I felt so proud of myself for writing once a week!)
The way you get to this unconscious place is by writing every day. Or not even writing. Some days you may be rewriting, rereading, or just sitting there scrolling back and forth through the text. This is enough to bring you back into the dream of your story.
What, you ask, is the dream of a story? This is a mood and a continent of thought below your conscious mind; a place that you get closer to with each foray into the words and worlds of your novel….
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Self-restraint is what makes it possible for society to exist. We refrain, most of the time, from expressing our rage and lust. Most of us do not steal or murder or rape. Many words come into our minds that we never utter — even when we’re alone. We imagine terrible deeds but push them out of our thoughts before they’ve had a chance to emerge fully….
The writer, however, must loosen the bonds that have held her back all these years. Sexual lust, hate for your own children, the desire to taste the blood of your enemy — all of these things and many more must, at times, crowd the writer’s mind….
Your characters will have ugly sides to them; they will be, at times, sexually deviant, bitter, racist, cruel.
“Sure,” you say. “The antagonists, the bad guys in my book will be like that but not the heroes and heroines.”
Not so.
The story you tell, the characters you present, will all have dark sides to them. If you want to write believable fiction, you will have to cross over the line of your self-restraint and revel in the words and ideas that you would never express in your everyday life….
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Another source of restraint for the writer is the use of personal confession and the subsequent guilt that often arises from it. Many writers use themselves, their families, and friends as models for the characters they portray….She (the writer) wades in, telling the story in all of its truth and ugliness but then, feeling guilt, backs away from it, muddying the water….
This would-be novelist has betrayed herself in order that she not tell the story that has been clawing its way out from her core. She would rather not commit herself to the truth that she has found in the rigor of writing every day….
[But] you should wait until the book is finished before making a judgment on its content. By the time you have rewritten the text twenty times the characters may have developed lives of their own, completely separate from the people you based them on in the beginning.
Novel Writing Advice from Caro Clarke
When I tell people I’m writing a novel, their first question is usually, “What’s it about?” (Not “Are you a masochist or something?”, which would be the logical question for anyone who had first-hand experience of the process.) I usually dodge by saying it’s a “family saga,” because as yet I have no idea which of its several storylines is the main one.
A friend recently directed me to this very useful series of articles by Caro Clarke, originally written for the magazine NovelAdvice. Clarke’s got my number in essay #9, “Pacing Anxiety or, How to stop padding and plot!” She distinguishes between the premise of a novel (e.g. “timid Jenny moves to Alaska to open a B&B”) and the plot, which is the actual conflict that drives the action. Most beginning writers have only a premise, Clarke says, and so they find themselves without anything to say once they’ve set up the scene:
Your premise implies that Jenny, feeling stifled, heads to Alaska to improve her life. Your plot, therefore, is about a woman who creates a better life for herself by accepting challenge, and everything you write has to develop to this resolution.So far, I have the opposite problem. My inability to choose the book’s central conflict means that I have 100+ pages of scenes that develop the characters and help me understand their voices and motivations, but I’m still very far from throwing these people together into the confrontation that I originally understood as the linchpin of the story. For pity’s sake, the character who has taken over the book was supposed to be dead before it even started!
Challenge implies battling something, overcoming opposition, and this is the heart of novel writing. Fiction is about the challenges that the protagonist either triumphs over or is defeated by (EMMA or MADAM BOVARY, for example). A novel must have conflict, not just in its overarching idea, but in every single scene. Your premise is merely the novel’s opening action.
However, this early in the game, I feel that too much writing is a better problem than too little. Maybe only a quarter of these scenes will make it into the book, but I’ll still know something about the characters that I couldn’t have discovered any other way. From essay #3, “Don’t get it right the first time,” it looks like Clarke would agree.