A Little About Me
About 50 years ago, I started believing I could be a writer. That is until I showed a sample of my work to someone whose opinion I trusted, one of my college instructors. She took two days to read my short story and then beat it with a three-pound hammer. After pummeling me for what seemed like an entire day—about fifteen minutes in real time—she asked, “Do you have anything to say?”
I didn’t know how to answer. Did I have anything to say? I didn’t know. What was I supposed to say? Should I write about the war in Viet Nam, which, at the time, was tearing this country apart? How about the intergenerational polarization that was also a feature of the sixties, or the British Invasion, or the sexual revolution? I asked myself—more than once—what do I have to say? Then I figured it out. Nothing. I had nothing to say. As a nineteen-year-old suburban kid with little going on besides my sexual prime, I hadn’t lived enough to have anything to say. I just didn’t know it at the time. So I decided that this writing thing was too deep for me and turned to simply finishing college, which for me was about all I could handle. Life hadn’t happened to me yet.
Then life happened. Career, marriage, kids. It all happened, and it was all too busy for me to write about. I did keep a journal sporadically, and I began to think that I actually did understand the craft of writing. But I was too busy getting my family by to give any thought to the old question: Did I have anything to say? Then some things happened that gave me something to say.
Looking for the one best way, I turned to the life of faith, committing everything to building a strict moral compass that would get my family through any storm. I quit my job, and we sold our home, moving wife, kids, the dog and cat hundreds of miles to work with people sure to save the world for Jesus. I became a minister, dedicating every waking hour—and every available dollar—to a check-your-brains-at-the-door religion. We were on the true path.
Then it all went bad.
When I finally came to understand the lies, abuse, and betrayal that had been the subtext of the life of faith I thought I was living, I had no way to get a handle on what had happened to a decade of my life. That’s when I turned back to writing. Now I had something to say, and I used fiction to say it. I had found my moral universe.
Every writer works from his or her moral universe. Dickens, whose anger makes him my favorite author, wrote of the immorality of a society that exploits children in Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations. A crime writer’s moral universe might be simply, “Crime doesn’t pay,” or “No one is above the law.” In Ayn Rand’s moral universe, the actualization of the ego is the highest good. Whether or not we agree with an author’s theme is not important. What is important is that the author expresses his theme in a way the reader understands.
My first novel, Power in the Blood, took nearly twenty years to complete because I defined my moral universe as I wrote, and only recently did I take the opportunity to express my beliefs in detail. Now I have it, dark as it is.
In my moral universe, nothing is as it should be. My protagonist, Pastor Timothy Rathbone, gets what he wants—ministry in a mega-church—but comes to hate his congregation. His girlfriend—with whom he lives in sin—is the biggest slut in ten states. Her father is at once a ruthless assassin and a loving parent, dealing with a rebellious daughter. And the good, God-loving, Bible-thumping Christians of the village of Dayton Crossing are drug dealers, murderers, manipulators, or just plain crazy.
In my moral universe, people of faith wait for God to move in their lives, and wait, and wait, and wait. Sometimes God makes his presence known, sometimes not. There is no divine plan, no justice, just the hope that "maybe this time. . . ." And above all, remember, "Be careful what you ask for; you just might get it."
My soon-to-be-published novella, Consent of the Governed, describes an elderly couple, intent on avenging their son's murder by government thugs. Ultimately, they find a common bond with a young couple--themselves part of the network of government thugs--and realize that they want the same thing, a chance to be free.
I am about on e-third of the way into my second novel of the series, titled, No Such Thing as Enough, and my moral universe is clearer to me now than when I started. Consequently, the writing goes faster, and I have a better idea of where the story is taking me than with my first novel.
As writers, we need to find our moral universe, our themes, based on our core beliefs. They are our starting point. When our moral universe becomes clear to us--when we know who we are--we can make it clear to others, and our writing becomes real and alive.
