The first part of the article takes us inside a story meeting where a murder mystery morphs into a dozen different forms over the course of ten minutes. At first, I was a bit taken aback by this process, the story was like a rag doll of indeterminate species, its limbs being torn off and others being basted on, only to be replaced by something completely different and then turned inside out. But, you know, the story they were coming with was kinda interesting.

This approach to story making is antithetical to the solitary writer mythos. I’ve noticed that often people–consciously ot not–write a story to express a part of themselves. So when someone suggests changes to the story, the author feels personally attacked. The problem with hammering out a story in solitude and connecting it so deeply with oneself is that sometimes what seems obvious to the author is mystifying to the reader. The other problem is that storytelling, in the end, is an act of communication. It is the author knowing how to use the raw material of reader’s imagination to build something.

This rag doll approach to story might be a good way for writers to play constructively with storytelling. To explore the possibilities of a narrative and how it plays with an audience without having to put their own story on the line. Perhaps the insights writers have while playing this game will begin to seep into their work.

I am making my way through the Carter-touted Story Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee and have met some challenging ideas. I’d thought I’d run one up the flagpole.

Early in the book, McKee discusses his take on the decline of the storytelling craft. He faults what I’ll call the assembly line manufacture of stories. But he concludes this section like this:

The final cause for the decline of story runs very deep. Values, the positive/negative charges of life, are at the soul of our art. The writer shapes story around a perception of what’s worth living for, what’s worth dying for, what’s foolish to pursue, the meaning of justice, truth–the essential values. In decades past, writer and society more or less agreed on these questions, but more and more ours has become an age of moral and ethical cynicism, relativism, and subjectivism–a great confusion of values….

This erosion of values has brought with it a corresponding erosion of story. Unlike writers in the past, we can assume nothing. First we must dig deeply into life to uncover new insights, new refinements of value and meaning, then create a story vehicle that expresses our interpretation to an increasingly agnostic world. (17)

There is much to digest here. I’ve read the passage a billion times, trying to process it, to decide whether or not I stand with him. I think he is equating values with truth, and truth with morality and ethics. So when he mentions  the “erosion of values,” he could just as easily have written “erosion of morals.” Maybe that’s a leap since he speaks of “what’s foolish to pursue” as a value. Still, he seems to set up “moral and ethical cynicism, relativism, and subjectivism” as the opposite of value, so I’m sticking to my interpretation of value as, at least in part, morality. This fits nicely with my Mormon worldview, so I accepted his position.

In fact, the idea that people with morals, or moral people, are best suited to craft stories that attain a level of greatness excited me. I thought, Hallelujah! What good news for Mormon writers!

But then reality hit: The most devout, or morality-based, of Mormon stories tend to be far from the mark of great literature, a term I admit limps. Oh, I know that some Mormon lit is deep and meaningful, but much is not, particularly if it can wear the label “faith-promoting.” And don’t we think of faith-promoting stories and their writers as being especially morally steeped? I can’t speak for anyone except myself, but to me, these kinds of Deseret Bookish tales are superficial because they will surely reach a moral conclusion that is not only predictable,  but is “authorized.” I know from the outset what the moral boundaries of such a story will be.

Interestingly, McKee doesn’t mention anything about boundaries in his discussion of values, morals, or ethics. In fact, he says writers must “dig deeper,” which, to my mind, suggests moving beyond established boundaries. Yet to most Mormons, morality is defined by its boundaries.

Somewhere along the line, it dawned on me that I was interchanging the concept of morality with the idea of religious. Suddenly I lost confidence that religious writers are, by default, moral writers. Certainly our faith-promoting stories are bursting with Standards, spelled with a capital S, but are these Standards the same as values, ethics, and morals?

I’m left asking why today’s best literature is not being created by religious people. Shouldn’t the very cultures that most vociferously defend choosing the right, or doing what Jesus would, be the best at developing ideas that explore moral and ethical controversies?

Of course I acknowledge that many of the greatest writers of the 20th century had strong religious ties. But that is McKee’s point. Great stories used to be written by moral people, but, he argues, the morality and values behind these stories is no longer lauded on a large scale. This brings me back to the question: Have religious people–including Mormons–stopped (or never been) the McKee kind of moral?

