How Long Do You Write Before Writing It Down?

I spent almost four years writing my first novel before I put a single word on screen or paper. 

Writing a novel wasn’t intentional. A song had captured my imagination, a single image formed in my mind, and gradually a story unfolded to accompany that song and image – all in my imagination. I mentally nursed the story for years, changing the characters, adding scenes, and altering the story line.

 

How you imagine a story, or create it in your imagination, is very different than what happens when it’s time to actually write the story. In my case, what I was imagining was a cinematic story, moving from scene to scene while developing a story line. Writing that down had two benefits: it forced the story out of my head and on to the screen, and it made me realize how big the gaps in the story were. 

 

I could imagine a character participating in a bike race, for example, and gloss over the details in my mind. But to read it on the screen showed the gaps and shortcomings. It was missing color and depth. The imagined account has left out the emotion, because I could imagine the emotion in my mind. It took six years of rewriting to get the draft to a point where it not only made sense but also told a complete story. 

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog. 

 

Photograph by Mitchell Hartley via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Abounding Creativity of Middle-earth: An Appreciation of J.R.R. Tolkien

I considerJ.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) and Middle-earth (timeless), and I find myself eventually arriving at Homer.

Tolkien in World War I

I’ve been reading about Homer and his Iliad and Odyssey, and the work that’s been underway for several years on what’s believed to be the tomb of Odysseus, or someone like him. We’re still learning that stories we believe to be myths, in the contemporary sense of that word, may actually be grounded in historical fact. It doesn’t mean they’re completely and historically accurate, but it does mean that the oral tradition they come from may be more historical than we realized.

Homer’s works were considered more fiction than anything else, until 1870, when the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered the site that is now considered the battleground of the Trojan War. Troy turned out to be a real place.

When he was young, Tolkien found himself fascinated with the Edda, the collections of prose and poetry written in Iceland in the 13^thcentury. These writings were themselves collections of stories from much earlier times that continued until the Viking Age. The Edda is our main source of knowledge of Norse mythology, and it would exercise a significant influence on The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and indeed all of Tolkien’s writings.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“The Arts and the Christian Imagination” by Clyde Kilby

It’s become more common today to see churches, denominations, and religious organizations begin to embrace and grapple with the role of the Christian (and the church) in the arts. But it’s been a long time coming.

The reason for that long time coming has been what can only be called antagonism, likely born in the Protestant Reformation. Protestants not only looked to reform theology; they also were done with icons, church paintings, and statues, seeing these as idolatrous. In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, fundamentalists and others turned their backs on culture, both popular and “high.” Art, movies, magazines, novels, and other aspects of culture were often considered a danger.

By the 1970s, a Christian imitation of popular culture had begun to appear, especially in music, self-help books, and fiction. “CCM” or “Christian Contemporary Music” became widely known, and secular music producers began buying up Christian labels. The same thing has happened over time with Christian books, with many Christian publishers now subsidiaries or imprints of larger secular concerns. But much of what is called Christian is still clearly separated from the general culture.

Also in the 1970s, Francis Schaeffer was one of the first spokesmen for Christians to re-engage with the culture at large. He, and many others, could clearly see the decay of secular culture – essentially what was happening without the redeeming “salt” of Christianity. The decline seemed to be happening quickly, but it had actually been happening for more than a century.

But before there was Francis Schaeffer, there was Clyde Kilby.

Kilby (1902-1986) was a long-time professor of English and department head at Wheaton College in Illinois. He also happened to be a passionate advocate for the arts. He taught literature and poetry and fought the good fight to defend both, and especially poetry. He was heavily influenced by British Christian writers like J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and other members of the Inklings. He was also instrumental in the founding of the Marion Wade Center at Wheaton, what became a major research center and document depository for the works of Lewis, Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Dorothy Sayers, G.K. Chesterton, George Macdonald, and Charles Williams.

Various manuscripts and essays by Kilby have been collected and published under the title of The Arts and the Christian Imagination: Essays on Art, Literature, and Aesthetics. It’s almost uncanny how Kilby advocated for and anticipated the renewed Christian involvement in the arts, which is only now beginning to gain velocity.

Clyde Kilby

The collection is divided into four sections. The first, “Christianity, the Arts, and Aesthetics,” includes a lengthy unpublished manuscript by Kilby drawn partially from his published essays as well as original material. He was especially interested in form in the arts, but parted company with academics, critics, and artists who saw form as everything. Kilby, says collection editor Willian Dyrness in his introduction, understood form in a radically different way: “True form, for the Christian, is exemplified by the Spirit-filled life. It is more closely connected to being than doing.”

