Veronica Roth posted the other day about having a thin skin and in the course of the post she dissed The Man in the Iron Mask. I have no idea why she didn’t like that movie—she didn’t elaborate. She’s still one of my favorite authors, but I have to disagree with her assessment of The Man in the Iron Mask. I don’t think it is a ridiculous movie at all.

Thinking about why I loved the movie, I came up with this: I like stories about people who are wrongly accused/punished/abused and where they gain back their fortunes in the end.

Cinderella, Conor Broekhart, Sara Crewe, Oliver Twist, Wee Sir Gibbie Galbraith, Edmond Dantès, Jane Eyre, Cado (Grady) Turtlebane, Anne Shirley…all of these characters have lost something through no fault of their own.

Their situations appeal to me because of my worldview. We are born into a state of sin and misery because Adam ate the forbidden fruit and then, sinful, he begat offspring after his kind. We are born sinners. We lost the garden of Eden through no fault of our own. We are born in the debtors’ prison like Little Dorrit, and now we wallow around there, dressed in rags and stinking of sin and not fully understanding that God never intended for us to live in such dismal conditions.

We are in terrible shape. We have a powerful enemy who wants to keep us poor and blind and hungry and ignorant. We were made to rule, to live in palaces, but we are bound in dank cells, with the image of royalty marred beyond recognition so that we might as well be wearing iron masks. We are royalty fallen into a pit and needing someone to rescue us and clean us up and restore our fortunes to us.

Jesus does this for us. He gives us the form he originally meant us to have. We are holy in Christ. Whereas we have lived since birth at enmity with God, in Christ we are now reconciled with our loving Father. And this is what I see in the stories I love. Cinderella, who lost a loving father and suffered cruelly under her abusive stepmother, is pursued and cherished by a man who is worth a hundred times what her stepmother is worth. She is loved by the prince. Sara and Gibbie get their fortunes, Oliver and Anne and Cado find their loving families, Conor and Edmond get freedom. They are all returned to the place for which they were created, and all is well in the world.

What great stories.

For my last day on the CSFF blog tour for Faery Rebels: Spell Hunter, by RJ Anderson, I would like to look at the way she wove her weltanschauung into her book without preaching.

Here is the brilliance of this novel: Anyone can read it and not be offended by the author’s personal beliefs. You will read it with your own pair of worldview glasses on and you will take from it what you want. But the author has not failed in putting in wonderful pictures that will encourage the reader to ponder deep things as they read. She gives the reader the opportunity to think about God and sin and cults and sacrificial love in this book, and, yes, even about Jesus. And yet, I’m happy to report that there is no preaching in the book.

Why is that a good thing? Some Christians may think the book falls short because it doesn’t preach. If books don’t preach loudly, how can we guarantee that the readers will understand the message?

Well, Jesus didn’t always preach the gospel in the stories he told. He spoke in parables and those that had ears heard the deeper meaning and acted on what they heard. Those that didn’t have ears sometimes heard the meaning and got angry and others didn’t even hear the message at all. I don’t think preaching is required or desired in novels.

Message is good. Sure. So whether you are Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or Pagan…whatever, you should weave your worldview into you novel. Your beliefs about the big issues is what gives your novel depth and makes it worth reading. But when you weave in your worldview, you should do it in a way that makes it fresh. Don’t give us the same old tired clichés that make us feel preached at. If we’ve heard the story before and rejected it, your beating us over the head with it is not going to make us suddenly agree with you. Anyone see Avatar? Preachy movie full of clichés. No, it didn’t convert me.

OK that’s my writing tip for the week.

Now, if you want to see what pictures I, as a Christian reader, saw in Faery Rebels, read on. I saw a story I love, painted in new colors, and that’s what added so much depth to this enjoyable faery action/adventure/romance. (In fact I can’t believe this is being marketed as a middle-grade novel. Yikes. This is one for mothers and daughters to share. This is one that even the men are liking, though they were not pleased with the cover.

SPOILERS! IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE BOOK, DON’T READ BEYOND THIS POINT.

I MEAN IT!

I’M NOT KIDDING!

LAST CHANCE TO STOP!!!!

OK, for the rest of you, if you want to read the post, highlight the space below and the words will magically appear, because I have special faery dust. (I’m sorry. I just love to do cheesy stuff like this. I guess I really am a drama queen at heart.)

So here we go.

Ms. Anderson gives us a fallen race. The faeries have lost their magical powers. They are not what the Gardener created them to be. We aren’t sure at this point why they’ve fallen. We are not given a thinly veiled sermon on the federal headship of Adam. But when the author gives us a fallen race she adds depth to her book. We can recognize ourselves in the faeries. This is a fresh way of showing the human condition—fallen short of what God made us to be.