One of my dearest LDS friends has cautioned me not to read the kinds of things I read, worrying that the books and journals she questions might challenge my testimony. She, like many others, only ingests reading material she feels is church-approved, or definitively ‘right,” and therefore safe. To her, if anything Joseph Smith taught or did proved  to be not “true,” then her entire religion–her life–falls into the chum bucket. Her primary investment is not discovering truth, but sustaining truth as she already has it.

Can that be a moral way to live?

Can a person with such a strong, overarching need to protect his/her core identity “dig deeply into life to uncover new insights, new refinements of value and meaning”? Can he/she “then create a story vehicle that expresse[s his/her] interpretation to an increasingly agnostic world”?

Here my brain spins, so I ask your opinion. Can a person’s faith conviction prevent him/her from becoming deeply, truly moral? If so, is this lack of morality preventing our writers from crafting masterpieces? I tend to think so.

So far I think it’s great. Even though the book’s about screenwriting, it applies marvelously well to fiction of all kinds. One of the sections I found particularly lucid and well-said was a short, three page examination of didacticism and why it ruins stories. Over the years on the AML-list and in other discussions between Mormon artists, I’ve engaged in lots of discussions of didacticism. But I feel like McKee gets to the heart of the matter exceptionally well, so I’ll be quiet now and let him talk. He says:

“A note of caution: In creating the dimensions of your story’s ‘argument,’ take great care to build the power of both sides. Compose the scenes and sequences that contradict your final statement with as much truth and energy as those that reinforce it. . . . If, in a morality tale, you were to write your antagonist as an ignorant fool who more or less destroys himself, are we persuaded that good will prevail? . . . [It is in a] balanced telling [that] your victory of good over evil now rings with validity.”

This is why “affirmation” fiction so often comes off as cheesy or unearned or dissatisfying. When the bad guy is unredeemably bad, he loses power, and then the story loses tension. Of course good will prevail! There’s no other logical option.

And speaking of the AML-list, today on the list Scott Parkin said something really smart (as he often does). He said, “affirmation exists on both poles of the conversation [in Mormon literature]–either affirmation that all is well in Zion, or affirmation that Zion is a pointless fool’s paradise. I find both flavors to be prone to the same limited and limiting presentations. A revolving door story is (quite often) just another polemic, whether it’s revolving in or out.”

Whether it’s revolving in or out! Yes, Scott. Excellent metaphor. McKee agrees with you. He says:

“When your premise is an idea you feel you must prove to the world, and you design your story as an undeniable certification of that idea, you set yourself on the road to didacticism. In your zeal to persuade, you will stifle the voice of the other side. Misusing and abusing art to preach, your [story] will become a thesis [piece], a thinly disguised sermon as you strive in a single stroke to convert the world. Didacticism results from the naive enthusiasm that fiction can be used like a scalpel to cut out the cancers of society.”

I think often, as Mormon writers, we assume the injunction above applies mainly to those who are trying to “convert” a reader to our standard Mormon conversion message: that the Church is true and that you’re happier with it than without it. But it applies just as readily to those Mormons with other theses, those who use “fiction as a scalpel to cut out the cancers of [Mormon] society.” Those writers with a bone to pick can fall victim to didacticism just as easily as those with the goal of proving the truthfulness of the gospel. Both narratives are, in essence, conversion narratives.

So how do we avoid didacticism? Must a writer have no point of view, no convictions? McKee again:

“Make no mistake, no one can achieve excellence as a writer without being something of a philosopher and holding strong convictions. The trick is not to be a slave to your ideas, but to immerse yourself in life. For the proof of your vision is not how well you can assert your Controlling Idea [your thesis, your theme], but its victory over the enormously powerful forces that you array against it. . . .As a story develops, you must willingly entertain opposite, even repugnant ideas. The finest writers have dialectical, flexible minds that easily shift point of view. They see the positive, the negative, and all shades of irony, seeking the truth of these views honestly and convincingly.”

