Blog on the Lillypad
Friday, September 05, 2003
 | The Purpose of Fiction is to Entertain. (part 1 of the essays on fiction)
Everything works when it is designed according to its purpose. You don't surgically operate on people with a can opener, and you don't open a can with a scalpel. Not every thought we think can be meditative. Not every perception can be focused on doctrine. Not every private moment can be spent in prayer. We were not even designed to spend all of our time praying or meditating or reading scripture or studying doctrine. We were created to know God, which is our highest purpose; but we were also created to occupy the earth and make it beautiful. Our occupation of this earth means that we create a culture in which our art, architecture, literature, etc. reveals God's wisdom in more subtle ways than we get from the directness of doctrine or the immediacy of prayer. |
From this purpose of filling the earth with a compelling and delightful beauty that causes the heart and emotions to revel and ponder and discover new insights about God, we have never been excused. It is a shame that secular society often does a better job with meaningful design than Christian society.
God has ordained that the Gospel be communicated through the preaching of the Word. Doctrine is established, false doctrines answered, and people converted by preaching. Fiction that tries to do what sermons have been ordained to do ends up being implausible. Sermonistic fiction, ultimately, fails as a sermon because it relies on an imaginary landscape; and it fails as fiction because it is always boring, sentimental, stilted, and predictable.
I am not saying that fiction has to be a vacuum where God is not glorified. The Christian writer can glorify God by means of fiction, but not by turning fiction into a sermon. Good fiction has to be entertaining. It has to be fresh, vivid, unexpected, startling, breath taking, and unpredictable. The sermon form is direct in propounding Truth; fiction relies upon indirection to unveil truth. Furthermore, we have to see the reality of ourselves in fiction, but that's another topic that I will have to post later.
What Makes Fiction Succeed
The Structure of Fiction
The Design of Fiction
The Action of Fiction
The Integrity of Fiction
The Limits of Fiction
