The Hound, the Lamp Post and the Seabird

Hi! I'm Sherry Thompson. I joined LGG just a few weeks ago, so this time I'll just introduce myself and describe how I started writing.

The Hound, the Lamp Post and the Seabird

In midsummer 1970, I was a discontented psychology grad student, halfway between a messy break-up with a long-term boyfriend and a semester in which I would take physiology with no biology since high school while teaching psych statistics. During the day, I worked fulltime at the university library and tried to make sense of the physiology text. I spent my nights fending off the Hound.

The Hound of Heaven was after me though, prodding me to make a decision about what I really believed. Glenn and I had both been agnostics. I had been exposed to Christian teachings via Sunday School from about 3rd to 9th grade and then virtually nothing. For a long time, my only response to the prodding was in bookstores where I picked up books with religious-sounding titles while on the eternal hunt for fantasy books. I had read The Hobbit years ago when I was a freshman and followed it with The Lord of the Rings. Glenn didn’t care much for fantasy and I was extremely busy, so I let my new interest drop until that summer.

Back in 1970, there was little fantasy to be had in spite of the popularity of Tolkien’s work. Lin Carter at Ballantine had reprinted a line of old titles by Lord Dunsany and Mervyn Peake. I found Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus in the university library. There was C. S .Lewis but, you see, Lewis was Christian and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get into that whole “mess” of making decisions about things that might change my life.

I reached the point where I really had no other fantasy to choose from in our local bookstore, so I picked up all seven volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia. (I hate having broken sets.) When I was checking out, either the cashier or a customer suggested that I begin with The Magician’s Nephew because that way I would be reading the books in chronological order. I read The Magician’s Nephew that night and was captivated by the idea of a lion singing a world into existence and by a world so bursting with life that a fragment of a lamp post buried in its soil sprang to life. A week later, I went to an evening meeting on campus and accepted Christ as my savior.

Over the following years, I read everything I could find by Lewis and followed that with everything I could find by the other Inkling, Charles Williams. I searched repeatedly for fantasy books I had missed earlier and I found a few from time to time but Tolkien was just beginning to have an impact on the publishing world and I lived in a small town with a small bookstore. Plus, this was the 1970’s B.A. (Before Amazon)

Eventually, I decided to write a fantasy story. I had written a bit before, many years earlier and mostly time travel stuff, but this would be my first attempt at an actual novel. The first step would be to “become organized” and make a list of everything that my novel should have in it.

The Daydream Novel List went rather like this:

a heroine (who would actually be me),
no elves or dragons (maybe for fear of competing with Tolkien?),
wizards, but not like Tolkien’s;
a jump from one world to another (based partially on Narnia but running back to my childhood daydreams of time travel),
the heroine would not instantly cooperate about her visit or her role (aside from Eustace, everyone visiting Narnia seemed to just follow along);
an artifact, for two reasons—1. to be mysterious here on Earth and 2. at the end to be proof that it had all been real (I disliked the insinuation that Dorothy had envisioned Oz while delirious);
heroes who rode horses and carried weapons (a leftover from my early exposure to TV serial westerns;
a really –different- setting,
a sequel with overlapping characters.

I didn’t begin with an story outline—I hated making outlines—but just plunged in with Cara finding the as yet unidentified “artifact”. Each day, my novel grew by approximately eight sheets in my 8x5 spiral notebook. Sorry about the culture shock! This was before personal computers. I had a typewriter but I couldn’t carry it around so I opted for the notebook.

After a while, perhaps a week or two, my inspiration dried up. I had taken enough English courses to realize that I didn’t know what my characters wanted or where I was heading with my plot. Plot? What plot? My list of Stuph was all on the surface. What was going on inside? Staring at the wall established the fact that the wall had cracks and the room needed painting.

Since I was still something of a new Christian, it took a while for the penny to drop and for me to pray for guidance. I asked for help and promptly went into wool-gathering mode

What did I want? What had I been looking for at the bookstore? What had I wanted when I finished The Lord of the Rings? God wanted my salvation. I wanted another good story, not necessarily LotR II but a complex fantasy world with people I could relate to. I positively –loved- The Chronicles of Narnia but technically Lewis had written it for children. What a shame he hadn’t held off on The Last Battle and written more stories bringing in older protagonists from Earth…

Oh.

I “checked in” to see if I were on the right track, and felt I had the go-ahead. Along with it, came a flood of “new ideas”, which I should have considered critical from the beginning.

The Duh List.
The new list of necessary story elements included:

an actual reason for the protagonist’s presence on this other world (aka plot);
a varied cast of characters whom I must get to know intimately;
an agnostic teen or one struggling with doubts about his or her faith;
mistakes leading to regret and feelings of guilt; eventual reconciliation;
a world just as loved and saved by God as ours and Narnia—but in a different way; with a new representation for the Second Person of the Trinity;
the awe and delight of knowing God, shown as Lewis did it. Doing this meant a lot to me. In fact, this had become nearly the whole point of the exercise;
a deeply embedded yet subtle pattern in the setting and culture showing how this world’s reconciliation with God became possible.