It seems to me that for Mormon fiction to succeed, Mormon writers, both “conservative” and “liberal,” need the ability and willingness to grant their antagonists humanity and power. In one example, the antagonist might be an attractive female non-member tempting a Mormon boy not to go on his mission and, instead, come live with her. In another example, the antagonist might be a rigid and conservative Mormon mother who won’t accept her son’s homosexuality. But in both cases, these characters must be complex, their motivations must be understandable, they can’t be “all bad.” Because if they are, what choice does our protagonist have? If there isn’t something compelling or even good about these characters, what will our hero be giving up if he rejects them? Where is the tension in a story where any logical human being would run away, fast, from a person who’s so obviously bad for him?

One last McKee quote: “A great work is a living metaphor that says, ‘Life is like this.’ The classics, down through the ages, give us not solutions but lucidity, not answers but poetic candor; they make inescapably clear the problems all generations must solve to be human.”

Exactly. And I’m curious: what “classic works” of fiction, Mormon or otherwise, do you think do a good job of saying “Life is like this”? Heck, you can even throw in some movies if you’d like. (I’ve been reading Story, so I have movies on the brain.)

Thanks again, Stephen, for the recommendation.

I believed in the Writer Genius for many years. He was this special, misunderstood person whose waters ran very deep. He was someone who had amazing novels and short stories swimming inside him like fish, just waiting to be caught and hauled up into the light of day. All he had to do was sit at the computer, cast the fishing line into his deepest depths, and type.

Oh, sure. He had to work to get those stories out, but it was his genius that created them. That genius was every bit as much a part of him as the color of his eyes, the shape of his hands, or the sound of his voice. That genius meant that story was something he didn’t have to worry about. All he had to do was find the words to embody that story.

And the really great thing was, in all possibility, I could be that writer genius. How many were the days that I sat down at my computer with an idea that seemed so full of potential? How many were the drafts I pumped out? How many were the critics who said, “Yeah, it’s fine.”

Fine? Obviously you don’t grasp what I’m doing here. Don’t you see the nuances? Can’t you catch the symbolism? Isn’t the story’s soul blindingly apparent?

I spent quite a few years trying to be the Writer Genius. Finally, I had to give up because it was evident to me that I had no natural storytelling talent. I was about as far from being the Writer Genius as it was possible to be. But I’m a stubborn cuss. I wanted to be a writer anyway, so I enrolled in a creative writing M.F.A. program.

I learned something during that time that opened an entirely new world to me, a world that made it possible for me to be a writer. That something is a single principle. And I’m going to give it to you free of charge, just because you’re you.

It is simply this: There is a craft to storytelling, just as there is a craft to engine design, or architecture, or artificial sweetener formulation.

This idea excited me so much that I spent the next five years studying it. The main text I used was Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. It may seem odd to focus on a screenwriting book when one wants to learn story craft, but, as I found out, screenplays are story skeletons. They’re the bones that the cast and crew hang flesh upon. You don’t have to cut through flowery language or extended metaphors or languorous description. You’re just looking at the beams and bones that make sure a building or body can stand. And there are ways to know if they will hold up, or if the art direction, costumes, actors, soundtrack and cinematography are just makeup on a cadaver.

Though I was obsessed with understanding the components that made a good story, it took me a while to learn to apply them. I look back on my M.F.A. thesis and cringe. Why in the world did they let me graduate?

But eventually, my work started to pay off. I could tell because the first time I submitted a screenplay to a film festival, they took my $20 entrance fee and never spoke to me again. The next time around, I revised that screenplay and won third place. The kicker was, I could tell what the problems with my screenplay were, and I could fix them. It was like fixing a toaster.

After that I got published and won writing contests on a regular basis. But it wasn’t because the Writer Genius in me had finally woken up, it was because I knew how stories work, just like an architect knows how buildings work, or an engine designer knows how engines work.

Learning the craft of storytelling has been great for my career. I can actually make a living with words. However, sharing my knowledge has proved to be very difficult.

As I think back on the majority of the fiction I have read, it all has one thing in common. It lacks story. Yes, those pieces of fiction may have lovely language, they may have sympathetic characters, they may have interesting ideas, but they don’t go anywhere.

I’ve written a lot of critiques to fiction writers focusing on their story’s structure, and with almost no exception I receive this response, “What in the world are you talking about? This is how the story GOES!”

That, gentle reader, is the voice of one who is under the thrall of the Writer Genius myth. It’s the voice of someone who believes that storytelling is an innate power they have. Like me many years ago, they don’t realize that there is a craft to storytelling.

