September 4, 2014 4 Comments

What Being a Catholic Writer Doesn’t Mean For Me (And Shouldn’t For You)

The phrase has become slippery.

“Catholic writer.”

What does it mean?

For some the phrase plays like a favorite old song, an evocation of the glory days of Greene, Waugh, Percy, O’Connor, et alia. Days long gone and sorely missed.

For others “Catholic writer” may spell an oxymoron, or at least refer to the kind of writer one would not like to meet at a Manhattan cocktail party.

Even for some Catholics the phrase increasingly tends to serve as a signal that some exceptionally maudlin fiction is quivering like a bad cheese on the horizon.

But even looking at the thing dispassionately, it’s not exactly clear what is being described when one uses the phrase “Catholic writer.” Does it refer to

[a] someone who writes stories set in a Catholic environment featuring (mainly) Catholic characters?

[b] someone interested in giving his or her audience what Flannery O’Connor called “instant uplift”?

[c] a writer whose religious affiliation happens to be Catholic?

Of the above options, I would argue that only [c] is a good answer to the question of what “Catholic writer” means. A Catholic writer need not write stories set in a Catholic environment featuring (mainly) Catholic characters (O’Connor almost never did, Waugh didn’t for the first half of his career, Greene only sometimes–and with dubious theology, Percy wrote some Catholic characters but never put them in a Catholic environment).

And a Catholic writer should not be interested in “instant uplift.” Our remit is not to conjure warm, comfortable feelings but to tell the truth in a beautiful (not necessarily “pretty”) way.

But I think we can say something more about what it means to be a Catholic writer. A Catholic writer is a writer who sees the world from the point of view of Catholic theology and, whether or not Catholics or Catholic things ever appear in his or her work, endeavors to tell the truth about the human condition from the point of view of that theology.

Such a broad charge can take a Catholic writer into some strange and unsettling territory, territory held largely by the devil, as O’Connor warned. If the Catholic writer is going to write stories about the times we live in, then he had better gird his loins and get ready to depict the devil’s territory in a convincing way. In light of that fact, this admonition by Barbara Nicolosi, “Why Good People Do Media Wrong,” is worth reflecting upon. Allow me also to recommend my essay, which includes some input from Barbara Nicolosi, “What Are The Limits to Depictions of Sin in the Arts?”

But the Catholic writer is certainly not obliged to take on the modern world mano a mano. In Kristin Lavransdatter Sigrid Undset took us to medieval (Catholic) Scandinavia. Tolkien took us to Middle Earth. Shusaku Endo took us to 17th-century Japan.

In fact, the choice of setting and characters–whether they are Catholic or not, contemporary or not, realistic or fantastic–is not the most important choice for the Catholic writer.

The most important choice is the commitment to excellence in the writer’s craft. That is what really makes a Catholic writer a Catholic writer. Sure, it would be great to change the world for Christ. But the first duty of the Catholic writer as writer is to create a masterful work of art. As Patrick Coffin argued recently in reference to cinema, that commitment to excellence is what is missing in so many artistic efforts by Catholics and other Christians.

I expand a bit more on this last theme in two other pieces:

“A Catholic Moment in the Arts?”

“Let’s Renovate the Catholic Literary Tradition”

Catholic and other writers, I’d be interested to hear what you think of these thoughts.

Filed Under: The Catholic Tradition of the Arts, Uncategorized, Writing in an Apocalyptic Time Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
June 5, 2014 Leave a Comment

The Art of Focus for Your Writing

Tell yourself no email, no social networking, indeed no digital stimulation whatsoever (except perhaps for some music) for several hours while you concentrate on your work, and notice how your mind relaxes. The daily dog-paddle we do against the current of the digital sea is exhausting–and not nearly as stimulating as our habitually fractured consciousness wishes it to be.

In an article this week in the New York Times, “The Art of Focus,” David Brooks talks about an interview with child psychologist Adam Phillips that appeared in The Paris Review. From Phillips’s work with children Brooks gleans a principle to help combat digital distraction more effectively:

“The lesson from childhood, then, is that if you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say “no” to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say “yes” to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.”

