I love to tell the story

Christian writers have every reason to be confused about what they’re supposed to be doing in today’s world. Should they write for an audience that accepts their faith, or should they try to venture out into the broader world of popular entertainment?

Over the years, Christians (especially evangelical Protestants) have tended to be message-centered. The sermon has been our primary medium, and we’ve had an uneasy relationship with ventures that involved entertainment rather than doctrine. We’ve tended to view storytelling as a secular vocation and not necessarily a good business for Christians.

That’s unfortunate, because storytelling satisfies a deep human need that is not always accessible to doctrine alone. Author Nancy Pearcey has pointed out that ideas penetrate our minds most deeply when communicated through the imaginative language of image, story, and symbol.

When Christians venture into the story business, they often find it hard to resist the urge to make a story to do the work of a sermon. But there are problems with that. First, we live in a post-Christian age, and a large number of Americans have become sermon-deaf. If they suspect that an author is using his story as a pulpit, they will avoid it like a dead skunk in the road.

Second, efforts to evangelize in the story medium often produce something that is neither fish nor fowl: not quite a good story and not quite a good sermon. Storytelling is an art form and an entertainment medium. Even authors who write strictly for a Christian audience should give their readers a good story.

C.S. Lewis was one of the great apologists of the 20th century, but also a very successful novelist, and he gave a great deal of thought to the role of both disciplines. In his Chronicles of Narnia stories, he was not teaching doctrine but rather trying to reveal the “grand narrative” of the Christian faith—the story that leads to a deeper story.

When we concentrate too hard on the message, we neglect the medium. But if we understand what the story medium can do, and develop the skills to use it wisely, we might be surprised how much of the “grand narrative” it can reveal. Let me draw some examples from my own experience with the Hank the Cowdog series of books.

The series began in 1982 as a self-publishing venture in our garage in Perryton, Texas. My original audience consisted of ordinary people in little farm and ranch communities in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and New Mexico. Most of them were members of a church, yet neither they nor I thought of the Hank books as Christian literature. They were just funny stories.

(Editor’s note: Starting next Friday, Dec. 18, as a Christmas present to WORLD members from John R. Erickson, we will publish online a chapter a day from a previously unpublished Hank the Cowdog book: The Case of the Homeless Pooch.)

As the circle of Hank readers grew and expanded, parents and teachers began to suspect that there was something Christian about them, yet a large part of the audience continued to see them only as entertainment. The Christian-ness in the books was very quiet, woven into the fabric of the stories and almost invisible unless you were looking for it. I suggest that we can find it in the medium:

Structure

The moral content of a story is delivered through the actions of the characters, but also through story structure. The conflict in a story should resolve like the chords in a song. In music, we refer to it as “harmony,” the mathematical relationships involving sound waves. At the end of a story, we should know that the action occurred in a moral universe, and it should produce something similar to musical harmony, making us aware of beauty, wholeness, meaning, and justice.

The presence of justice is especially important in storytelling, because it affirms the presence of moral order. In the small, framed-off world of the story, the characters should get what they deserve. When the chords of a story resolve, that is a message. It’s delivered in a whisper, not with loudspeakers, and it points to the source of physical, spiritual, and moral order: the God who designed it.

The first sentence of the Bible lays out a pattern for art and literature: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The story of mankind didn’t happen by accident. It didn’t evolve out of pond scum. God created order out of chaos, giving us the breathtaking design we see in a snowflake, in a galaxy, in the eyes of a child.

On a tiny scale, art tries to imitate the majesty of God’s creation. Former WORLD Magazine culture editor Gene Edward Veith has pointed out that form is a distinguishing characteristic of good art. In the hands of a great artist, form is intimately related to meaning. Bach and Handel expressed it through structured sounds, Rembrandt through structured lines and colors.

A video camera running 24 hours a day gives us nothing but raw, unstructured data. We might compare it to a block of marble sitting in a sculptor’s studio. The artist seeks the invisible form inside the block of stone.

Francis Schaeffer recognized that structured art delivers a powerful Christian message. He pointed out that Bach’s music had resolution because, as a Christian, he believed there would be resolution for each individual life and for history.

