This does not mean that I am an anti-intellectual. I am an intellectual, but I do the thinking ahead of time. I do the research ahead of time. Before writing A Wind in the Door, I had to do an incredible amount of research in cellular biology, far more than was going to go in the book because I had to know far more than was going to go in the book. But then after the thinking, after the research, you write. You listen. You don’t think.
CHANGE GENRES
When you have finished a real effort of a major book, you cannot start a major book the next day. At least you cannot start more than the first few pages. I usually make a start and then step aside and let the well fill up again. That’s also why I move from genre to genre. I never write two books of the same genre in a row. I think that’s a safety valve. If you write the same genre over and over again, you do tend to get stale.
BIRTHING A TITLE
The title of a book is as important as one’s right and proper signature on a check. A book may have a Library of Congress number, as a check may have that cybernetic salad, but a book, like Emily Brontë, like you, like me, must have its own name. Some books get born with names: The Arm of the Starfish, The Young Unicorns. We had to search for the proper name for A Wrinkle in Time, and it was my mother who came up with it, during a night of insomnia. I went into her room with a cup of coffee in the morning, and she said, “I think I have a title for your book, and it’s right out of the text: A Wrinkle in Time.” Of course! It’s perfect.
PROTECTING PRIVACY
Often when I teach a writers’ workshop I am asked, “What do you do, in your journal-type books, when you are writing sensitive things about real people?”
My reply is, “When I am writing about something that might invade privacy or hurt someone, I translate. I invent another situation which has the same emotional or spiritual impact.”
WRITING PRACTICES
There has been much to teach me about the ontology of things this summer: the blueberry bush; Thomas, the amber cat, and Tyrrell, the large amber dog, diligently washing each other’s faces in harmony and amity; the younger members of the Crosswicks family climbing up onto our big four-poster bed for hot chocolate at midnight; the babies’ incredibly beautiful bare bodies as I help give them their baths before dinner: all these, and many more awarenesses, are proof of my word for this summer.
It is this kind of awareness which I demand from my students in the seminar in writing practices I give somewhere or other each year. I like the name writing practices better than Creative Writing. As I have said, nobody can teach creative writing—run like mad from anybody who thinks he can. But one can teach practices, like finger exercises on the piano; one can share the tools of the trade, and what one has gleaned from the great writers: it is the great writers themselves who do the teaching, rather than the leader of a seminar. It doesn’t take long for the gifted student to realize that there are certain things the great writers always do, and certain things they never do; it is from these that we learn.
WRITING IS WRITING
I’ve finally discovered a way to make the point that writing is writing, whether the story is for the chronologically young or old. I give whatever group I am teaching two assignments. The first is to write an incident from their childhood or adolescence which was important to them. “Write in the first person. Nothing cosmic, just an incident. And do not write this for children. Repeat: do not write this for children. Write it for yourselves. Write it for each other.”
When I am giving this assignment as part of a juvenile’s workshop at a writers’ conference, I will already have read the stories, and chapters of books, which the conferees have submitted. Thus far, in every case, the work they hand in for this assignment is better than the stories they wrote “for children.”
I repeat, “But you don’t write ‘for children.’ You write for yourselves. Do you understand how much better this work is than the story you submitted when you were writing ‘for children’?”
DANTE’S FOUR LEVELS OF UNDERSTANDING
Dante said of his great works of fantasy that his writing must be understood on four different levels: the literal level (the story), the moral level, the allegorical level, and the anagogical level. Now the anagogical level is the most difficult of the four levels to define, but it comes clear to me if I think of the allegorical level as being a simile, that which is like something, and the anagogical level as being a metaphor. There’s confusion today between a simile and metaphor, but it is a very, very different thing to say that Jesus is like God than to say that Jesus is God. So allegory is what something is like, and anagogical work shows you what something is.
THREE NARRATOR ROLES
First Person Narrator
This may seem the most straightforward and easy way to tell a story. Actually it is supremely difficult. The narrator may be a villain, a hero, a moron, a madman. He may be ignorant of things the reader must know. He may reveal the truth through telling lies. F. Scott Fitzgerald tells The Great Gatsby in the first person. “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”…
The Concealed Narrator
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary…is the perfect example of this. I find it a comfortable point of view for this particular time and place in our history. Action moves swiftly from this point of view and can reflect the continuing changes in the world around us and the way it affects our lives. Much of David’s story is told from the point of view of the concealed narrator, straightforwardly, as in the adultery with Bathsheba or, much earlier in Scripture, in the story of Adam and Eve….