The point is not not to say “no” to the trivial distractions. Regular digital fasts are necessary for the good of the soul. But in order to make that “no” easier to say we need to focus even more on the “yes” of the passion that brings us to our writing in the first place. That can be done in myriad ways. By re-reading something from a favorite author, or undertaking a long free-writing exercise to get back into the groove of composition. For me, a sustained period utterly focused on writing is enough to remind me of that writing is play and more interesting than anything on Facebook or a Twitter stream.

Brooks quotes Phillips as saying something else very interesting, that in order to pursue their intellectual adventures, children need a secure social base. Observes Phillips:

“There’s something deeply important about the early experience of being in the presence of somebody without being impinged upon by their demands, and without them needing you to make a demand on them. And that this creates a space internally into which one can be absorbed. In order to be absorbed one has to feel sufficiently safe, as though there is some shield, or somebody guarding you against dangers such that you can ‘forget yourself’ and absorb yourself, in a book, say.”

The loving parent is the best guardian of the absorbing play of the child. There is a spiritual analogue here, I believe, for the writer.

Filed Under: On Being a Writer Tagged: , , , , , ,
May 24, 2014 Leave a Comment

The Hippocratic Oath of Authors: Item One

“It is my first aim always to give pleasure.” –Muriel Spark

It is the number one item in the Hippocratic Oath of fiction writers.

And it’s so easy to forget. Absorbed in questions about plot, character, scene construction (all vitally important, of course), we tend to neglect the person climbing into bed at the end of the day hoping to be swept away by a story. That person’s pleasure, first and foremost, is the aim.

To please, that is, not impress.

The following observation by T.S. Eliot in his essay, “Wilkie Collins and Dickens,” is to the point:

“You cannot define Drama and Melodrama so that they shall be reciprocally exclusive; great drama has something melodramatic in it, and the best melodrama partakes of the greatness of drama….It is possible that the artist can be too conscious of his “art.”…. We cannot afford to forget that the first–and not one of the least difficult–requirements of either prose or verse is that it should be interesting.”

From the very first sentence, the whole point is to grab the reader’s attention with something a little sensational, heightened, wondrous.

All art is entertainment.

Filed Under: The Craft of Fiction Tagged: , , , , , , ,
May 14, 2014 Leave a Comment

The Dramatic Unities

In his Poetics Aristotle sets down rough principles in regard to unity of action and time. He remarks that the plot of tragedy concerns, in a real sense, a single action, and that it “tries especially to be bound by one circuit of the sun or to vary little from this.” He doesn’t explicitly mention any stricture in regard to unity of place, though the stricture on time might be taken to imply one. In the neoclassical movement of the 16th and 17th centuries, in the drama of Molière and Racine, Aristotle’s rough principles of dramatic unity calcified into hard-and-fast rules. But even taking Aristotle’s remarks about dramatic unity of place and time as principles, not rules, is there any reason for the dramatist to be bound by them?

I worried especially about the unity of place as I composed my play, The Actor, which depicts the life of the young Karol Wojtyła from the years 1939 to 1942. There is a certain unity of place in the play in that all the scenes take place in Nazi-occupied Kraków, but the scenes themselves move from the university to the Wojtyła apartment to a quarry to a cemetery, etc. At very least I had made the jobs of a future director and set designer more challenging. But I took consolation from Tom Stoppard’s approach in the text of The Coast of Utopia, which effortlessly moves through the months and years and from setting to setting as though it were a screenplay.

In an essay included in his 1923 volumes, Fancies versus Fads, G.K. Chesterton offered an intriguing defense of the principles of dramatic unity. “Wherever [dramatic unity] can be satisfied, something not superficial but rather subconscious is satisfied. Something revisits us that is the strange soul of single places; the shadow of haunting gods or of household gods.”

A single setting and a single action bound more or less “by one circuit of the sun.” Artists have always recognized the freedom that is unleashed by placing limits upon their creativity; the principles of dramatic unity are the “frame” around the action of a plot. The effect of such limitation is, as Chesterton observes, uncanny: something strange and haunting is set free when the action of a play or other story is thus constrained.

“We might say,” concludes Chesterton, “that superior literature is centripetal, while inferior literature is centrifugal.”

