In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Peter answered Edmund — when Edmund asked if they really wanted to follow a bird they didn’t know in a world they didn’t know — this way:

“That’s a nasty idea. Still — a robin you know. They’re good birds in all the stories I’ve ever read. I’m sure a robin wouldn’t be on the wrong side” (p. 59).

And so they followed the robin, which was the more excellent way.

One of the reasons why the Scripture tells us so many stories is that we are supposed to get the feel of them down into our bones. We are supposed to do this because we are in stories ourselves, and we need to learn how to recognize who is who and what is what.

“Now these things were our examples, to the intent we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted” (1 Cor. 10:6).

“For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope” (Rom. 15:4).

What we often fail to recognize is that true moral choices come in the context of the interplay of relationships between characters. Moral choices occur within stories, and if you don’t understand the stories, then you won’t understand the moral choices. Aaron wasn’t walking along in the wilderness one day until he came across a golden calf which he then decided to worship. No, he was pressured by other characters in the story, characters he was afraid of. To use this instance in application, if you can’t see the characters you are afraid of, then you won’t be able to see the golden calf either.

In this world, in real time, in every well-written story there is a protagonist and antagonist, but it doesn’t follow that identifying them is necessarily simple. God writes stories, but they are not always short stories, or moralistic fables in the tradition of Aesop. At the same time, they do have have a moral point.

It would be a mistake to assume the protagonist is identified as the one who goes from strength to strength — that would be the protagonist in a David story. Or rather, in a David story, the protagonist goes from weakness to strength to weakness to strength to weakness to strength. The protagonist in a Jeremiah story has a rougher time of it. Some rout armies and others are sawn in two. Job was a protagonist. The man born blind was not the antagonist — the Pharisees were.

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As wordsmiths, as writers, one of the first things we should do is recognize that the Christian faith is necessarily logocentric. Jesus is the Word, and the Word is with God and the Word is God. Just as the Pythagoreans were religious about their math, so also we worship the Word. We think math is cool as well, but only because it is actually a language.

We worship God the Father through the Word, we listen to what the Word tells us (in Scripture), we meditate on the fact that we have a sacred Book, full of words, and then we pay attention to what this Book tells us about words.

These comments are to be taken as a teaser only. There is obviously a lot more to be said. In fact, apart from that one half hour of silence in heaven (Rev. 8:1), the reality is that the eternal Word and our everlasting words are going to be world without end . . . word without end, amen. We should give ourselves to this.

So then, how do we write? For whom do we write? What is the point of writing?

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Read widely enough so that you are not provincial, but not so widely that you become some sort of deracinated cosmopolitan. Walls that are too narrow can stifle all thought and originality. Walls that are not there at all leave you defenseless. Marauders of literary fashion come galloping in, and there you are.

Loyalty of some sort is inescapable, and so if a writer doesn’t have a sense of people and place, then he will tend to substitute some literary school or other. Belonging to a particular stylistic school is perfectly necessary, of course. Once you start writing, your use of the passive voice will either be closer to Jane Austen’s or to Ernest Hemingway’s. If you are going to write, you have to write something, and you will have to do it in some way. And presumably, you would do so for a reason.

But the problem of deracination is still a serious one. If you have been paying attention to the earlier advice about living an actual life among other people, you will have been doing so as a Christian, then a family man, then an American, and then a writer, and so on, just as your friend the software engineer is a Christian first, a member of a different family, a Korean, and then a software engineer. All idolatries are sinful, as when a particular nation is put before Christ, but some idolatries are pathetic, as when a peculiar literary preference is.

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Having urged aspiring writers to try their hand at many different forms of the writer’s art, I must now introduce a necessary cautionary note. Competence in one area is not something that transfers automatically to another.

Examples of those who have failed to recognize this crowd instantly into our minds. The fact that Michael Jordan was one of the greatest basketball players ever does not mean he can play professional baseball. The fact that someone can play baseball, a mean second baseman for the Yankees, say, does not make him an expert on the latest superglidefusion razor blades. The fact that dad flips a Saturday morning flapjack in a manner second to none does not mean that he should be allowed to prepare the souffle for the big dinner. And the fact that a writer has sold a bazillion copies of one kind of writing does not mean that anybody wants to read his other stuff. Expertise in the possum hunter’s cookbook genre does not mean that a writer will have the nuanced ear that is needed for haiku. What might happen is the inadvertent creation of a new genre entirely — as may have happened, who knows, with redneck haiku. Speaking of which, through the magic of google, we can summon up an example almost instantly . . .

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My last bit of advice on the wordriht life was this:

“Keep a commonplace book. Write down any notable phrases that occur to you, or that you have come across. If it is one that you have found in another writer, and it is striking, then quote it, as the fellow said, or modify it to make it yours. If Chandler said that a guy had a cleft chin you could hide a marble in, that should come in useful sometime. If Wodehouse said somebody had an accent you could turn handsprings on, then he might have been talking about Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland. Tinker with stuff. Get your fingerprints on it.”

1. The writer’s life is a scavanger’s life. A little here, and a little there, diligently pursued, and pretty soon you have a lot of material. When you come across a striking phrase (and if you are reading properly this will happen a lot), make a note of it. Use it yourself in conversation. If there is no opportunity to use it in conversation, or in something you are writing, then you need not worry because you wrote it down in your commonplace book. You can always use it later.

