Imitation Imagination

For the past few days I've been mulling over this post from last year, wondering why I resisted nearly all Christian music, books, TV shows, magazines and other forms of media in favour of secular stories from such a young age. It wasn't our home environment -  I never remember Mom and Dad being outwardly excited about any sort of secular media until we were teenagers. While I did know a couple of adults who were interested in non-Christian genres of literature they were definitely not in the majority.

After thinking about this question my best answer is that it was a writing quality issue. Most of the Christian books that I have read are more concerned with making sure that their characters do the right thing than they are with character development or the pacing of the plot.

It was difficult for me to relate to the characters in Christian novels who always made the right decision (and whose potentially incorrect decisions could nearly always be boiled down to a simple misunderstanding or miscommunication with a secondary character at a critical moment in the beginning of the novel), who never wavered in their beliefs or wondered which choice would the better one for a particular situation. I've only known a handful of people who acted like this in real life and they were all but impossible to get to know on anything other than a superficial level even after years of befriending effort.

There were a handful of Christian novels that attempted to break this mould : The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters and to a lesser extent The Chronicles of Narnia. C.S. Lewis knew how to write stories (heavily) influenced by his religious beliefs without sacrificing the plot or neutering (or spaying) character development. I now find The Chronicles of Narnia too heavy-handed to reread but The Great Divorce is a fascinating story even if one doesn't agree with the underlying theology.

The vast majority of the books that I read, though, are not written through the lens of any particular religious, moral, political or ethical point of view. In my experience good writing is generally incompatible with making characters behave in any way other that those in which are natural for them. Like flesh-and-blood people, some characters are naturally loving/kind/law-abiding. Other characters are anything but these things. Most are going to be a vexing mixture of healthy and unhealthy motives, behaviours and thoughts.

Imitation* was another reason that I consistently chose secular media over the sanitized, Christian versions of a particular style of music or genre of writing. Too often, Christian writers and singers recycled ideas or styles that have recently been released by secular artists. Even more often the Christian version had nothing new to offer to the genre and was not even as well-thought-out as the original song, story idea, etc.

What made this even more disturbing is that many of the Christian writers and artists who were doing this were often fairly talented at their craft and seemed to take pleasure in creating memorable stories regardless of which medium was used to tell those stories. Had they been allowed to write without the expectation that their characters always make the correct decisions (and had they perhaps edited, rewrote and research their work for a longer period of time before publishing it) they could have been producing work that I would have happily read, watched or listened to.

*Yes, many secular books also have some or all of these issues. It definitely isn't easy to write something original that is populated with people who sound and feel like real people.  I've written more than one stereotypical, flat or otherwise unbelievable character or created a story that I thought was unique before researching it and discovering that I was just remembering something I'd once read. But this is why one edits and rewrites a first (or second...or ninety-second ;) ) draft!

(Photo credit.)