Filed Under: The Craft of Fiction Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
March 16, 2013 Leave a Comment

In Defense of High Concepts

One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar.

So wrote G.K. Chesterton, in a marvelous little essay entitled “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” published in his book, The Defendant, back in 1901. What are penny dreadfuls? Pulp fiction, cheap fiction, cheap in more than one sense, no doubt. But not in every sense. Chesterton’s essay focuses on the boys’ book—i.e., the story of pirates or outlaws, of Robin Hood and Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine—stories light on literary merit but heavy on excitement. He asks whether boys should be kept away from such fiction. His answer, perhaps surprisingly, is “no.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Art and Culture Tagged: , , , ,
March 7, 2013 Leave a Comment

10 Simple Ways to Eliminate Simplistic Rule-Following from Your Writing

Not to worry. Help is on the way.

 

If you’re anything like me, you’re always on the qui vive for a way to help you over your second act hurdles, or enliven your stilted dialogue, or punch-up some punchless characters. In brief, you’re a sucker for any article you stumble upon with a title such as:

“Five Rules for Creating Suspense (Doled Out One Day at a Time)”

or:

“7 Things the Fiction Writer Can Learn from the Pre-Socratic Philosophers”

There’s just something irresistible about an article that promises to deliver the Long Lost Secret of the Incas in a handful of bullet points.

Speaking of the Long Lost Secret of the Incas, David Mamet claims to have definitively located the Long Lost Secret of the Incas–that is, the secret to writing successful fiction–in three simple questions that any author must answer for himself:

Who wants what from whom?

What happens if they don’t get it?

Why now?

These questions are as good as any I’ve found. But the problem is, answering them is notoriously difficult, and so I often find myself running back for help in some “How-to” article. I don’t think there’s anything terribly wrong with this. After all, I’m sure even Shakespeare nicked one or two useful items from

“3 Things To Do with Your Melancholy Protagonist When He Refuses To Perform His Princely Duty and Knock-Off His Usurping Uncle”

1. Get him monologuing

2. Introduce a play-within-a-play

3. More monologuing

But bullet points, just like bullets, can be taken too far. Fiction does have its rules–or better, principles, as Robert McKee calls them in his book, Story. But because fiction is an art, the closer the practitioner stays to the “stuff” of his craft the better. Discussion of principles in the abstract must always be balanced by the study of actual specimens.

That is why I love the approach in novelist David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction. In these fifty short pieces, originally published in The Independent on Sunday in the UK and The Washington Post Book World in the U.S., Lodge teaches the art of fiction by putting before the reader specimen after specimen as illustrations of one or other aspect of the craft.

For example: Jane Austen and Ford Madox Ford on “Beginning”; George Eliot and E.M. Forster on “The Intrusive Author”; Thomas Hardy on “Suspense”; James Joyce on “Interior Monologue”; Henry Fielding on “Showing and Telling,” et cetera.

The result is fifty master classes that show the principles of excellent craftsmanship embedded in their proper context.

Indeed, Lodge’s approach is so good that I think I’m going to steal from it here at The Comic Muse. Why should Lodge have all the fun?

Oh. And as for the “10 Simple Ways to Eliminate Simplistic Rule-Following from Your Writing,” they’re right there in your hands. Use those ten digits to order, or to pick up again, Lodge’s delightful book.

Filed Under: The Craft of Fiction Tagged: , , , , ,
February 25, 2013 Leave a Comment

Something to Read During Those Long Speeches at the Oscars

When that costume designer you’ve never heard of launches into that interminable Thank You speech, you’ll want something to read to pass the time. But you’re watching the Oscars. You’re in a Hollywood mood. So why not enjoy High Concepts: A Hollywood Nightmare–available here for just $3.99. Below is an excerpt from Chapter 7, “The Deal,” in which my protagonist, a young out-of-work philosophy professor named Donald Wirt, posing as a Hollywood screenwriter, takes a meeting with some bottom-feeding slasher film producers.

Enjoy!