The second section, “The Vocation of the Artist,” discusses the Christian and culture, a defense of beauty, individuality, and evangelicalism and human freedom. “Faith and the Role of the Imagination” is the third section, followed by  a section specifically addressing poetry and fiction, two art forms too long neglected or ignored by the Christian community. Kilby, in fact, saw Jesus as more of a poet than an expositor, and said that “we have forsaken the poetry of Christianity for it prose, and especially its dull expository prose.”

Kilby was the author of several works about Lewis and Tolkien, including The Christian World of C.S. Lewis (1964); Tolkien and the Silmarillion (1971); Images of Salvation in the Fiction of C.S. Lewis (1978); and Brothers & Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis (1983). He served as editor for C.S. Lewis: Letters to an American Lady (1967). And a companion volume to The Arts and the Christian Imagination, A Well of Wonder: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Inklings, was also published in 2016. Kilby also published Minority of One: A Biography of Jonathan Blanchard (1982).

The Arts and the Christian Imagination has insights and thought-provoking observations on almost every page. Kilby was a shrewd observer of both the contemporary arts and how Christians did, and didn’t respond to and participate in them. It’s an important collection that is pertinent for Christians and for anyone who cares about the arts today.

Related:

My review of A Well of Wonder: C.S. Lewis, J.R. Tolkien, and the Inklings.

Photograph: Whitby Abbey in the United Kingdom by George Hodan, via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Confessing the Sin of Envy

I have to confess the sin of envy.

Every day I read a statements by writers who confidently say they have been called by God to write.

I envy their call. And I envy their confidence.

I don’t feel called by God to write.

Writing is something I do, something I have always done. I’ve made a living by words, and in many ways I’ve built a life from words.

I’ve been a reporter, copy editor, newsletter writer, news release writer, speechwriter, report writer, ghostwriter, article writer, speaker, reader, teacher, presenter, blogger, corporate blogger, poet, contributing editor, novelist, Twitter editor (tweeter?) and Facebook page manager. I’m sure I’ve left some things out.

My life has been filled with words, by words, for words. Words shaped by experience, understanding and imagination.

But I have never felt the confidence to say that God called me to write. It’s a skill or gift or ability He gave me, but I can’t say it was a calling in the way we Christians mean “calling.”

What I believe He did call me to was faith – is faith.

A.W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God says something about this.

“Imagination is not faith,” he writes. “The two are not only different from, but stand in sharp opposition to, each other. Imagination projects unreal images out of the mind and seeks to attach reality to them. Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that which is already there…The Object of the Christian’s faith is unseen reality.”

Tozer says it better than I think I could have. My imagination – as wild and exciting and weird and strange as it might be (I write poetry, after all, and there are few things stranger than that) – is not my faith. Imagination creates something out of the mind; faith apprehends a reality that is already there.

But I do wish I could feel some of that confidence, at least sometimes.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading and discussing Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Apprehending God,” please visit Jason’s site, Connecting to Impact. Next week we will begin a discussion of chapter 5.

The Baptized Imagination

A dozen years and several employers ago, I spent some time with a career counselor. I needed help in figuring out where I was at work (translation: a bad situation getting steadily worse) and some understanding of whether I was really suited for corporate life at all.

This counselor was good. She had a whole raft of resources, tests, exercises and knowledge, plus a lot of her own experiences. She had even worked for two to three years for the same employer I had. Without knowing me, she knew a lot about the kinds of experiences I had had.

We did the tests and exercises. We had long talks. She interviewed me in two or three different ways. We did sorted and prioritized hopes and dreams on index cards. We talked about the things I liked to do, and what I didn’t. She analyzed.

And then she surprised me.

“I have to tell you,” she said, “that you’re a conundrum.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve lasted far longer in that work placethan anyone like you should have.” She paused and then continued. “You should have been fired to quit a long time ago. You have the wrong temperament entirely. You think nothing like a corporate person. Nothing. You come at things with a decidedly non-corporate perspective. Companies like yours usually find people like you to be very threatening.”

She looked away, possibly recalling her own experiences. “The corporate work place is usually toxic for people like you. It either makes you conform or it destroys you. There’s no middle ground. Yet somehow you’ve managed to avoid that, and more than that, you’ve been successful. It makes no sense.” She stared at me for a moment. “You’re creative. You think the way a creative person thinks. Organizations don’t deal with creativity very well. So, yes, you are a conundrum.”