There are pictures of the weak shaming the strong–the Gardener uses Knife, not the Queen, to save the sick librarian. The queen isn’t necessarily evil–she does the wrong things for the right reasons. But she can’t save the hive. The faeries must be saved by a child who sees that their world has changed, has left the old paths, has struck off in a different direction and has cut itself off from the world. I wonder if at the end of the series, Knife will be seen as a John the Baptist figure. I doubt, seriously if the author painted her this way. But I still wonder if she will end up being a kind of forerunner of whoever is coming to save the faery folk.

The author then puts in a bit about how the creativity of the faeries has dwindled because they’ve cut themselves off from the outside world.

I suppose emergent church people could read that and think the author is saying that the church is outdated and irrelevant and we need to evolve and get rid of our Victorian understanding of scripture.

Is she encouraging the church to go whoring after the world? Is she one of THOSE kinds of Christians?

I read with my worldview glasses on and I think the author is saying, “If artists stay in their own little cloister, they will lose all their creativity. Creativity must be fed by new ideas that lead to personal growth, by truth, by knowledge. There’s a great big world out there, and artists (and Christians) need to go out and learn from it. They need to take the best of it and make it their own and give it back as something pure and holy. If you stay inside and only look at art that comes from people just like you, your creativity will die. You will become a little, bigoted, arrogant person with no room for truth offered by others who happen to be  created by the same Gardener you were created by.”

This is not to say that there are many roads to heaven. It is to say that there are cults in the world that cut themselves off from all others in a way the Bible does not command. Jesus left us IN the world and never gave us permission to hide from it. We are not to be monks in monasteries. That is nowhere taught  in the Bible.

Then there is a picture of a disabled human boy (which I loved since I was married to a quadriplegic for twenty years—the author nailed the depression of a fresh injury and the joy of discovering you can still be a whole person even though your body is paralyzed, I think. What a good job she did with that!)…anyway, back to the boy—he’s weak and he ends up being the Christ-figure in the book, I think.

The thing about Christ figures is they aren’t Christ. They need saving as much as anyone. Moses was a figure of Christ but he was a sinful man.

In the same way, this novel is full of pictures of Christ. So on page 318 Paul is the Christ figure and Knife is the person making the decision to follow him and to have no home but him. She has to give up her old self and become a new creature. She has to be conformed to his image. All of this is rich, rich, rich with meaning if you are a Christian and totally nonthreatening if you aren’t. It’s the best way to write, I think.

On that same page, Knife says, “I used to think I knew what freedom was. To do whatever I pleased, go wherever I chose, and not have to depend on anyone, But now… I know this won’t be easy. But I still want to do it.” That is a wonderful picture of a Christian counting the cost of being a disciple of Christ.

This is not straight theology. You cannot read fiction and hope to find absolute truth. But the pictures deepen the fiction and call to the reader to ponder these things. That’s what good fiction does.

And then on page 322, Knife is conformed to Paul’s likeness. She is naked and he covers her. And to do so, cost him a great price. He had to give up his wholeness, his healing, and suffer for her. Very Christlike, I think.

Finally he takes her home to his parents, dressed in his clothes.

No, Paul is not Jesus Christ. He doesn’t become a faery and die on a little faery cross to pay for their sins against the Gardener. But he is a Christ figure. There are pictures in his story that powerfully point to Jesus Christ.

And that’s what makes for great fiction. Putting your message in without making it so obvious that people groan because they already know the story. Again, Avatar is an example of bad fiction, and Feary Rebels is an example of good fiction.

Go and do likewise my writing pals.

A few posts that also dealt with the messages in the book:

• Becky Miller
• John Otte
• Fred Warren
• Amanda Barr

We’re in the third day of the KidzBookBuzz.com tour for Sand to Stone and Back Again, and I’ve been trying to tie my posts in on the third day with my Wednesday Writers thingy.

So what did I learn from this book that I can apply to my own writing?

Well, several things, but the one I want to highlight today is this: Yesterday when I was digging around Mr. Kuyper’s site and looking at all the lovely pictures, I clicked on on this page and saw that Kuyper manipulates his prints on the computer. I’m not a photographer or an artist so I’m not sure if I’m saying that right. But he explains on his site that he tries to restore to the prints the emotion and the power of the scene he originally shot. He’s an artist, and true artists capture and expose truth. But sometimes they do that by making stuff up, or manipulating facts. Or maybe by obeying what Jesus Christ called the spirit of the law (as opposed to the letter of the law).

I used to live on a lake in Alaska. I’d stand on my deck and click pictures of the lake in front of my house, with birch trees all around it and wild mountains behind it, and the pictures, once developed,  looked nothing like reality. The mountains in the pictures were flat, small, pedestrian things. They elicited no feelings of majesty, of wild, brutal power, or of the passion that the real mountains poured into me. So I am glad that Kuyper understands how to put back into his pictures the beauty and the personality that the camera strips from them 

I suspect that even as the camera strips truth from nature, so does the bustle of our world strip meaning from life. Novelists have an opportunity to encourage people to stop and listen and learn.

