My Audience is My Neighbor
The art that lasts is made of love, and made to love.
If we creators create without the aim of loving the work and our audiences, we're just clanging cymbals together. We might make best-sellers and win awards, but if it does not give something to those who experience the work, it will soon fade. So I want to write with magnanimous generosity. I want to give away as much as I can through my stories.
I'm radically sold on the belief that this is a way to love our neighbors, because love can mean telling someone she is not alone. Shouting to he who has become blind about the light ahead! Stories do this by giving a vision beyond our own life.
Good stories look like glass. Well-chosen words turn into a window, through which the reader sees out into some new world - but if one looks at just such an angle, the window shows one's own reflection.
Trust Your Reader
Stories are the train we can board to travel more than one life, more than one time, more than one world. The quality of a piece of fiction is measured by how easily a reader can slip into that world and experience a secondary world as if it were reality.
Christian writer, here we must trust our readers. It is tempting to step in and tell them what meaning to take from it. That will only rob the story. Story's power comes from the generosity it has. It gives readers an opportunity to leave their lives, wrestle with meaning, and return, themselves now the wiser Hero coming back to the land from which they set out. George MacDonald's essay The Fantastic Imagination says,
"The best thing you can do for your fellow, [...] is not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or, say, to make him think things for himself."
Oh boy. What sorts of things might the reader think for himself?
The reader expects to be entertained by a fairy tale, but secretly hopes some part of it will spring out of the pages into their own life. At that moment, the story begins to have a life of its own, no longer between author and work, but between work and audience. The author has ceased to exist. Now that he's dead, the real magic begins to take effect.
But if storytellers wield such great power, then we must bear it with discretion [insert Spider-man quote here. You know the one.] So if you write fairy tales, how can you be sure the reader will not take the wrong message out of it? What if they get it all wrong... Wouldn't it be better to make the truth as plain as possible?
Should Christians only write allegory??!!
Stories are Applicable
Again from MacDonald's essay: fairy stories "are not so much to convey meaning as to wake a meaning."
This is the difference between the kind of Fairy Tale George MacDonald wrote of and allegory. To allegorize steals the reins from the Hero (the reader). To allegorize is to intellectualize. This is not to toss allegory into the rubbish bin. But maybe there is more than one path to encounter truth.
When readers of The Lord of the Rings noticed that the One Ring had parallels to nuclear bombs, Tolkien rejected the idea that his stories were allegorical. He did not know of nuclear power when he began writing the series. Rather, Tolkien referred to The Lord of the Rings as having applicability. The themes of his story strike at indelible truth. They can be applied over and again no matter the circumstance because it wrestles with the question of what power is and how it should be handled. Applicability speaks in infinite parallels. It is fluid. Allegory speaks in 1-to-1 real world understanding. It is definite.
Both can be helpful to understand something complex.
Deep knowledge is comprised of both intellect and experience. To comprehend something as ungraspably big as God's love for humanity is to be told God loves you. But to go further, our imaginations need help. We need to see that statement acted out on a stage thousands of years wide to feel what God's love is.
Story is a way to know things. Story is epistemological.
Lloyd Alexander wrote,
“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
Stories wake meanings in us. Oddly enough, even meanings beyond the author's understanding. If the author were to shut in meaning to one path, he steals the influence the story may have to help us know truth.
But truth is not the only gift a fairy tale might give, if the author sows their own life into the work.
1. Empathy
Great stories are safe spaces. Inside, we learn to see people we normally wouldn't understand because fear gets in our way.
The genre of the Fairy Tale has the ability to take us far from the seemingly mundane world that we've become too familiar with to see the story in.
Stories offer us an opportunity to go places we've never been before, without the risk of loss in the real world. Entering into the mind of another is the act of reading. It grows a muscle called empathy.
Christian Artist, you can give empathy.
2. Comfort
Great stories offer us the comfort that we are not alone.
The world is wide and wild. It's easy to believe we are alone in our fears of what lies ahead. When we meet a well told story, the author is generously coming along side us, arm around our shoulders, and saying, "Me too."
Christian Artist, you can give comfort.
3. Healing
"All healing begins with an expansion of the imagination." - Curt Thompson
Hardship is a fact of life. Stories enter into that hardship and offer new perspective on it. The very best stories give hope by an injection of Christ-mindedness into the dark. The best stories glow with holy, healing imagination.
Christian Artist, you can expand imaginations.
4. Courage
To look into life's unknowns can be paralyzing. In the safety of a story world, a reader can witness heroes fighting monsters. They can see heroes win. And they can see what happens when no one steps up to fight the monsters.
Christian Artist, you can give an experience of fear, and courage, and a taste of what your reader will one day fight.
Giving Through Story
Write well, my friend, for this purpose: give your reader a little joy, a little grief, a little anger, a little fear, a little peace, a little hope inside your story. As they learn to know all things in your little story, they will come to know them better in their own.
So tell good ones.
Make your words be the ones by which light invades their life. May they come to see the true story by feeling the one you share with them. If your words are glass, radiant light will come shining through.