The Omniscient Narrator
This is a very ancient method. Homer used it in The Iliad and The Odyssey. Tolstoy uses it in Anna Karenina; Dickens, Thackeray, Stendhal all used this point of view, and it was certainly very popular with the Victorians, where the storyteller knows everything: “Had she only realized, dear reader, what lay on the other side of the door, she would never have opened it.” Many works written from the point of view of the omniscient narrator are leisurely and long. Alas, nowadays if I am given a book of six or seven hundred pages I hesitate to start it; where am I going to find the time?
THE FIRST SENTENCE WHISPERS OF THE RESOLUTION
In the great storytelling there is usually an indication of the resolution in the first sentence. In Chekhov’s story Vanka, Chekhov states, “Nine-year-old Vanka Jukov, who has been apprenticed to the shoemaker Aliakhine for three months, did not go to bed the night before Christmas.” In the resolution he finally manages to doze off, dreaming of the freedom of other Christmases before he knew the brutality of the shoemaker.
The first sentence of Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms is, “The leaves fell early that year.” In that first line we have a foreshadowing of love dying young, a hint that before the end of the plot the hero’s heart will be as bare and ruined as the trees and the roads.
KEEP THE STORY MOVING
In responding to a story, we react not only with our intellect but with all of ourselves, with our subconscious and our supraconscious selves, the side on the other side of the sun, the side in the dark, the side below the water. And this is something that every writer, no matter how big or how small the talent, must remember. What we have to keep in mind when we write is first and foremost to get on with the story, to keep excitement moving in the reader’s mind.
For instance, if A Wrinkle in Time is not first and foremost an exciting adventure story of time and space, if the fact that while I was writing it I was trying to come to some understanding in myself about good and evil, darkness and light, if that shows too obviously, then I have failed.
EXPERIMENT IN POINT OF VIEW
One writing assignment which has proven productive is to take any protagonist in Hebrew Scriptures at a time of conflict and decision and write a midrash about this person. A midrash is a story which explicates a portion of Scri
pture, usually an ambiguous or difficult Scripture story.
Often the assignment which follows is for each writer to pass hes or hir (we can get pretty silly about inclusive pronouns) story to the person on the left, and that person is to rewrite the story from the point of view of someone else in the story. We don’t often think about how Bildad the Shuhite might have felt, or Leah’s or Rachel’s maids. What about Cain’s wife? What about Lot’s wife, or even Jezebel?
A SENTENCE FROM THE PSALMS
Take a sentence from the psalms, or one of the Gospels, and write a half-page journal entry about what this sentence means right now, in your own life. For instance, the first line of Psalm 11: “Blessed is the man that feareth the Lord; he hath great delight in his commandments.” Forget, for the moment, the use of “man” and “he” and “his.” Remember that man is a generic word, meaning both male and female. Read the words with ourselves in mind: “Blessed are we who fear the Lord; we will have great delight in God’s commandments.” What kind of fear is the psalmist talking about? What kind of fear leads to delight? Not cringing, demeaning fear. Awe, perhaps. Amazement at the wonder of a star trembling into being in a darkening sky. Wonder at the greeting of a friend: “Oh, it’s you! I’m so glad to see you!” Marvel at the love surrounding a single dinner table as we hold hands for the blessing of the gathering and the food. That kind of “fear” causes us to desire with our whole heart to keep God’s commandments, for they are there for our delight.
TELLING MYTHIC STORIES
I read an article that discusses just why J. R. R. Tolkien is so enormously popular with high school and college age students. One young reader says that he goes to Tolkien simply for the sheer fun he gets out of the books. A Columbia freshman says that he and his classmates would be downcast if there were a social meaning.
Some older readers insist that the books are a powerful and hopeful affirmation about man filled with philosophical import. Of course, they’re right, but in a basic way, the younger ones are the most right. If what you see on reading a story which is written in the mythic form is not the story but the philosophy or theology which motivates the story, then the storyteller has failed. The motivation behind a mythic book has got to be implicit. It’s got to be there, but it mustn’t show.
WRITING FANTASY
I think the most important thing about fantasy and myth is the grounding in reality. You must start with something that is accessible to the reader, something as homely as a liverwurst and cream cheese sandwich. (Which is, by the way, a very good sandwich. It’s even nicer if you put a slice of sweet onion with it.)
I think that food is helpful in grounding the reader in reality—or something that smells, such as the smell of wet earth in the spring. Before you can take your flights of fantasy, before you could explain what a tesseract is, you have to make the reader comfortable in something homely, as the English use the word homely, which is more homey than homely.
BELIEVABLE STORIES
A story must be believable no matter how high the fantasy soars or how offbeat the science; the child must be willing to give it courage and willing suspension of disbelief. A child finds Tolkien’s hobbits as realistic as Judy Blume’s contemporary pre-teenagers, and Anne McCaffrey’s dragons as believable as social studies.