A good story—even one that doesn’t appear to be Christian—can deliver that message through its structure, and it’s a message that human beings need and crave. The audience doesn’t have to know the source of our artistic vision. If we give them stories that nourish the spirit, at some point maybe they will ask where it came from, and we can tell them.

Honesty

God teaches that it matters whether we are liars or bearers of truth. As an author, I think it’s important that my artistic medium conveys a message of honesty and truth. Honesty and truth are characteristics of good art.

The honesty I’m talking about occurs in the medium—in the setting of the stories and in the characters. I have gone to a lot of trouble to present Hank’s world in an honest manner and to maintain creative control over the content. The setting for the stories is a family ranch in the Texas Panhandle, and the characters include a husband and wife, a hired hand, children, dogs, cats, cattle, horses, coyotes, raccoons, and buzzards. It also includes the forces of nature: blizzards, tornadoes, drought, and the ever-present wind.

I know every detail of this little world because I’ve lived it and observed it firsthand. Some authors who write about animals don’t go to that much trouble. Maybe they think it doesn’t matter, since most animal stories are directed toward children. These writers do their research in a library or on the internet.

For them, an animal might be just a concept, a vehicle for giving expression to an idea. “Wouldn’t it be neat to write a story about a rabbit who visits a Texas ranch and makes friends with a dog? The story will teach kids the importance of diversity.”

The dogs on my ranch would love to be part of that story. While the bunny was explaining his views on diversity, they would give a dog’s honest response. They would eat him. What they didn’t eat, they would drag up on the porch and leave as a gift for my wife.

Does it matter that people who write about animals know something about animals? I think it a matters a great deal because in this postmodern age dishonesty about animals is often a symptom of confusion about who we are and where we came from.

When I watch movies about animals, I’m often struck by the thought that these stories were written by people who don’t know where they came from, and don’t know much about animals either. Their human characters are the bad guys, the ones who eat burgers and pollute the earth, while the abstract, concept-animals possess all the innocence and goodness we humans so obviously lack.

It’s as though the author recognizes that humans are sinful beings but doesn’t know what to do about it. It’s a message without hope because, in spite of all our cleverness, we don’t have the option of becoming puppies or bunnies.

C.S. Lewis observed that mankind needs relief from “the long and terrible story” of trying to find something other than God that will make us happy. We won’t find it in dishonest stories that use concept-animals to peddle a political or sociological agenda.

Humor

Speaking of C.S. Lewis, it was he who pointed out that nowhere in the New Testament are we told that Jesus laughed. That is not particularly good news to an author who writes humorous stories.

It gets worse. The concordance in my Bible shows about three times as many entries for “sorrow” as it does for “laughter,” and then we find this amazing statement in Ecclesiastes 7:3. It says: “Sorrow is better than laughter, because a sad face is good for the heart.”

It actually says that, and I checked several translations to be sure. You could certainly get the impression that Christians are a rather sour group of people, and there is no denying that we haven’t set the world ablaze with our humor.

Yet humor is a universal emotion, and God must have given it to us for a reason. Scientific studies have demonstrated that it takes two or three times more energy to frown than to smile, and other studies document that laughter contributes to good physical and mental health. It has to do with brain chemistry.

Laughter is good for the body and good for the soul. Proverbs 17:22 tells us, “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” Laughter helps to redeem us from the effects of fear, depression, and monotony, and from the sin of pride—taking ourselves too seriously.

Apparently, we were hard-wired to find the humor in our experience, and to laugh about it. Human beings who speak different languages and live on different continents respond to the same events with laughter. One of the things we laugh about is the behavior of our dogs.

Mankind’s long and loving relationship with dogs shouts the wonder of God’s creation. We and our dogs are so perfectly matched! Only the Maker of galaxies would have thought to give us such a marvelous gift as a dog, and the laughter they bring into our lives.

They love us when we’re unlovable. They’re always glad to see us when we come home. They forgive us for being fallible, fallen creatures. They entertain us with their weird compulsions. They are such fools … but so are we. In the Hank stories, we see both sides, the foolishness of dogs and the foolishness of people, and it’s funny.

But what do we say about that verse in Ecclesiastes? “Sorrow is better than laughter, because a sad face is good for the heart.” My layman’s interpretation is that old Solomon was having a bad day when he wrote that, but 11 verses later, in Ecclesiastes 7:14, he had lightened up enough to say, “When times are good, be happy.”