*          *         *

When he had listened to Miles talk to them on the phone, a certain image of Slasher Films had been conjured in Donald’s imagination. A glass office building, its windows reflecting the clouds placidly drifting through the blue Los Angeles sky. A plush suite filled with smartly dressed people busily working the phones and reading scripts.

Slasher Films, in fact, was located in a seedy area of town in a small, one-storey box-structure on pilings that listed precariously. Connoisseurs of all that is most dehumanizing in twentieth-century architecture would recognize in it the death rattle of Bauhaus. Donald found no outward sign that this grim little box on stilts housed a film production company. But the street address matched the one that Miles had given him.

The door was reached by a flight of stairs at the side of the building. Donald’s knock was answered by a tiny, well-presented woman wearing a surgical mask and plastic surgical gloves. Donald staggered backwards as a wave of the woman’s jasmine perfume slammed into his nostrils.

“Hiya, sweetie! What can I do you for?”

“Good afternoon. Are these the offices of Slasher Films?”

“Got it in one! But sorry, hon, the boys don’t take unsolicited pitches.”

“I have an appointment.”

“Really? That’s a first. But I’m kind of new here. Come on in. Ima Bumpus.”

“You’re a what?”

“Ha ha. Wish I had a nickel for every time I heard that. My name’s Ima Bumpus. The boys’ executive assistant. Call me Ima. Need a surgical mask? I like to wear one. The air in here can get kind of gamey.”

Donald refused the surgical mask and followed the woman into the house.

“I’ll get one of the boys,” Ima said, and she hurried through the living room picking up discarded pairs of boxer shorts along the way.

Donald waited in a dreary living room with the blinds drawn. Beer cans and bottles were strewn among stacks of books, magazines, videos, DVDs, and scripts. On a rickety coffee table a crusted dinner plate featured the grizzled bits of a gnawed pork chop embedded in a pool of petrified ketchup. An almost suffocating smell, a mixture of curry and burnt microwave popcorn, seemed to ooze from the walls. On one of the walls were posters showcasing the cream of the Blood and Gore oeuvre: The Devil’s Car Wash, Thumbtack Murders, One-Eyed Jack I through IV. Framed stills from these movies tilted at various angles upon the wood paneling, the dominant themes of which were women screaming and a Rogue’s Gallery of grinning killers wielding instruments both blunt and sharp.

After a long delay a large shaggy man in an old t-shirt and sweats, looking as though he had just been roused from sleep, emerged from the bowels of the house. Ima introduced him as “Mr. Brad Blood” before returning to her desk.

“Hello,” Donald extended his hand, “I’m Dr. Donal—I mean, my name is Donnie Wir—uh, Donnie Percival.”

“Sounds like an identity crisis,” Blood drawled as they shook hands.

“My name is Donnie Percival,” Donald colored.

“You from the Labor Commission?”

“Excuse me?”

“Writer’s Guild? Director’s Guild?”

“No. I’m Donnie Percival. The author of Out, Out, Brief Candle!”

“How nice for you. Email me a synopsis.”

Blood turned to go.

“We scheduled a meeting for today,” Donald called him back, his voice cracking. “You offered to buy my script. I’m here to sign the contract.”

Blood stopped.

“Not another one,” he sighed and rubbed his tired face with his hand.

There was an uncomfortable silence until the man turned back to Donald and said:

“I gotta get my brother. Wait here.”

“You’re brothers!” Donald smiled, as if he had just gotten the punchline of a very clever joke.

“Yeah,” Blood sneered. “It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes people in Hollywood go by other names, Dr. Donald Donnie Percival.”

As he waited Donald watched Ima Bumpus read from a book called So You Want to Make It in Hollywood.

Blood returned.

“Sorry, dude, but my brother isn’t well enough to meet with you today—”

“Nonsense!” bellowed a voice, and a moment later there emerged, with a wavering step, the spectral presence of Blood’s brother and co-producer.

“Graham Gore!” he announced himself, far more loudly than was strictly necessary, and extended a shaking hand to Donald.

He was a wiry, sun-starved man of thirty, or fifty, dressed casually in a pair of boxer shorts and fuzzy slippers. He had a gaunt, pasty countenance; wisps of soft blonde hair floated like cobwebs above his balding head.