Our novels can’t be thinly disguised sermons, though. They should be parables. They should show the truth of the human condition, the truth about pain and love and joy and eternity. We should inject into our novels our worldview, sure. That’s what makes them uniquely ours. That’s what gives them voice and personality and makes them interesting. But the truth we project into our novels is hardly ever the harsh reality people see every day.

I once critiqued a novel in which the writer painted a brutal homosexual rape in excruciating detail. It was devastating and ugly, but worse than that, it was so brutal that it lost all power to move me emotionally. I shut down. I couldn’t look, I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t connect.

I suggested that the scene would have been more powerful if she had shown the big boys moving in for the kill, and then cut-away, perhaps to focus on the flower crushed under the heel of one of the attackers, so as to allow the little boy to have some privacy and dignity, and then moved back in to show him lying in a wilted, little heap on the ground after the act was done.

Because what we are looking for is to elicit emotion so people will grow. People rarely grow when you bash them over the head with ugliness. They close their eyes.

On the other hand, the truth we put into our novels can’t be a picture of the wonderful eternity where every tear is wiped away that some of us look forward to. Our readers don’t live in heaven and we can’t paint heaven on earth and expect anyone to care about what we say. Readers are living in the land of brutal rapes. We can’t lie and pretend that stuff doesn’t happen.

People are not moved and they don’t grow when novelists preach at them. So we often hear, “Show, don’t tell,” and this is good. Telling is preaching. Showing is allowing a reader to draw his own conclusions. But I think we need to remember, as we show, that we want to not show life exactly as it appears to the lazy, busy reader as he rushes through his day. We want to show the underlying truth that we see in life, not the day to day dirt or the future glory. We want to show the true human condition and sometimes that means we speed life up for our characters or slow it down. Sometimes we focus on a minute detail and sometimes we flip open a curtain to give the reader a glimpse of the big picture.

You’re the artist. You need to play with the light in order to bring some things forward and push some things backward so that the reader will focus where you want him to focus and so see life as it really is and not as it is on the surface, which is all most of us usually see.

I’ve been mapping out a new novel and having the mostest fun.

I really learned a lot from reading The Year the Swallows Came Early. I read that book a couple of times and the thing that struck me about it was how there was one unifying theme–things aren’t what they appear to be on the outside–and that theme played out in different ways and in different people throughout the book.

The father wasn’t as good as he seemed. The mother wasn’t as bad as she seemed. And on and on it went with all the characters.

But on top of that the author, Kathryn Fitzmaurice, also made several of the characters deal with the same thing. It wasn’t just Groovy who came to realize that things weren’t what they seemed. The mother came to see that the horoscope wasn’t the truth it seemed to be at first. The father realized that “get rich quick” schemes weren’t the relief from trouble they originally seemed to be.

If you haven’t read the book and you want to study a book in which all the parts work together to serve the whole, you should definitely buy The Year the Swallows Came Early.

So, as I map out my new book, I’m trying to keep these things in mind. I want to have my main character learn something–shirking responsibility does not bring happiness, rather, accepting our God-given responsibility brings peace and contentment.

So I’d like several other characters to deal with this same thing. A child can learn to take responsibility for a pet, perhaps. Maybe, the hero can take responsibility for something his sister is trying to shield him from.

I don’t think we have to load every character down with the same shortcomings. But I do think if we deal with the same problem in various degrees in different characters we can make the books richer.

We love children. That’s why we want to write for them. Unfortunately, that’s also part of the reason so many of us start off by cranking out preachy stories–we want to help our young readers. We want to share our wisdom with them.

But if the story is nothing but a poorly disguised lesson, the reader will discard it as easily as he shucks his wool hat on a warm spring day. And rightly so. Spring days and children’s books must be enjoyed—never endured.

Does this mean we need to stick with silly stories and leave the lessons to the school teachers? Not at all. Children learn from the characters they encounter in books. They learn to laugh, and to love, and to suffer loss. They learn what it means to be noble, and what it means to be stingy.

Readers Grow With the Characters They Love

In Katherine Paterson’s, Bridge to Terabithia, Jess learns to love his sister, he learns that people die, and he learns that it’s OK to be different. Jess learns those things.

He learns them as he walks through life, and the readers are invited to come alongside and wrestle with these issues for themselves. None of the adults in the story say, “Jess, it’s OK to dream wild dreams and to be happy with who you are.”

And yet, Katherine Paterson gets that point across clearly.

Children want to learn. They love to stoop down to inspect minute details. They constantly poke and prod life, trying to understand what it all means. So feel free to give them books full of meaning and message. Give them more than sunshiny stories. Give them shadows and showers and winds.

Just let the reader figure it out the lessons on his own.

You take a character and put him in conflict. Then you let your readers observe as the character tries different ways of reconciling things. You let the readers watch your character grow.

That’s all.

You don’t ever have to sum up the moral of the story. Trust your readers. Give them conflict and they’ll figure out who to root for. No one ever thinks The Joker is the good guy.