A good story
is always a story of conflict. A boring story is one in which everything goes
right and nothing goes wrong. The sharper the conflict the more there is in
favor of the story being a good one. This conflict comes in all shapes and
sizes. Conflict between two persons, conflict between two teams, two parties,
two countries. The conflict always works its way into the lives of at least two
people. The persons involved may be part of a larger body, such as a
corporation, or an athletic team, a culture, an army. Even the abstract crystallizes
into the concrete lives of human beings. Consider Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, and the assumed
struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, how it led to the great
revolutions that produced the Soviet
Union and Red
China. Or, Hitler’s Mein Kampf with
its seminal idea of the extermination of European Jewry, the demand for
Lebensraum, and the ideal of racial purity all of which led to Nazi death
camps all over Europe and a war on two fronts.
Conflict is
essential to a story’s credibility not to mention its success. Anyone who knows
anything about writing knows that. But why is that so? Why is the conflict so
tantalizing, even as it may require the horrors of the human condition to be
starkly painted?
At bottom, it
is because there is nothing else the human being can relate to. Ever since the
Fall, man has always known struggle and conflict. It is part and parcel to his
existence. That's what Mom and Dad, and Aunt Max and Uncle Jesse talk about. It's what the neighbors gossip about over the fence. It's what my dog experienced with the dysplasia in his hip.
That struggle
comes under the two broad categories of good and evil. These
may refer to the physical conflict that typically is used to describe the human
condition - desert and paradise, poverty and riches, paucity and plenitude. But they also refer to moral conflict, the clash between doing the right
and doing the wrong.
If good and evil
are the essence of conflict, then every good story of fiction in some fashion is a
story about precisely that, good and evil.
Think of that,
as a Christian writer. Only the Christian, enlightened by the word of God and
illuminated by the Holy Spirit, truly knows what good and evil are. The
Christian writer is the most qualified to write anything fictional from that
standpoint. If that truth could sink deep into every Christian writer’s
literary heart, I think it would profoundly impact Christian fiction.
Paul wrote,
the Lord Jesus Christ ‘gave
himself for our sins to rescue us from this present evil age according to the
will of our God and Father.’
Gal 1:4. This world is intrinsically, inherently, through and through an evil,
dark world, and the Christian is the lamp that God has placed here to shed some
light on it (Matt 5:16 ). A Christian writer of fiction is the
only truly eligible writer that can do this for the reading world.
Fiction is a
marvelous vehicle to bring the reader face to face with not only the evil
around him, but also the evil within. When trying to do this, however, it can
easily come across as preachy dialogue set in a cast of out-of-touch maudlin
characters. There is no requisite for sermonizing. Serious dialogue, yes, where
the ‘unbeliever’ is not a push over. Rosy personalities are fine as long as the
rose faces the thorns, blight, and drought of the real world - the evil world.
Just as
important as the message is the tapestry it is woven into. The writer must
write with the greatest care, not shabbily, but as an artisan, crafting his
words and sentences into a laudable tale that brings to the eyes and mind of
the reader what the conflict between good and evil really is. As the most
serious problem in the universe - good and evil - the work becomes a weighty
tale elegantly woven. That is not easy, but no work of art that truly earns
that accolade is easy. As Christian and writer, it is incumbent that we put
into our story the best that we have. Our goal is to paint the canvas and
charge the imagination so that the ubiquitous evil character of this world, which
reigns in the heart of every person from birth, is not glossed over. The
revelation of evil readies the stage for the only hope and deliverance from it,
the great redemption through the Lord Jesus Christ.