I understood what she was saying. She was largely correct. But then I really knocked her for a loop.

“You’re right,” I said. “Or mostly right. There’s a reason why I think like I do, why I look at things the way I do, possibly even why I’ve lasted as long as I have.

“I’m a Christian.”

This conversation came back to me this week as I read chapters five and six (on imagination and “the muse”) of Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and Spirit. Author Luci Shaw writes this: “It is my wild hope that perhaps creative Christians, by means of their ‘baptized imaginations,’ may be able to help integrate the universe by widening and sharpening their focus, by seeing the whole picture as if through God’s eyes, by observing humankind and the environment and saying, ‘Yes, I see. This is like that. There is meaning in it.’”

And that’s the answer. I have a “baptized imagination” (Shaw borrowed the phrase from C.S. Lewis). I think in terms of connectedness, the “whole picture.” I fight compartmentalized thinking, no matter how personally attractive I find it. How I behave at work is how I behave at church and with family (although I’m much more open with family). I don’t always assume the organization is always right. I see and understand the elements of truth in what opponents and competitors say.

It’s not an easy way to live a corporate life. Far from it. A friend at work heard me “predict” something – although it was less a prediction than a statement of the obvious. The something eventually happened, and he called me a prophet. I laughed. “You know what happens to prophets, don’t you? They get hunted down, imprisoned and sawed in half.”

But I don’t know how to be otherwise.


To see other posts on imagination and “the muse” from Breath for the Bones, please visit The High Calling, where Laura Boggess has been leading our discussion of the book.

We Are all Poets in the Workplace

She captured my attention with the imaginary house.

For The High Calling’s Monday book discussion, we’re starting to read Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and Spirit by poet and writer Luci Shaw. I’ve “met” Shaw through her poetry, like Harvesting Fog: Poems, and then moved a step close when she joined us for a TweetSpeak poetry jam on Twitter two weeks ago.

In Breath for the Bones, she explores artistic creativity and imagination as profoundly influenced, perhaps even directed, by “the spirit and creatorhood of God.” She speaks to “the artistic process from a profoundly God-centered perspective.”

For a Christian, this sounds like a no-brainer. Yet for evangelical Christians, it is actually more of a fairly recent no-brainer, because it has been only in the last three decades or so that evangelicals have come to consider “the arts” – fiction and other writing, poetry, theater, art, music, film – as something that just might possibly be connected to God.

My own introduction to this whole idea of God as the source of human creativity was Flannery O’Connor, and though she was Southern she was also Catholic, so she didn’t “really count.” No, we evangelicals needed one of our own here, and we found one in Francis Schaeffer and his “How Should We Then Live” book and film series in the mid-1970s. (I was actually reading O’Connor about the same time that our church in Houston showed the series on Sunday nights.)

In her introduction, Shaw imagines a house, “a large rambling house – old, with multiple doors and windows at different levels, all opening onto a landscape of fields interrupted by trees, and beyond this rolling hills, and even farther away, the glistening horizon of the ocean.” She describes the house and its diverse community of people, of both sexes, all races, all ages. “Moving among them, talking and working along with them, is an ordinary-looking man; it is the Christ, the One who lends the house its personal warmth, its structure, its creative center, its vision, its reason for being. This is the house of faith.”

This is a book about art, creativity and artistic imagination. What caught my attention was whom she included among the residents – artists and actors and poets and writers, yes, but also the businessperson, the carpenter, the marketing expert, the inventor and the computer programmer.

And I was seized with an idea, an idea of how I’m going to read this book, and how I’m going to participate in the discussion for the next several weeks – by focusing on how art and creativity and imagination can and should flourish in the workplace, as much as they do in novels, poems, plays, paintings, movies and music, and that here, too, they arise from “the Spirit and creatorhood of God.”

In other words, for those of us who live God’s kingdom in offices and cubicles, on trucks and airplanes, standing behind counters at Macy’s and handling insurance claims, we are all, at heart, the artists of God. We are all made in the image of God, and part of that image is the creative, artistic spirit and force.

Consider joining us. I’m reading the book on Kindle (instant gratification!), and it’s easily available from Amazon and other booksellers like Hearts and Minds Books. Laura Boggess is leading the discussion at The High Calling, and she’ll be posting on Mondays with links to other posts in the discussion.

Come help us write a poem.