As Robert McKee writes, “The novice plunges ahead, counting solely on experience, thinking that that life he’s lived and the films he’s seen give him something to say and the way to say it … What the novice mistakes for craft is simply his unconscious absorption of story elements from every novel, film, or plays he’s ever encountered. As he writes, he matches his work by trial and error against a model built up from accumulated reading and watching. The unschooled writer calls this “instinct,” but it’s merely habit and it’s rigidly limiting. He either imitates his mental prototype or imagines himself in the avant-garde and rebels against it. But the haphazard groping toward or revolt against the sum of unconsciously ingrained repetitions is not, in any sense, technique, and leads to screenplays clogged with clichés of either the commercial or the art house variety” (15-16).

Lack of story craft is the bane of Mormon fiction. In fact, I believe it is the main barrier that keeps Mormon writing from gaining the strength to compete in the national and international markets. Too many potential Mormon writers think that there’s a Writer Genius inside of them just waiting to get out. I figure that a Writer Genius pops up only once for every million people born. Possibly less often. But the Writer Genius myth is so powerful that a great many people who could be good writers, if only they learned the craft, spend their lives waiting for a fish that never bites.

I believe in repentance

But it’s probably not what you’re thinking.

I actually dislike the word repentance. When I hear it, I think of those priesthood sessions of General Conference when I sat between my dad and my brother in the darkened chapel, knowing that I was full of adolescent sin. From an outside point of view, I’d probably look pretty innocent. But mine was a hyperactive conscience, having been molded by endless sacrament meeting and general conference talks, by priesthood lessons and standards nights.

Do you remember the old gray woman in Jim Henson’s movie The Labyrinth who waddles around hunched beneath the weight of a pile of junk? That was my soul.

Much later, when I was in grad school, I found myself pulled toward writing about my experience as a Mormon. Which surprised me because I moved to Alaska expressly to get away from the overwhelming Mormoness of Utah. But I wanted to see what would happen, so I kept writing.

As I did, I realized that even though I was the person typing, I didn’t actually have control of my stories. I could feel them being fought over by two forces. One was the sacrament meeting mentality. It wanted to take all my stories, scrub them down, and tack a moral onto them. The other was the deconversion mentality. It wanted to dismiss my Mormon experiences as naïve pit stops on the way to true enlightenment.

I became very angry with both sides. They had the audacity to think that they knew how to tell my stories better than I did. It was like the stories were trying to tell me, instead of the other way around. I decided it was time to take a stand. These were my stories, dadgumit, and I was going to tell them my way.

What I didn’t know was that accepting responsibility for my own stories was going to be a huge undertaking. As I struggled to cast off these two influences, I found myself alone. I hadn’t realized before just how much I had relied on prefabricated stories to make sense of my life.

After a lot of work, I had a few almost finished personal essays on my hands and I was itching to send them out. But I could tell that they just weren’t ready yet. There was something missing: something essential to the essays’ life. And, as it turned out, something essential to my own.

I started to see that my unfinished essays all had one thing in common, they pointed out the fact that I was carrying a huge weight of contradictions on my shoulders. Sometimes the priesthood seemed like a wonderful thing to me. Other times, it seemed an oppressive weight. Sometimes I could feel the binding power of the temple. Other times, it seemed to only cut me off from my loved ones. My mission was at once an elating and awful time.

These contradictions stared me in the face, daring me to make something out of them. And there was never any way around it. To finish those essays right, I had to take that pile of junk off my back. But instead of walking away from it, I had to dive in. Deep.

It was hours of pondering. It was dozens of drafts. It was contest deadlines passing me by. There was only one way of knowing that an essay was finished. It was when the essay had finally changed me. When I had collected the used tin foil, the ratty teddy bears, the rusty bicycle frames, the dog-eared magazines, the old toilet paper rolls of my experience and made something new with them. Something that derived its beauty not from the perfection of its materials, but from the interplay of their imperfections.

So when I say I believe in repentance, I mean that I believe in creation. I mean that repentance leaves a monument of beauty wherever it is performed. I mean that that pile of junk on your back may be exactly what you need to work out your salvation.

Just make sure that it’s your salvation.

