Mindy Withrow

Well Said: Welty on crusader-novelists

There are Christian novelists and then there are Christian novelists. Christian novelists create a fictional world out of a life perspective of human depravity and divine redemption. Christian novelists write happy endings about mostly-perfect people to encourage readers to pray the sinner’s prayer. One is an authentic expression of human experience—physical, spiritual, and moral—in relation to the divine. The other is a 200-page gospel tract. Christian novelists of the second persuasion would be well-advised to read Welty’s essay, “Must the Novelist Crusade?” (more from On Writing [New York: The Modern Library], 2002, 74-88).
The problem is confusion of purpose:

Writing fiction places the novelist and the crusader on opposite sides. But they are not the sides of right or wrong. Honesty is not at stake here…the only thing at stake is the proper use of words for the proper ends…

The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report on it, but to make it an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it, and offer it to the reader….

Morality as shown through human relationships is the whole heart of fiction… and yet the zeal to reform, which quite properly inspires the editorial, has never done fiction any good….Large helpings of naiveté and self-esteem, which serve to refresh the crusader, only encumber the novelist. How unfair it is that when a novel is to be written, it is never enough to have our hearts in the right place! But good will all by itself can no more get a good novel written than it can paint in watercolor or sing Mozart.

Welty lays out some of the problems the crusader-novelist will encounter, not the least of which is: “…if we write a novel to prove something, one novel will settle it, for why prove a thing more than once? And what, then, is to keep all novels by all right-thinking persons from being pretty much alike? Or exactly alike?”

But the good news for fiction writers who desire to reflect Christ in their fiction is that when “a writer is committed to his own moral principles …when we read him, we cannot help but be aware of what these are.”

Indeed, we are more aware of his moral convictions through a novel than any flat statement of belief from him could make us. We are aware in that part of our mind that tells us truths about ourselves. Yet it is only by way of the imagination—the novelist’s to ours—that such private neighborhoods are reached.

Rather than forsake my deepest convictions, I can trust them to steer the truest course for my writing. But it’s obvious I must first reach a compromise with Justice Woman about divvying up my time so she’ll mind her own business while I’m fiction-making!

13. February 2007 by Mindy
Categories: On writing | 8 comments