THE RISK OF LIFE
Aristotle teaches that that which is probable and impossible is better than that which is possible and improbable. But this probable-impossible is often fraught with risk. And risk implies the possibility of failure and death. I’m worried that we live in a climate where we are not allowed to fail and therefore we are encouraged to take fewer and fewer risks. For all human endeavor is set by risk, as the physicist Franz Kernig believes. Freedom risks its own abuse, thinking risks error, speech risks misunderstanding, faith risks failure, and hope risks despair. The risk of life is death, and man is man only by virtue of his risks of the future.
QUESTIONS WITH ANSWERS
I warn my students that when I get dogmatic about…weighty matters it is usually when I am most unsure of myself. “Any time I make a categorical statement, and I’m going to make lots of them during these sessions, we had all better beware.” I am learning to expect questions I cannot answer—that’s easy; I just say that I can’t answer them. What is far more difficult is questions I would rather not answer.
STRUCTURE PROVIDES FREEDOM
A year ago I taught a seminar in writing practices at the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea. One evening I walked in and announced, “Tonight we are going to talk about structure,” well aware that I was stirring up a hornet’s nest. One cannot talk about structure in literature without talking about it in all of life, and structure, that year, was out. But I wanted to show structure not as restrictive, pharisaic law but as the means of freedom.
We started out discussing the structure of some of the great novels and plays, and went on to structure in poetry, moving from the rhythmic structure of “free” verse to the incredible obedience to structure demanded in the sonnet. The sonnet, as I discovered during the writing of Wrinkle, is for me the perfect analogy of the structure which liberates….It is not a coincidence that some of the greatest poetry in the English language is in the form of the sonnet. The haiku is one of the most popular forms of poetry today: what could be more structured?
EXPERIMENTING WITH FORM
In The Other Side of the Sun, what I tried to do was to take the traditional Gothic novel form and give it theological depth. I did the same thing in Dragons in the Waters in trying to take the traditional murder mystery form and again give it theological depth.
It’s fun to experiment with forms. The sonnet is the strictest of all forms, and yet there’s nothing you cannot say within it. I have not been tempted to fall into some of the more popular best-selling forms because I couldn’t do it. Back during the decade where nothing I wrote was being published—I was getting nothing but rejection slips—one day I went to my typewriter and said, “Okay, I’ll write something just to sell.” And I finished writing it, and I put it in the fireplace.
THE SEDUCTIONS OF THIS WORLD
The seductions of this world, though they are felt and though they are always seductive, can be seen for what they are. For the writers, some of them are fairly obvious. Have I put in enough sex scenes to please the public? Have I paid enough lip service to Christ to please the church? Did I put in enough thought value for it to sell? Maybe I’d better take that out because the viewers might think it was too religious. What can I do to assure big sales? I’d better not include this because it might offend some group or other. But like the prophets, the true artist listens to the work, listens to God, not to that world which is ever teasing us with its dirty devices. And some of the dirty devices hit right at the most vulnerable point of the Christian artist. For example, that dirty device that tells us that stories aren’t true.
STORIES REVEAL THEIR CREATORS
Where you are in your own life, in your own thinking, is bound to be reflected in some way in what you are writing. I do not believe in the message novel. If you want to give a message, write an essay, preach a sermon.
When you tell a story, you tell a story, but underneath that story are the levels of your own interest which somehow get in. So if you are a shallow human being unwilling to open your doors and windows to new ideas, that will show in what you write. If you are willing to go out into the unknown, that too will show in what you write and will, perhaps, give your reader courage to be willing to go out into the unknown as well.
LET THE STORY LEAD
Story is seldom true if we try to control it, manipulate it, make it go where we want it to go, rather than where the story itself wants to go. I do not control my stories, and most of the writers with whom I have talked agree with me. We listen to the story, and must be willing to grow with it. But how do we know that the story is right?
We’ve lost much of the richness of that word kn
ow. Nowadays “to know” means to know with the intellect. But it has much deeper meaning than that. Adam knew Eve. To know deeply is far more than to know consciously. My husband knew me. Sometimes he knew me far better than I know myself. In the realm of faith I know far more than I can believe with my finite mind. I know that a loving God will not abandon what has been created. I know that the human calling is co-creation with this power of love. I know that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
LISTEN TO THE BOOK
Slowly, slowly, I am learning to listen to the book, in the same way I try to listen in prayer. If the book tells me to do something completely unexpected, I heed it; the book is usually right. If a book like this present one, a strange kind of book for a storyteller, pushes me to write it, I have no choice except to pay attention. All I can do, as far as activism is concerned, is to write daily, read as much as possible, and keep my vocabulary alive and changing so that I will have an instrument on which to play the book if it does me the honor of coming to me and asking to be written. I have never yet fully served a book. But it is my present joy to try.
Madeleine L'Engle Herself Page 10