The concrete reality of faithful fiction

My fiction career began with the happy collision of a canoe trip and a sermon series. I was in Florida, and a friend gave me a set of cassette tapes of Eugene Peterson’s sermons on the life of King David that became his book, Leap Over a Wall. As I listened, I was struck by how much David’s story has in common with the kind of fiction I have always loved, from The Hobbit to Robin Hood to Huckleberry Finn to True Grit. I had never paid attention to how “earthy” David’s story is, or what an outsized role the wilderness plays.

That same week, another friend took me canoeing on the Wekiwa River, outside Orlando. The alligators and turtles and wading birds, the palm trees and cypresses and Spanish moss tumbled around in my mind with the stories of David in his wild places, and a new story began to take shape. The next day I went to a bagel shop and outlined the story that would become The Wilderking Trilogy, which is being rereleased this summer in a new 20th-anniversary edition by Rabbit Room Press.

The great majority of my writing to that point had been in academic settings, which rewards writers for turning the concrete realities of the world into abstractions and theories. But fiction moves in the other direction, away from the abstract and theoretical toward the concrete, the sensory, the earthy.

I’ve found three writers especially helpful in articulating the relationship between imaginative worlds and our concrete world.

Mystery and Manners Flannery O’Connor

Truth in the particular

Flannery O’Connor’s short stories are themselves a master class in fiction writing. In the essays and speeches collected in Mystery and Manners, O’Connor explains much of what she is doing in her fiction. One of the things I love about O’Connor is that she took her craft seriously without taking herself seriously. “The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest,” she writes. “Fiction is about everything human and we are made of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty you shouldn’t try to write fiction.”

The writerly insights come so thick and fast in Mystery and Manners that it feels arbitrary to single any out. But a good entry point, perhaps, is O’Connor’s assertion that “the nature of fiction is determined largely by the nature of our perceptive apparatus”—i.e., the five senses. Whereas a persuasive essayist or a literary critic or a preacher has the option of skipping the world of the senses, handling ideas and arguments directly, a fiction writer has no such luxury. A fiction writer must present what readers would see, hear, feel, smell, or taste if they were in the scene, thereby activating a reader’s judgment. This is how fiction works because it is how human experience works.

O’Connor put it this way: The inexperienced writer “thinks that judgment exists in one place and sense-impression in another. But for the fiction writer, judgment begins in the details he sees and how he sees them.” Consider what happens when you see a father looking at his phone, oblivious to the child who is trying to get his attention. That scene comes to you through your senses (you see and possibly hear what is happening). No narrator tells you what to think or feel. But within nanoseconds that sensory information is transformed into feelings, judgments, and opinions about the man with the phone.

Fiction works this way—sensory experience creating emotional, moral, and intellectual experience—because “real life” works this way.

The Supper of the Lamb Robert Farrar Capon

Joy of the senses

Robert Farrar Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb is a cookbook; it has real recipes. But more importantly, it’s a theology of food and feasting and, by extension, a theology of the material, sensory world in which we find ourselves. The world exists, Capon reminds us, because God wants it to exist and because God takes pleasure in it. No small part of our role here on earth is to enjoy the things God created for His own enjoyment and ours. This world, for all its troubles, “is a gorgeous old place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries, and it has enough textures, tastes, and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have.”

We often associate writing with introspection. Indeed, most writers of my acquaintance don’t need to be reminded to look inside. We need to be reminded to look out on a world that is full of marvels. I often tell my students a writer’s first task is to pay attention, then to give an account of the things that astonish and delight us.

Telling the Truth Frederick Beuchner

The gospel as comedy

In Telling the Truth, Frederick Buechner makes the case that the gospel can be told (and told faithfully) according to the conventions of tragedy, of comedy, and of fairy tales. Because my novels are all comic in structure and tone, I have found Beuchner’s discussion of the gospel as comedy to be especially helpful.

In tragedies, things fall apart. In comedies, things that have fallen apart are brought back together. Shakespeare’s tragedies all end in deaths or funerals. His comedies all end in feasts, dances, or weddings. The tragic is inevitable; everybody’s earthly life ends in a death and a funeral. But the gospel reminds us that death doesn’t get the last word. Human history ends not with a funeral, but with a wedding feast. Given what we can see with our eyes, we’d have to be fools to believe that we are heading toward a happy ending. But the Apostle Paul was way ahead of us: “The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom.”

Buechner writes, “Blessed is he who sees that, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, [Jesus] is who he says he is and does what he says he does if they will only, at admittedly great cost to their pride, their common sense, their sad vision of what is and is not possible in this stormy world, let him do it. Blessed is he, in other words, who gets the joke.”

Fiction, like a joke, relies on surprise—on the ending that we couldn’t see coming, but that makes perfect sense once it comes. We are all predisposed to resonate with that sort of story because, as it turns out, that is the story of the world.

—Jonathan Rogers is the author of both fiction and nonfiction; when not writing, he shepherds the stories of others as the host of The Habit Membership for writers at TheHabit.co