(An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2008 Sunstone Northwest Symposium.)

On the face of it, none of these topics seems particularly “uplifting.” In fact, many of them are downright dark. But as I’ve read and reread the stories and essays and poems contained in this issue, I’ve found myself inspired, even spiritually fed. As I contemplated why such difficult topics can engender such seemingly contradictory responses, I began to fashion my editorial on the idea of communion, compassion, and charity in literature.

So before you read the editorial, I’ll pose my question:

It seems to me that Mormon theology can (or should) equip us as Mormon artists to create work that engenders and promotes charity. But are we doing this? If we are, where do you see it? If we aren’t, at least not very effectively or consistently . . . why? (I have my own ideas about this, but I want to hear yours first.)

***

What does your character want?

This is a question any writer of stories must be able to answer. At the core of every good piece of fiction or creative nonfiction—even, I would argue, at the core of every good poem—lies an unfulfilled yearning. Sometimes this yearning expresses itself in grand adventure. There are dragons to slay and mountains to scale. But often a character’s desires are circumscribed by the boundaries of the personal; there’s a longing for love, independence, faith, renewal, understanding. In the hands of a skillful writer, a character with these private yearnings can be just as potent and compelling as any sword-wielding hero.

This issue of Irreantum is full of heroes and heroines, and each one of them, in turn, is full of desire. The details of what is wanted change from story to story, but it seems to me the impetus for each character’s journey is essentially the same: the people in these pages want communion.

The sacred overtones of the word “communion” are appropriate for a journal like Irreantum. After all, this magazine attempts to bind two impulses—the artistic and the religious. But I see the broader definition of communion working somehow in every piece published in this issue. I sense the longing for intimate connectedness, the desire to be stripped of pretense, the need to be seen, to be heard, to be known.

I understand these characters’ desires. My own search for communion has led me, time and time again, to other people’s stories. To literature. The best characters—be they found in fiction or nonfiction—are those who let me know them. This intimacy not only helps me better understand those who live outside my personal and cultural boundaries, but I believe it helps me know myself better too.

In the contributors’ notes for Best American Short Stories 2007, the author Richard Russo posits that transformative literary experiences can help tear down the walls we humans erect around ourselves. He says:

The study of literature has had what I believe to be a salutary effect on my own character, making me less self-conscious and vain, more empathic and imaginative, maybe even kinder. Perhaps it’s an oversimplification, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to wonder if maybe this is what reading all those great books is really for—to engender and promote charity. Sure, literature entertains and instructs, but to what end, if not compassion? (409)

The idea that we create art as a way to encourage charity is a heavy one to contemplate. But it rings true to me. As a Mormon, I believe each individual on earth is a hero in his or her own epic, extraordinary, eternal journey. Each life on this planet is but a chapter in a decidedly character-driven story. As I try to see the world and the people in it more clearly, every story I know broadens the scope of my vision. I agree with Russo: my acquaintance with literature helps me live with compassion.

As readers come to the stories and essays and poems in Irreantum’s pages, it is my hope they will get a sense of the communion I believe the best art offers us. Perhaps some will see themselves in these characters’ yearnings and, in that recognition, gain a measure of power, or peace. Is this a lofty goal? I suppose. But if there’s any kind of literature that can “engender and promote charity,” I believe a Mormon literature can.

It’s kind of scary to see my name sidle into its place next to the worthy names of Dan Wotherspoon, Elbert Eugene Peck, Peggy Fletcher Stack, Allen Roberts, and Scott Kenney. I feel like an Osric suddenly called upon to play Hamlet.

Whether there was a divinity that shaped this particular fate of mine, you’ll have to judge for yourself. Let me tell you how I got here and what I’m planning to do.

My story starts in 1997 when I first met Eugene England. He had just become writer-in-residence at Utah Valley State College (now Utah Valley University) and was in the initial stages of planning what is now the Mormon studies program. By a great stroke of luck, he hired me as his administrative assistant, and I became deeply involved in his work. I got to sit in on both private and public scholarly symposia with some of the most interesting people in Mormon studies, such as Armand Mauss, Carol Cornwall Madsen, Jan Shipps, Terryl Givens, and the late Dean May. This period was a formative one for me, because for the first time in my life, I heard Mormonism discussed with discipline, intelligence, and spirit.

