Everything I know about writing I learned in Sunday school

Christian Century, Oct 21, 1998 by Doris Betts

In this film and video age that emphasizes pictures, some people think that if Jesus had wanted us to take heaven seriously he would have brought along snapshots instead of telling stories. But those stories taught us the power and magic of words. The Bible taught us the uses of metaphor--"I am the vine, you are the branches." In Sunday school we absorbed the effectiveness of repetition and echo ("He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters").

The Bible differs from other sacred texts such as the Qu'ran and the Hindu Veda in the way its cosmic story becomes the all-too-personal story of us all. For us, too, there was a childhood garden before the snakes came, and we keep trying to get back to that innocent garden, as the hippies sang at Woodstock. Like the Israelites in Egypt, some of us have been enslaved. Listen to Africans singing "Go Down, Moses" so that Pharaoh in the plantation house can hear. Listen to the enslaved crack addict. Sometimes we travel the long way through the wilderness, stopping off at the shopping mall to worship a golden calf. Sometimes the tyrant we fight is named Nebuchadnezzar, sometimes Nero, sometimes Hitler. In every major city there are streets as wicked as some in Babylon.

Besides teaching us to appreciate language and to see the patterns of our lives, the Bible also taught us the techniques of fiction Like the Iliad, it opens with a great booming omniscient voice: IN THE BEGINNING GOD CREATED THE HEAVEN AND THE EARTH! If the reader asks, "Who says so?" there's no answer, just as we don't know who booms out "Sing, muse, of the wrath of the son of Peleus Achilles" at the beginning of the Iliad. The great 19th-century novelists also write with the godlike authority conveyed by this omniscient point of view. But the Bible also teaches us how to use more limited and personal voices. In the 23rd Psalm, the point of view shifts from the first-person my shepherd leading me, to the third-person he and then all the way to the intimate second-person thou when things get tough in the valley of the shadow of death.

A PASTOR TAUGHT me all I know about characterization in a sermon with the text "Thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself." I yawned when he announced that text. Been there; heard that. But then the pastor said, "Bear in mind that you do not always love yourself. Sometimes you dislike yourself and are embarrassed by your own behavior; sometimes you may even hate yourself. Even then, what do you do? You make excuses. You put your own conduct into a favorable context. `I wouldn't have said that if I hadn't had this headache,' you say. Or, `Well, actually, he asked for it!' And so on."

The Golden Rule asks of writers the same thing it asks of all who are trying to love their neighbors: to put themselves inside others, inside their characters, even the villains; to know what excuses they would make for themselves; to imagine how it feels to be Shylock or Hamlet or Anna Karenina or Willy Loman. Writers love their characters as themselves. They remember, as one minister put it, that "we're all related to God on his mother's side."