Blog on the Lillypad
Sunday, September 07, 2003
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The Design of Fiction is to Illuminate Truth; not to Expound Truth Fiction achieves its highest purpose by indirection. It finds its strength in depicting the world as the reader experiences it and moving from there. Unlike the sermon form, which finds its strength by direction, the indirection of fiction requires that fiction operate by images. But only very poor fiction (such as erotic fiction) is purely experiential. Yet at the opposite extreme, fiction that discounts the experiential in order to convey a message is also poor fiction. Fiction must be experiential and imagistic, yet it must move these elements towards a coherent end. If it wallows in its own experiential components, fiction becomes self-serving, sentimental, and self indulgent. There has to be more to a story than an orgasm. |
Yet if the experiential and imagistic components are merely a shell, the story always fails to be compelling. A story is something other than a message or sermon. A story must be more deeply personal and intimate than a lesson plan in order to be memorable. This is why the didactic nature of so much Christian fiction produced in the 20th century has condemned it to oblivion even among Christians, and outright mockery and scorn among the readers of the secular world.
Fiction can illuminate Truth beautifully. There are few adornments more lovely and compelling than good fiction artfully woven around the neck of Truth to bring out the eternal beauty of the face of Truth. And the best example of fiction that so beautifully adorns Truth is the fiction of CS Lewis. He does not hand the reader the plan of salvation and ask for a salvation decision at the end. Instead he focuses on illumination and adornment of truth. With that goal as the central goal of his fiction, his occasional moments of direction are not discordant.
Fiction cannot expound truth. Though fiction is a lovely adornment of truth, it is no substitute for the directness of the sermon form. When fiction attempts to expound truth, it loses its experiential and imagistic foundation and descends into didacticism. Perhaps a sympathetic reader will agree with the lesson being pounded home (perhaps not), but he story itself will fail. It stops being a believable event, an imagistic experience in the mind of the reader. And thus, at the very best, it becomes forgettable. At worst it becomes a point of mockery and scorn and does more disservice than service to Truth.
God has decreed that by the preaching of the Word of God, souls shall be converted. I'll discuss this more later, but we actually have a doctrinal mandate to keep stories out of sermons except as short, pointed analogies with direct meaning; and to keep fiction away from being sermons, because fiction is NOT the ordained means to preach the Gospel. Fiction can adorn the Truth, but it is not designed to expound the Truth, for fiction is experiential and subjective. It's a terrific art form but a bad way to directly impart doctrine. If we keep fiction in its proper place as an adornment, we can create and enjoy great fiction. If we try to put fiction into a place it was not intended to occupy, we will fail (and have failed) to achieve our ends to use it to teach doctrine, and we end up with boring, stilted, predictable, didactic, forgettable fiction.
What Makes Fiction Succeed
The Purpose of Fiction
The Structure of Fiction
The Action of Fiction
The Integrity of Fiction
The Limits of Fiction
