Insulting the Imagination
A story is like a child. You nurse it along, aim it in the right direction, put your heart and soul into the baby, but then, if heaven smiles, it comes to life, grows up and has its own soul, its own spirit, its own essence.
Call it the muse or call it whatever you like, but there is something that directs a story in the direction it is meant to go — and I do not necessarily mean what direction the author is aiming. Stories speak of themselves, under their own power, or not at all.
A story can be a morality tale, or make a point, or have a theme, but a story cannot be a sermon. It cannot be heavy handed or hold a message that does not grow organically out of the message.
God is a light too bright to look at. Like the sun all things are seen by its gift of light, but the source of light will blind you. Likewise in a story — even a story with an obvious Christian theme, like THE LION THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, is still a story first. It is not a sermon, nor a lecture.
Stories of any sort, of any theme, in any genre, if they put lecture above theme, the story breaks the theme, and breaks suspension of disbelief. It becomes fake.
And that is fatal to the imagination.
There are stories, like ATLAS SHRUGGED or STARSHIP TROOPERS that are actually lectures. The plot stops and a radio voice or a teacher in school tells the reader the author’s opinion on the matter. These books are enjoyable as lectures, but not as stories.
I like the lectures. They are good lectures. But they are still lectures, not stories.
Stories speak to the imagination. Lectures speak to the reason.
If my imagine realizes that the author has stopped talking to her, and instead talks to her sister, reason, that is the same as if a young man came by my house to pick up one daughter for a date, but flirted with her sister. The imagination is insulted by the act of neglect.
This is true for stories proselytizing Christ as well as any other.
The topic of the lecture does not matter. Give your arguments and opinions and orations about God or about bimetallism or the Caledonian War, and even if you have a tongue of gold, you are still giving arguments, opinions, orations, and not telling a story.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
