The Well You Draw From
Musings on writing dark fiction as a Catholic Christian
Allow me a moment to crawl upon my pulpit (don’t worry, I’ll keep it brief).
This is not a fiction post, but a much dreaded post about fiction. It’s also unplanned. For the last few days, I’ve reflected on my journey as a Catholic writer of dark fiction—the good and bad. I humbly place my ramblings before you.
It is this: be careful which well you draw from.
What do I mean?
Being made in God’s image and likeness opens up brilliant possibilities. Creative expression should be tuned to that end. That doesn’t mean stories need to be eternally sunny nor does it have to live within the strict confines of pious fiction (though that has a place, as well). As Michael Dana Gioia puts it:
“Surprisingly little Catholic imaginative literature is explicitly religious; even less is devotional. Most of it touches on religious themes indirectly while addressing other subjects—not sacred topics but profane ones, such as love, war, family, violence, sex, mortality, money, and power. What makes the writing Catholic is that the treatment of these subjects is permeated with a particular worldview.”
We live in a broken world full of broken people. It is no small wonder that our narratives reflect this.
When one write about darkness, however, one must ask themselves two things:
Why or to what end?
If you writing about a character’s suffering, why are you writing it? How far do you take it? If you delve into the actions of a serial killer (i.e. “A Good Man is Hard to Find”), what is the point you’re making?
Every story makes a point whether or not an author is aware. It doesn’t have to be political, it can include statements of morality or personal philosophies. Avoidance of “a point” is a point in and of itself. You cannot escape it.
What places am I going for this story?
One wouldn’t trust the devil to tell you who he is, so why go to the dark to write about it?
I’m not speaking about research. What I am referring to is the place our mind travels when we create. Creativity comes from that divine essence, the bit of us made in His image and likeness. Of course, man has the ability and opportunity to pervert that gift.
It’s an interesting subject because many artists (and university art teachers) encourage creatives to live in their pain. Pain exists, but seeking out darkness to draw out something physical (whether it be visual arts, creative writing, etc.) possesses a distinctly evil flavor.
People who create balance on the edge of a knife.
That’s all for me today. I’m curious to know your thoughts on the subject!
If you're lost in the woods it pays to have a compass. You don't have to understand how the compass works, but you do have to understand what it's for and what direction to follow to get you back to the narrow road. If you don't have a compass, it is EXTREMELY challenging. If you don't have a well tuned sense of how to follow it, it is EXTREMELY challenging. If writing is a walk in the woods, then not only can we lead OURSELVES by a short route to danger, but we can lead *every soul reading us* by that same route. Evil is real, so it's important to treat it as real, and not like some mundane boring earthly emergent property of human behavior.
It is such a challenging line to walk, because of that knifes-edge nature of the beast. Some people have a bigger appetite for, lets say, the demonic. That has always scared me and scares me MORE now that I understand it better. So I avoid writing about it. Some people can write about it and handle it excellently--they are not WRONG to do so. Shaina Read made a point once that caution and reverence are like two sides of the same coin. Proceed slowly, with understanding, with awareness that you are confronting Grave Matter. So the watchword that I would suggest is *caution*. Be careful.
"every story makes a point, whether or not the author is aware"--I love this. A lot of times what-the-point-is is driven more by where the reader is than the author. Some lessons learned are not necessarily the lessons intended. So that's another reason to be cautious.
This is a good reflection and you've given me a lot to chew on!
"What is the point you're making?" ...always a good question. As soon as you rephrase it as "What effect should this have on your reader," it can become a frightening one. Like Scoot says, the reader's got a soul too. Of course, the dream is to write something that goes out there and becomes real, somehow, but how much responsibility comes with that? That weight is a lot more clear in some areas than others - it's relatively easy to not write smut or incitements to murder. But at the edges, you get into large grey areas, and we can't assume that the reader has the same compass that we do.
Basically: readers, by consenting to spend time in the worlds we create, accept us as a moral authority in those worlds, and I think that people are too innately good at learning from stories to be able to set that aside when they put the story down. Maybe we don't accidentally convince anyone to become a serial killer, but we might convince someone that, in at least one case, (insert evil act here) was actually the right thing to do. This is an area where horror writers have the advantage - I'm thinking of what you wrote the other day, that horror is kind of like a fairy tale in the clarity of the moral pictures it can paint.