Serioulsly! I'm Not Kidding!

Let’s see. I have reported on a couple books I have read during the spring/summer of 2021. Hare are a couple more. They are “how to” books by James Scott Bell. Their subject? Writing.  

How to Write Dazzling Dialogue, (2014)

Writing Unforgettable Characters, (2020)

One of my reasons for choosing these is, simply, I like stories. In fact, I like to create stories. That’s why I have, for several years, continued to develop a story which I first told to my oldest son when he still sat on my lap to visit before bedtime. I have thought about writing it for publication, but whenever I play with the idea the joy goes out of the project. Time has persuaded me, therefore, that this particular story has become a hobby in which I try my hand at what I read about writing. The title of the potential five-volume set has changed from “The Little Boy and a Houseboat, to The Mountain’s Revenge. The plot has shifted from a simple collection of dramatic episodes designed to amuse my youngster, to a double-plot with a message about at-risk kids.

So that’s one reason for reading books about writing. Another, and, in fact, the primary reason, is my understanding that I live in and am part of an unfolding story. The more I read about writing, the more fascinating I find the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures in their authoritative presentation of both the backstory to and the plot-line of the world in which we live. The difference between God’s mega-narrative and our mini-narratives lies in the mystery of how God is unfolding the story using authentic, morally accountable characters to develop their own intertwined autobiographies and, yet, to do so in such a way that it is His sovereign epic.

Presently I am enjoying a third book by Bell:  27 Fiction Writing Blunders – and How Not to Make Them, (2015). Just last night I came across this counsel on writing: “Don’t write to impress your readers. Write to distress your characters.” His point is that the attention of a reader is maintained not by clever vocabulary and syntax, but by tension in the lives of the characters in the story-line. It is an irony that we, who do not like tension in our own lives, grow bored quickly if a novel spends too much time in the green pastures and beside the still waters.

I am personally of a mind that too many believers in Christ have not cultivated an appreciation of the role of tension in the narratives of Scripture. Consequently, they do not know the Narrative as a whole and its relationship to the tensions of their own lives in the ongoing living Epic about the King and His Bride.