“I’m Donnie Percival,” Donald said boldly. “I’m here to sign the contract for the sale of my script, Out, Out, Brief Candle!”

Gore belched and wavered slightly. Blood reached out to steady him.

“Out, Out, Brief Candle! Weird title, man. Wassitbout?”

Donald launched into his memorized pitch.

“Uh. There’s this high school teacher, an assistant vice-principal—”

Gore tipped to the right.

“—who with his girlfriend, the advanced Spanish teacher, plots a series of murders as a means of taking over as principal of the school.”

“That’s his external goal,” Gore clarified with a manic smile. “What’s his internal goal?”

Donald hesitated.

Gore tipped to the left.

“Internal goal?”

“His innermost deepest desire,” Gore explained. “Not the thing he wants, but the thing he needs.”

Donald reflected upon this.

“I guess he just wants power and glory.”

Gore beamed at Donald.

“I think we’ll make a writer of you yet—wassyername?”

Filed Under: High Concepts: A Hollywood Nightmare Tagged: , , , , ,
February 20, 2013 Leave a Comment

In Defense of a Popular Literature

Michael Chabon’s instinct is spot on. In his essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights–Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” from his 2008 collection, Maps & Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, he makes the case for a literature that does not despise to be entertainment, that challenges the hegemony of “literary fiction,” that seeks to inhabit the borderlands between high art and low genres such as sci-fi, horror, and the western.

Chabon concocts a thought experiment. “Imagine that, sometime about 1950, it had been decided, collectively, informally, a little at a time, but with finality, to proscribe every kind of novel but the nurse romance from the canon of the future”:

Not merely from the critical canon, but from the store racks and library shelves as well. Nobody could be paid, published, lionized, or cherished among the gods of literature for writing any kind of fiction other than nurse romances.

Once this fanciful scenario is in place, Chabon invites us to substitute for nurse romance the “contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.” And once we do so, he predicts, we’re going to find sitting right back in our own world. For the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story wields an almost tyrannic rule over the state of literature.

And let’s not forget, Chabon observes, that the CQPMOTRS (contemporary, quotidian, etc.) has conventions just as rigorous as any popular genre. Such as: “the primacy of a unified point of view, for example; letters and their liability to being read or intercepted; the dance of adulterous partners; the buried family secret that curses generations to come; the ordinary heroism of an unsung life.”

Why, Chabon asks, should this genre trump all others?

Chabon’s critique is squarely on target, and I applaud his desire to explore the “spaces between genres” in order to produce a literature that is as entertaining as it is artful. But what he fails to explain is why the disconnection of literature from entertainment can only occur to the detriment of literature.

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.” So G.K. Chesterton famously asserts in his 1901 essay, “In Defense of Penny Dreadfuls.” Similarly to Chabon in “Trickster,” Chesterton in this essay takes on those who would sneer at popular fiction, especially fiction for boys, both because it corrupts and because it does not meet the standards of literature. Chesterton will have none of it, but he defends popular fiction for reasons that are probably very different from Chabon’s:

These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilization is built; for it is clear that unless civilization is built on truisms, it is not built at all.

What truisms does Chesterton have in mind? “The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared.”

Literary fiction, by contrast, both then and now, tends to eschew such truisms. “It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated,” contends Chesterton, “which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables.”

It is a good question whether in our day much popular fiction itself wouldn’t offend the sensibilities of a high-souled errand boy–if there are any more errand boys.

Be that as it may, Chesterton and Chabon agree that there is a sharp distinction between literature and fiction. But the truth at least implicit in Chesterton’s essay, but wholly missing from Chabon’s, is that literature and popular fiction exist along a continuum, and not just a literary continuum but a moral one as well. For this reason, when literature becomes profligate and pessimistic, divorcing itself from the entertaining truisms of popular fiction, it becomes what Chesterton calls “criminal.”

And in this light, a fiction along the borderlands of high art and popular fiction is not simply a refreshing change, a way to renew (as Chabon wants) the art of the short story. Rather, it is a way of reintroducing the truisms of civilized life–that is, the humanity–back into our literature.

Filed Under: The Craft of Fiction Tagged: , , , , , , ,