Category: Fantasy Criticism

We have talked about taking ordinary fiction and tacking some “Christian stuff” onto it to make it “Christian fiction.” And we have talked about fantasy as a special kind of story-telling that gets under your skin, if it’s done well. But what about “Christian fantasy”? Can we take fantasy’s special qualities and put them to work for Christ’s Kingdom?

Well, of course we can, But how? Here are a few ways not to do it.

Write it as if it were a perfectly ordinary fantasy story, like everybody else’s, only plug in a few scenes of characters praying or going to church.

You want to know why that doesn’t work? Because even an unbeliever can pray or go to church. Christianity that is only on the outside isn’t Christianity at all.

Have God give the good guys better magic than the bad guys have.

Remember what happened to Moses when he snapped at the children of Israel, “Must we fetch you water out of this rock?” God did all the miracles, but here was Moses taking credit for one of them.

I just read a book featuring a great big magical duel, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. “May the mightiest magician win!” is hardly a sentiment found anywhere in the Bible. What we do find in the Bible is God using weak and inconsequential things to confound the great and powerful. So Balaam is rebuked by his donkey, David slays Goliath, a lot of itty-bitty germs wipe out Sennacherib’s army, and the whole world is conquered not by armies, but by a baby in a manger.

Any attempt to write Christian fantasy must be anchored in the truths of the Bible, be they applied to this world or to an imaginary world, and must focus on the spirit of Christianity rather than any outward show of it–unless, of course, you’re writing about the vanity of outward show.

This being only a blog post, I’ll have to take up the subject again later on. And I’m curious to see what my readers have to say about it. Is there any Christian fantasy you’ve really liked–and why did you like it? Or is there any that you couldn’t stand–and what turned you off about it?

I wrote many fantasies before I wrote Bell Mountain and its sequels. None of these got published. I won’t say these books were worthless–if nothing else, they were practice for me as I learned my craft. But they all had one fault in common.

None of the fantasy worlds I was writing about offered the reader any compelling reason to believe in them. They were just… well, just there. They were, none of them, in any sense true.

In Bell Mountain I did something different. I presupposed that the world I was writing about was real: created by the same God who created our world, and who reveals Himself to us in the Bible. Therefore the same laws of righteousness, the same laws of nature, had to apply to the fantasy world as they apply to ours.

At the same time, the fantasy world, because it is a different world, had to follow its own arc of history. For instance, the fantasy world’s Medieval Period comes after its Modern Age, not before. And in the fantasy world, God has done a few things differently. The fantasy world has yet to meet its Savior, although a few of its prophets have hinted at His coming. The Day of Fire, which ended that world’s Modern Age, is analogous to the Great Flood of the Bible. In the historical period in which the action of Bell Mountain takes place, God is shaking the world–not to destroy it, but rather to liberate His Word from its captivity in the spiritually dead Temple of Obann, so that it can spread beyond the borders of Obann into the Heathen nations.

To do this, I have to steep myself in the Bible. The work also requires much prayer and meditation. And I trust the theological brains at the Chalcedon Foundation to set me straight if I run off the rails. Happily, they have not yet had to do this. Finally, I avail myself of input from theologians like R.J. Rushdoony, D. James Kennedy, and others, and non-theologians like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others. Great Christian writers are a source of inspiration to me.

What I receive from all this is a fantasy world which is not just there, but has a reason for being there. Because the story is rooted in the Bible, the story becomes, even though it'[s fictional, true: not in a strict allegorical sense, but in terms of its message.

This, by the way, is why it takes me so long to come up with a new book in the series.

And the lesson is, boys and girls (note I don’t say “purple penguins”), that in order for the fantasy to have power… it must be true.

Truth is bigger than the writer; and if what the writer writes is true, then the writer, as far as the reader is concerned, has disappeared. Because what matters is not the writer, but truth; and the truth is of God, and comes from God.

There are all sorts of stories about authors whose fictional characters came to life. (Bram Stoker really hated it when that happened.) I don’t mean to suggest that this can truly happen in the real world, although there is some evidence that it does. Rather, it is a metaphor for what should happen when you write fiction.

First you have to imagine a character as a whole other person, totally distinct from its author. This is a step that some would-be writers are never able to take. But unless you can cut the cord, the reader is always going to be able to tell that your character is just a surrogate for you–a phony character who does things you’ve never done, but desperately wish you could do. This is the genesis of seriously awful writing.

Step Two is even trickier. You have to get out of the way and let the characters do what they want to do. This won’t happen, of course, unless you’ve spent a lot of time with the character and fully, deeply imagined him or her, and allowed this fictional person to have nothing to do with you.

At that point, you may find that something you planned for the character to do is not going to happen because he won’t do it. He wants to take some other action. It may even be something that you, the writer, never anticipated. Usually this turns out to be a great improvement over what you were going to write at first. At the same time, if you try to force the character to say or do something he doesn’t want to do, your story will suffer.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But it’s only art.

I often find a character kicks in and comes to life after I’ve succeeded in “seeing” and “hearing” him as an actor in a movie. First the face, then the voice; and next thing you know, the story is unfolding itself before you, and you’re writing to catch up.

All of this is especially applicable to fantasy, because good fantasy depends more on the imagination than any other genre–not just the writer’s imagination, but the reader’s, too. To come alive, the fantasy needs both the writer and the reader.

But that’s the subject for another essay.

One of the hardest things about writing fantasy is to turn your imagination loose.

You folks out there who’d like to try to write this stuff, be warned: the easiest thing in the world is to fall into writing fantasy that is not imaginative, that’s been done to death by everybody else, that’s dull and predictable, etc. True, there is no new thing under the sun. But it’s funny that the greatest enemy of fantasy should be the cliche.

Speaking only for myself, I find sometimes that it takes an act of will to let my imagination have free rein. But if you’re not going to do that, why write fantasy? The world already has all the stale, derivative, imitative, boring fantasy it’ll ever need. You have to be bold. You have to take a chance. A timid imagination has no place in fantasy.

Some examples:

In The Lord of the Rings/ The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien awes me with his depiction of the forest of Lothlorien as a place outside the normal flow of time. How did he ever think of that? And having thought of it, how did he ever come to write it so effectively?

In The Magician’s Nephew, one of the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis had his magical transportation rings work by taking you to a special place in another dimension that was a kind of gateway to all the other places in the universe; and although it was also a place in its own right, it was like none of the others. I find it hard to describe, but you don’t need my description: Lewis’s is better!

Edgar Rice Burroughs, in The Chessmen of Mars, imagined a backward civilization cut off from the mainstream of Martian culture and science–a place where the art of taxidermy is put to unexpected purposes. So detailed, so vivid is his depiction of the city and people of Manator, you may find yourself dreaming about it.

I can’t tell you how to develop a wild imagination. If you don’t have an imagination, well and good–you can always write for television. But I suspect you’ve either got it or you don’t. The thing is, you might not know you have it. The only way to find out is to start using it and see what happens.

Final hint: Your imagination is never going to stretch its wings if you insist on writing about street-smart nuns and crusty but benign old wizards.