new lesson

Somewhere in the middle of performing "The Muse" at church yesterday, I realized that it wasn't that good a piece.

It has all the essential elements of drama. The main character, Neil, is having a struggle both internalized as an inability to create and externalized as a job he hates because diligence and quality are liabilities rather than assets. The conflict reaches its climax as he appeals to Calliope for inspiration, and it reaches resolution when she points out that he already is communing with her quite effortlessly, and hands him his paintbrush, a visible indicator of his reinstatement as an artist.

The essential failing of the drama, as I see it, is that it fails to say anything truly meaningful in his context. So Neil hates his job and feels wasted as an artist. Those are certainly common enough attitudes, I'm sure, but the sermon that the drama was written to prepare the way for was "Tuning into God."

The drama didn't say anything about prayer, and it didn't really depict anything that would stir the soul and make people think about how they could pray. It does provide insight into my character and some of my struggles -- the ad agency described was based more or less on my experience with WCN Newspapers -- but I'm not convinced it provides any great insights into God, or prayer. I had hoped to do something where Calliope dived to a deeper level than Neil, and her insight and weightier messages slowly changed the way he was viewing his problems and began the process of resolving them.

And, ironically, my complete failure to accomplish that was probably the greatest strength of the drama.

The preacher referred to the piece several times during his sermon, saying how great it would be for us to develop an image of prayer as a matter of sitting down at a table in a cafe and chatting with God over a cup of coffee. After the service, several people came up, effusing praise over the drama.

Later Sunday it hit me why people may have reacted so strongly to it. I've taken it for granted for years that prayer is simply a conversation with God, and I've often depicted it in conversation and writing as something akin to having a milkshake with Godor sitting down and talking with him over a burger. 

This is an old, familiar way of thinking for me, but that doesn't mean it's universal or even common. A friend of mine thinks it's great when I ask questions like what kind of dog Jesus had as a boy, because he's not used to thinking of Jesus in such human terms. By the same token, an accustomed way of thinking about prayer still can be insightful and revolutionary for someone who's never looked at it that way before.

So what made the piece effective had nothing to do with the stronger points of my writing, nor even what I hoped to do. The writing has some weaknesses anyway that I really should change to make it stronger, anyway. In a way, I'm reminded of Charles Sheldon's book "In His Steps." The book is badly written. The writing style is meretricious, there is no character development or plot to speak of, the book is melodramatic, and when characters appear, they're usually gone within the next five or six chapters. But I read the book, and even as I groaned over the writing, I was moved by its poignancy. The message itself was beautiful, and heart-rending, and even if it did spawn that fucking WWJD marketing craze about ten years ago, it remains a deeply powerful one: Before you make a decision, stop and ask yourself what Jesus would do, and then do that.

The book endures and remains worth reading not because of the writing, but because of the message. I'd rather have lousy writing and a good message that fantastic writing that says nothing. (Best of all is the writing that is both excellent and meaningful, but that is the rarest of combinations.)

This in turn inspires some thinking about my own writing, namely the principle of letting go. Nothing is ever finished; there is always room for improvement. But at some point you have to accept that it is done, toss the story upon the water, and begin work on the next one.