I realized only later how unique my tenure with Gene was. Few undergraduates are privileged to take part in gatherings in which religious and scholarly discourse is carried on with such skill and wisdom. I attribute the unique spirit of these meetings to Gene’s commitment to Joseph Smith’s concept of “proving contraries.” When one proves contraries, Gene always argued, you aren’t doing so to identify which is right and which is wrong but to experience the tension between them. It is the experience of dwelling in this tension that makes you wiser.

The scholars Gene brought together were skilled in the art of dwelling in tension. They didn’t jump ship when the conversation got hard. They didn’t bail when someone challenged their ideas. In fact, they saw these moments as opportunities. They knew that ideas can grow only when they are interacting. And the best way to make ideas interact is to put them in tension.

Only days after Gene died, I moved to Alaska and began a master of fine arts program in creative writing. Then, just because I could, I also finished a Ph.D. in narrative studies.

During that time, I became fascinated with the structure of stories. I discovered that the great characters of fiction are those who are stretched between two competing values. Think of Asher Lev, stretched between his devotion to his religion and his passion for art. Think of The Merchant of Venice, where justice and mercy vie for the souls of Shylock and Portia.

I also learned that the great stories of the world have second acts. This may seem like a silly thing to say, but so many stories set up the problem (the job of the first act) and then resolve it (the job of the third act) with little to no struggle in between. I’m here to tell you that it’s the struggle that makes a story great, because that’s the time when the opposing forces are at their most powerful, when they wreak their full havoc on the character. Rest assured that any character emerging from the second act without scars is a cheater.

I began to see that Gene was right. Those who dwell in the tension, those who are willing to go through their second act, gain much. Those who jump out too early lose much. Perhaps this is the wisdom behind the adage, “Endure to the end.”

That is how the foundation for my passion and commitment to the mission of Sunstone was laid. Sunstone is the place where Mormons can come to dwell in the tensions that arise from their religion and from the rest of the world. It happens to all us. We find ourselves inexplicably pummeled by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. During these times, we need a place to wrestle in spirit, as Jacob did, as Job did, as Jesus did. It needs to be an independent place; it needs to be open, respectful, and rigorous.

Thus, Sunstone is necessarily a place of labor. No spiritual journey is a primrose path; it is a “steep and thorny way to heaven,” as Hamlet put it. The people you find at Sunstone are not the ones who have jumped. They are the ones who are still trying to navigate their vessels between the whirlpool of Charybdis and the teeth of Scylla. They are the ones who have been brave enough to plunge deep into the second act of their story.

But getting through the second act isn’t the end.

As Elie Wiesel said just a few months ago, “I believe that whatever we receive, we must share. When [I] endure an experience, the experience cannot stay with me alone. It must be opened, it must become an offering; it must be deepened and given and shared.”1

The act of composing your story is a heroic journey in itself. “It is essential that the writer undergo the journey,” playwright David Mamet says. “That’s why writing never gets any easier.”2

And then we, the audience, become the beneficiary of that double journey. “The true drama … calls for the hero to exercise will,” Mamet continues, “to create in front of us, on the stage, his or her own character, the strength to continue. It is her striving to understand, to correctly assess, to face her own character […] that inspires us—and gives the drama power to cleanse and enrich our own character.”3

My editorial philosophy for Sunstone will follow in Gene’s tradition. There are contraries all around us, and we will prove them. We will wrestle within their tensions. We will do so with rigor and artistry. We will open the conversation. We will plunge into our second acts. And when we find our way out the other side, we will shape our journey into a story and share it.

As the novelist E. M. Forester writes, “One can, at all events, show one’s own little light here, one’s own poor little trembling flame, with the knowledge that it is not the only light that is shining in the darkness, and not the only one which the darkness does not comprehend.”4

NOTES

1. Elie Wiesel, “God is God Because He Remembers,” All Things Considered, 7 April 2008, http://www.thisibelieve.org/dsp_ShowEssay.php?uid=41283&topessays=25&&start= (accessed 16 September 2008).
2. David Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 19.
3. Ibid., 43
4. E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (New York: Harcourt Trade Publishers, 1962), 76.