2. It is dishonest to take the wit and wisdom of others and represent it as your own. That is form of theft. But it is not dishonest to have your expressions reflect the fact that you have spent a great deal of time with such people. At the same time, be scrupulously honest in your usage. If you are quoting Churchill or Chesterton (and why wouldn’t you?), then say, “As Chesterton put it . . .” If the expression is distinctive, but you don’t want to look like you live in Footnoteville, write, “As the fellow said . . .” Sometimes you cite by name, and other times you just point away from yourself. You would not say, “As someone once said, ‘When in the course of human events . . .” You could say, “she had just enough brains, as the fellow said, to make a jaybird fly crooked.” This last one is from Wodehouse, and he is also well known enough to cite, if you feel like it. But one of the reasons why I often generalize when using Wodehouse is that he was obviously a scavanger of American slang from the thirties. I am just keeping the ball in play.

This lets everybody know that you are not taking credit for the bon mot yourself. But if you are a mere copyist, instead of being an intelligent and engaged imitator, then, whenever you let fly, it will just be a bon not.

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Back in my callow youth, a number of months ago, when I set out seven basic pointers for writers, the sixth one was this:

“Learn other languages, preferably languages that are upstream from ours. This would include Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon. The brain is not a shoebox that ‘gets full,’ but is rather a muscle that expands its capacity with increased use. The more you know the more you can know. The more you can do with words, the more you can do. As it turns out.”

And so here are some additional thoughts on that.

1. God approves of translation, and by this I am referring to the process of translation. Obviously, some translations are better than others, and some are atrocious. But God approves of the attempt. The work itself is a good work. Good things come out of the process of moving house, from one set of linguistic thought forms to another. Jesus taught His disciples in Aramaic, but God wanted the “original” that we have received to be a Greek translation of that teaching. The canonical text of the Lord’s teaching is a translation, and not what originally came from the Lord’s mouth. This means that God approves of translations. We ought not to accept therefore the idea that “something is always lost in translation.” Sometimes, sure. But there are also many times when something is gained in translation.

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My fifth bit of advice for writers was this:

“Be at peace with being lousy for a while. Chesterton once said that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. He was right. Only an insufferable egoist expects to be brilliant first time out.”

But let’s unpack this a bit.

1. Concert pianists do what they do because they practiced scales for years. So most of the music that comes from them over the course of their lives gets “thrown away” in the practice studio. The quality of what you keep will be directly proportional to how much you are willing to throw away. Drills, scales and exercises should not be something you consider to be beneath you.

2. If a striking expression hits you, don’t hold back just because you are writing an email to your sister. If you think, “I need to save that kind of thing for my memoirs,” you are a stingy writer with a heart like a walnut, and you won’t have any memoirs to save it for. Who wants to read the memoirs of Old Walnut Heart? Writing ability is a developed and honed skill, and the more you develop and hone it, the more of it you will have. Writing as well as you can in every setting is the way to have reserves to draw on when it comes to writing for publication. Pianists don’t have a limited number of C major chords they are allowed to play in the course of their lives. They aren’t afraid of “running out.” Writing skill is not a zero sum game, and so you shouldn’t be afraid of using up all the colorful adjectives. Extending yourself in any situation is the best way to be able to extend yourself in every situation.

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My fourth bit of advice for aspiring writers was this:

“Stretch before your routines. If you want to write short stories, try to write Italian sonnets. If you want to write a novel, write a few essays. If you want to write opinion pieces for The Washington Post, then limber up with haiku.”

As with the others, this one can also be separated into seven things to think about.

1. This keeps content vibrant within the structure. If someone specializes in one form of writing only, the chances are good that he will master that structure, and the content he produces to fit within that structure will become pretty predictable. After that has been happening for a while, a school of thought will arise blaming the structure, and will demand freedom from such limitations and constrictions. But that is like noticing that your tap water to smell like sulphur, and therefore replacing your table pitcher.

When it comes to this, cross-pollination is good. Hybrids are good. Mutts are good. If, in order to be whatever it is you are writing, the structure has to be there, then the only thing that changes is the content. And when you have been a number of other places, the content of your conversation is more interesting. Who would you rather listen to, someone who has been around the world three times on a oil freighter, or someone who never came out of his basement — even if he had really sweet bandwidth down there? In this case, the world and the exotic locations are the forms of writing that you need to visit — whether or not you intend to live there.

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In my recent seven-fold set of admonitions for writers, my third bit of advice for them was this:

“Read mechanical helps. By this I mean dictionaries, etymological histories, books of anecdotes, dictionaries of foreign phrases, books of quotations, books on how to write dialog, and so on. The plot will usually fail to grip, so just read a page a day. If you think it makes you out to be too much of a word-dork, then don’t tell anybody about it.”

Under this head, allow me to break it out into seven separate elements, but with a brief caution first.

Having the eggs doesn’t mean that you know how to make the omelet. But if you don’t have the eggs, it doesn’t matter if you do know how to make the omelet. Writing is like cooking, and words are your ingredients. In order to write well, you need to have those ingredients, and you need to know those ingredients. And having them means collecting them, and studying them once you have them.

That said, here we go.

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Some months ago, I listed seven brief and basic pointers for writers, and have since wanted to take time to expand on each one of those points with seven observations under each head. So here is the second point, upon which I would like to enlarge.

Read. Read constantly. Read the kind of stuff you wish you could write. Read until your brain creaks. Tolkien said that his ideas sprang up from the leaf mold of his mind. These are the trees where the leaves come from.

So then, what about it? How should writers read?

1. The first thing is that writers should in fact be voracious readers. We live in a narcisstic age, which means that many want to have the praise that comes from having written, without the antecedent labor of actually writing, or the antecedent labor before that of having read anything. Mark Twain once defined a classic as a book that nobody wanted to read, but which everyone wanted to have read. It is a similar situation here. Wanting to write without reading is like wanting to grind flour without gathering wheat, like wanting to make boards without logging, and like wanting to have a Mississippi Delta without any tributaries somewhere in Minnesota. Output requires intake, and literary output requires literary intake.

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