Christian Writers' Reading Challenge Day 26

Welcome to Day 26 of the Christian Writers' Reading Challenge! We're so glad you've joined us for this dive into literary wisdom. If you've missed out on the previous installments of the Challenge, here they are:

Day 1: Short Works by JRR Tolkien

Days 2-8: Walking on Water by Madeleine L'Engle

Days 9-16: Adorning the Dark by Andrew Peterson

Days 17-25: If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland 

Today we're reading an essay by renowned Christian author CS Lewis, titled "On Stories."

Day 26

Quick Guide

Required Material: A Bible and CS Lewis's essay "On Stories," the latter of which can be found for free online via Project Gutenberg.

Reading Guide: First open your Bible translation of choice and read 2 Corinthians 4:18. Then read the essay. Annotate thoroughly.

Notes: Homework time! The stuff you've been writing down will now come in handy. Copy 2 Cor. 4:18 onto that grubby bit of paper. I'll give the NIV verse for example: "For we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, for what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." Under the verse, put the quote from the end of Lewis's essay: "In life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive…. I think it is sometimes done--or very, very nearly done--in stories." Now read the whole list of connections you've made on that bit of paper and reflect.

 Deep Dive

About the Author: CS Lewis is a well-known Christian author. His children's fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia, has been made into a series of movies. His other famous works include The Four Loves, The Screwtape Letters, The Abolition of Man, and his science fiction series, the Space Trilogy. We briefly mentioned Lewis on Day 1 of the Challenge, because he and Tolkien were close friends, and Tolkien is widely credited with helping convert Lewis to Christianity.

Hard Words: Lewis's vocabulary is broader and more difficult than that of the last work we read. Here are some definitions for the more-obscure terms:

Otiose--serving no purpose, idle

Sidereal--relating to the distant stars

Bacillus--a kind of bacterium

Rentier--someone who lives off of property and investments

Peripeteia--(literary) term referring to a reversal of fortune or change in circumstances

Also, in the fifth paragraph, Lewis uses "romance" in the sense of a dramatic or adventurous story, which is a more archaic use of the term.

Notes for Christians:

"For I wanted not the momentary suspense but that whole world to which it belonged," Lewis says when explaining why the kind of danger the MC is in matters. Danger is itself a part of worldbuilding; that is, it contributes to the reader's mental depiction of the world. With what weapons do the enemy attack, and what do they look like? The components of any action scene should, in the grand scheme of things, be components of your Story's world.

Lewis explains his purpose in writing the essay as thus: "I write on the chance that some others may feel the same and in the hope that I may help them to clarify their own sensations." This is the reason anyone writes anything--something he later explains is the purpose of story.

Writing exercise: Imagine the soundtrack to your story. What does each character's theme sound like--especially the villain's?

Your conflict should enthrall your reader, not merely because of the danger but because of the distinctive elements of the source of danger. As Lewis says in the essay, pirates inspire a different kind of fear than giants. Consider your conflict and the source of danger. A dragon is terrifying for different reasons than an Old West outlaw. (One thing all these have in common, though, is distance from the reader--separation by time, place, and reality.)

The difference between a conflict of dragons and a conflict of a psycho with a flamethrower isn't in the physical threat they pose--either will burn you to a crisp--but the "spiritual danger." The spirit of a dragon, which we'll loosely define as the "vibe" the reader gets from a dragon, is what matters. Dragons are manipulators, sometimes even hypnotic. They are imposing, controlling. They get into your mind and make you feel small. They are thinkers, riddlers--philosophers who play with their food. And yet at the same time they're petty, spiteful, vain, and greedy. (Psychologically it's interesting to note that dragons are believed to be a combination of early man's three great fears: Snakes, cats, and fire.) Smaug from The Hobbit and The Green Death from How to Train Your Dragon are prime examples of archetypal dragons. It's that archetype that makes us fear dragons (or outlaws, or psychopaths) the way we do--we don't fear the dragon because it can kill us, we fear it because it's a frickin' dragon, and dragons represent much more than a fiery demise.

"No man would find an abiding strangeness on the Moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden." That's who writers have to be. We must make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, which means we must see both in everything. It's part analysis and part awe--the closer we inspect anything, the more we realize how strange it is, whether we're investigating a flower in our garden or the neural pathways in the brain.

We'll learn more about the "logic of a fairy tale" when we read Tolkien tomorrow.

"[The story] may not be 'like real life' in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region." The more central region is the realm of the spirit, the ideals (reminiscent of Plato) that we strive to conform to but cannot achieve. Because the world is broken by sin, it cannot be truly "real" as God meant it to be before the Fall. The spiritual reality we glimpse in stories is not the world as we see it all around us today, but the world as it should be and will be someday.

"There is death in the camera." Have you ever heard a more poetic line in an essay? This is how we should strive to write our school papers: with poetic authority. That's something we have to earn the right to do, of course, but it will be worth it.

I'll leave with this thought: Great fiction should mirror "real life" (our broken world) enough that we can understand it and feel close to it--but it should also point us towards the true reality of the mended world clearly enough that as we view the story's path, our spirits feel pulled towards our everlasting home. It doesn't matter if the story is "Christian" or not, it's the gesture towards something "higher" that makes a story resonate with the reader--that makes us long for more after the story has ended. That makes it feel beautiful and true.

Study Questions:

What does it mean for the elements of a Story (characters, theme, etc.) to be there for the sake of the Story itself?

What is the "pleasure in stories distinct from mere excitement"?

Consider this quote: "But in imagination, where the fear does not rise to abject terror and is not discharged in action, the qualitative difference is much stronger." Why should it matter that the fear "is not discharged in action"?

"That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude." Why should authors bother with it, though? Why should we care about representing to the reader sensations that aren't realistic to the situation of the character?

Look at one of your stories. What one, key word (it doesn't necessarily have to be in the story) summarizes what sets the story's particular appeal apart from the general appeal of excitement?

"It might be expected that such [an unrealistic] book would unfit us for the harshness of reality and send us back to our daily lives unsettled and discontented." Why doesn't it?

"If he were capable of analysing his own experience as the question requires him to do, he would be neither uneducated nor immature." Is self-awareness one of the keys to maturity? What do you think of Lewis's definition of "uneducated" here (and "well-educated," by implication), and who or what is doing the educating?

Lewis defines theme as "something other than a process and much more like a state or quality." The process of a story is the plot (and without a plot, it's not a story, just a jumble of scenes). How does plot relate to theme?

Essay Question: Is theme truly the "end" of story, or plot only the "means" of reaching it? In other words, do you agree or disagree with Lewis's opinion of Story? And the dreaded four words: Why or why not?

That's all for now. Come back tomorrow, when we'll read another essay, this one by Lewis's friend Tolkien, titled "On Fairy Stories." (Spotting a theme yet?)