On Fiction Writing
What Good Is It? Part 2
What good is fiction? The answer, I believe, is that there is no such thing.
“There is no such thing as fiction?” you ask. “Are you suggesting that Frodo was real?”
Yes. And no. But to understand that answer we have to ask what it means to go “there and back again.” So, perhaps it is better to begin with, “Outside of the Bible, all writing is a matter of perspective.”
An example from history will help us here. Winston Churchill’s The Second World War is a monumental masterpiece, a detailed account of the apex of wars told by a man who lived it. In any courtroom, such eye-witness testimony is invaluable. Without such testimony, you can never know what happened. You can never gain knowledge of the events.
But, as any attorney for the opposition will be eager to show, just because someone saw it, or remembers seeing it, doesn’t mean that all of it is true. Many (most?) historians will tell you Churchill remembers the war the way he wants to remember it, that he colors the details in a certain direction, that he exaggerates this while he leave that out. This is to say that his work, like all writing outside of the Bible, is full of bias. (Actually, the Bible has bias too. It is just not merely human bias.)
Bias is the linguistic challenge mankind cannot escape in our efforts to remember and know things. The historians who criticize Churchill’s bias might like to believe that their accounts are more accurate. But the best of them will admit that they, too, are subject to skew. Deciding what to write and what to omit, what to say and what to leave unsaid, always impacts what is heard. Hard scientists and mathematicians go to great lengths to overcome this limitation, but they too are subject to their passions, limited by their assumptions, biased toward their own point of view, and, especially, limited by the scope of their studies.
This does not mean that knowing history or algebra or anything else is not possible. It only means that such things are ever constructed within a realm that we must admit is rife with speculation. The most honest man developing the most honest assessment of the most observable reality will always still be limited by what he is able to see. What he cannot see is beyond him, and, may in fact later change everything.
All this is to suggest that there is not a fundamental difference between history, math, science and fiction. The differences which do exist are a matter of nuance rather than of substance. In every case of writing, whether an analytical physics research paper or a poem about your purple frog, the important question is not, “Is it true?” but “What does it mean?” You might not be able to find a hobbit hiding out in the bush behind Cambridge, but hobbits definitely existed there in the mind of their author. In telling stories about them, J.R.R. Tolkien did not expect you to pull out stethoscopes and tape measures, but to sit back, relax and consider the implications of his story. The dragon named Smaug might not “actually” exist, but his mind, his morals, his means and his ends most definitely do.
When Jesus told the parable of the sower, it did not matter whether or not he had a specific sower from the tribe of Naphtali in mind. If there was not a man with a name in a field that he saw the week before, that does not make his story a “lie.” To suggest so is to miss the point entirely, not to mention adopt a very anemic meaning of the term “lie,” a meaning limited to the world of newsprint and microscopes, a mindset narrowed to see only materialistic “things” as those things which are “real.”
What is wisdom? What is love? What is honor? Can you point to it? Can you put it in a bottle? Can you sell it at the market?
Indeed, it demonstrates the drastic power of the materialistic story that such a skewed version of truth passes so easily for the only “true” form of knowledge. The mythology of secular materialism and scientific objectivity has dominated the direction of thought in the west for several hundred years and taken their toll. But that is not the point we are after here.
The point is that, clearly, Jesus did not care about “the facts” in his parable. What was the sower’s name? Under which king did he live? These are stupid questions. It is not reasonable nor insightful to ask them. Instead, like his disciples, you are supposed to ask, ”What did the story mean?”
This is what I mean by, “There is no such thing as fiction.” Contrary to what my own, young, analytical mind posited with its anemic, materialistic view of truth, stories told for their novelty are not lies. They are commentary. They are metaphor and symbol, as reliable as any random science claim or historical assertion, which is to say, very much dependent for their value on the integrity of the author. But down to the very letters of the alphabet that make up the meanings we draw as words from the page, everything that we humans speak, hear and pen is as much about what is not seen as what is seen. It is about the supernatural power of language, the ability of one thing to mean another, the potential for wisdom to rest between the poles of what is otherwise merely knowledge.
Escapism and addiction to entertainment are certainly a threat within the present zeitgeist, and I have serious qualms about them. How useful is the fifteenth book about the warrior princess dragon rider who fights off hordes of gumbleboblins with her magical scrunchy? Does that romance novel really enable you to better love your husband, your children, your God? Why are you wasting your time on what dose not matter, does not satisfy and may indeed be a threat to your immortal soul? These are imperative questions. But the danger lies not in the concept of story itself. The problem lies with our atrophied ability to distinguish story from meaning, statement from purpose, make believe from what is worth believing, what it means from what it is.
“A man went down to Jericho…”
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit…”
“Sit back and I’ll tell you a tale…”
The value of fiction is that, should you pay close attention, you stand to learn a thing or two.
To be continued…
🔥🪓 Nice pastor