Blog on the Lillypad
Saturday, September 06, 2003
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The Structure of Fiction is Indirection (part 2 of the essays on fiction) When the Lord Jesus used parables, He depicted people as His audience understood them: the doting father, the prodigal son, the dutiful son, the grudging laborers in the vineyard, the tolerant master of the vineyard, the latecomers to the work, the clever merchant, the anxious housewife. His stories don't all end happily. We don't see the dutiful son reunited with the prodigal. We don't see the permanent laborers satisfied that the latecomers got the same wages. |
The most common fictional form used by the Lord was the parable, though He also condescended to use startling analogies in order to create memorable images. He incorporated parables into His longer lessons and sermons, but the parables themselves were often jarring. The prodigal, who used whores when he had the money to do so, gets the party from his Father. The long-term laborers get the same wages as the latecomers. The unscrupulous servant saves himself by granting favors under the table to his master's debtors.
The Lord's pattern does not depart from the classic structure of fiction. Fiction differs from the sermon form in that the sermon relies upon direction, and fiction relies upon indirection. The sermon gathers all the doctrinal ideas into a meaningful order and targets them at a single thesis. Fiction, when it works, presents first the image of the world as the audience sees it. Unlike the sermon form, Fiction starts at some distance from doctrinal and moral realities and depicts the visual world.
 | Even science fiction, which holds up a very ornate mirror, still only works when it starts by showing us characters we recognize on some level. After all, we would never appreciate the Klingons if we did not understand the samurai. We would not find the Daleks meaningfully horrible if the Nazis had not come first. The cry of "Let us die well!" existed in our realities before Paramount put it in the mouths of big green warriors. And "We are the superior race!" was a well known slogan long before the Doctor encountered it on the BBC in 1963.
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The key to well-structured fiction is that no matter how ornate that mirror that we hold up to the reader, the reader still sees a true world, an honest depiction. A story cannot move forward in the reader's mind unless the reader believes the characters he or she is reading about. Thus, before the writer can ever get the plot up to a really full head of steam, the characters have to maintain themselves as reflections of the real.
In the real world, people are flawed. That's the nice way to say it. The reality is that they are selfish, grasping, vicious, lustful, cowardly, etc. Even the best of people give in to their worst impulses.
Christian fiction that uses only model characters loses the reader straightaway. Some writers, recognizing this, still use unrealistic characters but compensate with compelling mysteries or adventures, but in the end you get a book in which the readers skip long passages to get back to the action. And worse, you end up with a literature that is dishonest. Instead of preserving a witness to the world, Christians have created a literature that people read only because it is safe for them, or because they suppose they should, or because somebody else expects them to.
But the world has been shut out from this literature because the literature stinks. It has failed to compel a wide range of readers to read it. Instead, it targets a narrow range and succeeds with them mostly on moral grounds, and not because the stories are better than other stories that are out there. Creating a literature like this is not occupying in the way that God intends for Christians to do. It is a retreat and fortify strategy, and it as long as the current role-model type literature is what Christian publishers publish, they guarantee that Christian literature will never be meaningful to the world, nor will it ever serve as a compelling witness. A dishonest literature fails to be a witness of the Truth of God, no matter how much it touts proper behavior and moral righteousness.
What Makes Fiction Succeed
The Purpose of Fiction
The Design of Fiction
The Action of Fiction
The Integrity of Fiction
The Limits of Fiction