And then a biggie, right out of the blue: An alternate history of the church beginning after the Incarnation, Christ’s Sacrifice and His return to Heaven where the abundant miracles of the Early Church would alter over time as needs changed. Enchanters would be called to wield these miraculous powers, each as granted from God. To the casual observer (or reader) it will look like magic but it wouldn’t be.

All of this subtly hidden in plain sight so as not to spook the person I used to be. No question: I was writing for all the other doubting or agnostic fantasy-readers like my old self who needed a subtle invitation to taste and see. If fellow Christians liked the book, that would be great but I needed to help those made nearly impervious to the call, by what Lewis named the Watchful Dragons.

I almost forgot one necessary element. Learning how to write. Sigh. I continue to work on the foundation for that one. I pray that my desire to share the joy of knowing God makes up for my abysmal execution of the message.

I used various plot ideas as testing grounds for my characters, jiggery-poking different elements until I knew what path I was supposed to follow. However, I was still missing a key element. I went to the beach on vacation and while I was there I searched vigilantly until I found it—a silver necklace shaped like a soaring seabird. My artifact, and the representation of Narenta’s Savior.


Under the Mercy,
SherryT

Christ Figure or Christian Figure

The Christ figure or the Christian figure

I don't know what my problem is exactly, but the depictions of Lost Souls in stories simply fascinate me. There's something about a Lost Soul, someone who is utterly destroyed, confused, oppressed, in darkness, that of course reminds me of a Lost Sheep or of sheep without a shepherd.

When I see a television documentary about a prostitute, a petty thief, a prisoner, a molested kid who grows up to be a male prostitute, my heart goes out to them. Generally, it takes a lot to make me dislike them, and unless they are torturers, molesters, or murderers the disgust factor just isn't there.

I suspect this is because I'm a Christian. The whole saved-by-grace kind of thing. After all, our dear and wonderful Lord hung naked between two thieves, killed wrongfully by capital punishment, with a supposedly fallen woman as a comforter in his death. But I suspect this love for the fallen might have another cause. I'm a writer. The artistic soul often tends to veer toward the wounded, the alienated, and the outcast. I also grew up with some pretty wounded folks...folks many Christians would not really hang out with, much less write about.

Our Lord, as Yeats said, "pitched his tent in the place of excrement." Imagine heaven in its white purity. Imagine the filth of earth in all its sins. Earth is so sinful and dirty and filthy that even the most perfect righteous person is unclean and their righteousness like filthy rags. But what lifts us out of this dirt? The Love of God shed abroad in our hearts for God and for God's fallen sheep. And our faith in God's love for us.

Sometimes when I've finished reading a book written by a Christian writer, I find that the character's goodness has turned me off. I feel often that I have not read a book about the gospel of God's love toward us, but a book about a person becoming good. I feel as if, under the guise or showing the gospel, the author has written a book which led me to the tree of knowledge of good and evil instead of the tree of life. I feel as if the writer has written a book that shows me a Christ figure instead of a Christian figure.

I often wonder why so many main characters in Christian fiction, seem to be more like Christ than the Lost Sinner. Perhaps, unlike Christ, we cannot "condescend" (an old and lovely word, that) into the lives of those unlike us. Perhaps being in the dingy mind of a sinner is just too dark for us. Perhaps we identify too much with the Pharisees and still don't understand the essence of the gospel: our conversion is a conversion from our own righteousness and dead works to believing in God's love for us through the life and death of Jesus Christ.

Several Christians have not liked the way my main character, Loic, behaves after his converstion. They think he ought to behave better. I try not to write characters who are perfect. The first is my own issue: I don't like the idea of writing a perfect man. Human hearts lust. If they don't lust, they compare. And all too often, women romance writers seem to fall into the habit of falling in love with their main male characters...as if their main male characters are the literary man of their dreams. It's a subtle act of carnal concupiscence but it happens very often. Yes, I know men can write and read books without being in love with their male lead but the women writers I have known seem to need to be somewhat in love with a character in a book in order to read his story. This is a kind of lust and daydream I simply don't want to indulge in.

But the other reason is this: I'm a Christian, someone who continues to sin even after my conversion. I honestly wish I were perfect. But I am not. I muddle through with my brightest light being that God loves me. I am a writer, and so I can only tell about my own life, and maybe my readers will judge my characters badly. Or maybe they will identify with them, or maybe they will understand them. My hope, however, is that they will look up from my book with a loving heart that doesn't expect perfection from their neighbor or brother in Christ. Although we all have the mind of Christ and are being renewed everyday by His Living Word, only Christ is the true Christ figure. We and our brothers and sisters in Christ are nothing more or less than Little Christs, believers who are learning to love our neighbors as ourselves instead of measuring them by some standard of perfection. When I write, my only hope is that my readers will walk away from my books knowing how to love. And if we can love an imperfect character in a novel or in the Bible (Lot's wife, Job's wife, Hagar, Michal) we are well on our way to doing learning how to love.

Often we Christians say that non-Christians dislike us because we are so like Christ. But that isn't true. In fact, it is usually the opposite. They dislike us because we do not show the love of Christ. We often stand afar off from people we consider sinful and we often have a holier-than-thou attitude because we truly believe in our good works. And the writings of Christians often show this lack of understanding of the gospel of God's love.

Thank you dear Lord Jesus for teaching us how to love the lost and the saved the way you love us, and not with our own human measures.