That sounds better. Maybe, somewhere between verse 3 and verse 14, his grandchildren brought home a dog. It jumped up into his lap and licked his face … and he laughed.

When we’re happy, we laugh. We can’t help it. God made us that way, and we should be doing more of it, not less.

Stories can function as parables

The defining characteristic of a parable is that it presents more than one level of meaning. It can be just an entertaining story or it can deliver a quiet lesson.

The parable of the Prodigal Son can be a nice little tale about a father who welcomes his wayward son back home, or it can bite harder and prod us into asking deeper questions about forgiveness. “What! You mean … I’m supposed to forgive my own brother who has behaved like a jerk for the past 20 years?”

The Hank stories sometimes operate on two levels of meaning. It wasn’t something I set out to do, and I suspect that when we try to write a parable instead of a story, it comes across as pushy and contrived. Readers feel they’re being manipulated. But if a story is honest and well-crafted, sometimes it becomes a parable on its own.

Hank struggles against fear, food lust, self-pity, envy, greed, dishonesty, confusion, and laziness. In one of the books he laments, “No one but a dog understands how hard it is to be a good dog.” He barks all night. He wants to eat Sally May’s chickens. He digs up her garden. He carries on an endless war with the cat. He is even drawn toward addictive behavior: He can’t resist chewing objects made of plastic.

When he makes a foolish decision, we laugh and think, “That’s exactly the way my dog behaves.”

An hour later, we might say, “That’s exactly the way my children behave.” Two hours later, we might say, “It kind of reminds me of … me.”

And around bedtime, we might say, “Hey, that’s what Paul was talking about in Romans 7:15: ‘What I want to do, I do not, but what I hate, I do all the time!’”

One of the nice things about a parable is that the listener has the option of hearing the lesson or not. In a secular age, that opens a lot of doors.

Stories can bring families together

The Hank stories are usually regarded as children’s literature, but I never intended them to be for children. They were always meant for a three-generation family to read aloud.

When I was growing up, our entertainment was not divided up into marketing categories: adults, teenagers, children, the elderly, males, females, Republicans, Democrats, urban, and rural. We all listened to the same radio programs and attended the same movies. At Christmastime, my father read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol aloud for the entire family, and at breakfast we took turns reading from the King James Bible.

Today, in our churches, we hear sermons about the importance of family, but what happens when the service is over? If every member of the family goes off to his own corner of the house to send text messages and check Facebook, we cease being a family. We become a community of isolated individuals, each communicating with people who are somewhere else.

Reading aloud as a family can be a form of worship. Without any preaching, it affirms the family as the unit God ordained for men and women, and for the raising and teaching of children. We can strengthen our families by sharing stories—not talking about it, but doing it.

Now, let’s return to the question we asked at the beginning: What kind of books should Christians write?

The ever-quotable C.S. Lewis gave a simple answer. He said that we don’t need more Christian books. We need more books written by Christians. In other words, we should write great stories, then figure out where and how they fit into the marketplace. If they don’t fit the needs of established publishers, secular or Christian, we might have to find another way of doing business. We might have to start our own publishing companies and make our own movies.

That was the approach I used with the Hank stories, self-publishing, and it has been the approach followed by the Kendrick brothers in making their movies Facing the Giants, Fireproof, and Courageous. Both they and I started small, raised our own money, and created an audience from scratch. It was hard work and it was slow, but it has allowed us to tell the stories we wanted to tell.

We have controlled the message by controlling the medium. It’s a model that bright, talented Christian writers should study and consider, because the people who put up the money usually define the worldview.

The Kendrick brothers have delivered good stories in their films, but they’ve also done some preaching. They’re able to do both because they are very talented writers and directors, but also because they’re paying the bills. If Disney or Nickelodeon had bankrolled Fireproof, it would have been a very different movie.

We must stop allowing other people to tell our stories, and we must produce stories that are beautiful, honest, and entertaining. Great stories make us laugh or cry. They find order and justice in human experience. They nourish the spirit and make us better than we were before. They strengthen the bonds of family and make us aware of the majesty of God’s creation.

That is what great art used to do. That is what art should still be doing.