Moral Technicalities & Writing Fiction

[stormiel]

When I was younger I used to say that I lived by technicalities. I considered myself an expert on finding grey areas. I think most people are.

When I first started writing fictional stories I often found ways to put my characters in morally sticky situations. Especially male and female characters. My train of thought was usually along the lines of how far I could push something before it crossed the line of fully breaking the rules.

Now in writing, that often becomes necessary to put our characters in morally sticky situations but the we handle it is what (in my opinion) separates us as Christians who write and Christian Writers. There are two options we can use the moral technicalities:

A. To let our characters get away with murder.
or
B. To use the technicalities to show our characters making the difficult choices in a way that points to Christ, even at the expense of our character's desires.


I have an idea for a scene in my book where Character A. and Character B. are married. Character B. was kidnapped immediately after the ceremony. Two years later Character A. finds Character B. and rescues and finds out that her memory has been wiped. Character B. has no memories of her husband, her faith or any hard facts about her life. So at this point she is basically starting over. Character A. tries to help her. Over time Character B. becomes more comfortable with him to the point where she tries to take things to a physical level. Character A. even though he wants to, he knows that she has no memory of him prior to their last few months and that she has no intention of real commitment. She just wants to make him happy, in a way she wants to repay him for helping her. He doesnt let things go that far. And he explains his heart on the issue. That he wants her love, he wants the bond that they once had and is willing to take the time to re-build it if she is willing to give it a try.

He could have given in. By technicality were married after all. It would have been much easier to write that way and would probably would be what the majority of readers wanted, but doing it this way it gives me a chance to show Character A.'s heart and desires. It also gives me a chance as to show that there should be a deep love and commitment, not just a technicality (that they are in fact married). It allows me to show the reason behind the madness without preaching at the audience. I think it allows me to show the beauty of it and create something deeper and better between the characters.

If we want to write good stories, I don't think its really possible keep our characters out of the sticky spots but its up to us how they come out of them.

Does anyone have any thoughts? Has anyone ran into any similar problems or solutions?

[fluke]

I completely agree. As writers, we throw our characters into the crucible and see what comes out. I have characters who would absolutely hate me for the messes I put them in (Shylocke is looking at me right now and trying to snag a crossbow off of Bolaim). The question is how do they come out of the situation? They can't be the same as before, but do they come out better or worse and why? I have characters who make the wrong choices and then have to live with the consequences of their actions.

As Christians, we know that God can overcome even the circumstances that we put ourselves in. Take a character in a story that I just wrapped up. He came to a fork in his life 10 years ago. Tragedy hit and he knowingly took the road away from God, thinking it would get him what he wants. Concurrent with his return to faith, he shouts, "What have I gained! [My choice] has cost me my soul, and I have lost everything!"

On the other hand, there is a webcomic I follow (more out of morbid curiosity now then because I like the story which started with such promise) where the author (let's call him M) absolutely refuses to put his A-level heroes in situations where they could grow. There have been times when he was so close to putting D (the main character) in a situation where he could really be a hero. But no, M pulls back at the last minute because D always does the right thing.

I really like the situation you describe and how you resolve it. The easy road is rarely the one that leads where we need to go.

[Kristen]

I agree, fluke. And the hard road usually makes for better stories, as your webcomic friend has failed to learn.

[Kessie]

Interesting moral dilemma. I love "weird romance" stories like that. I'm glad your hero had the moral fiber to not take advantage of his wife. Not all characters will, and that's where the fun of characters' choices comes in. Like, if he did take advantage of her, then she might lose her respect for him, and their relationship might slide downhill. I don't know, it depends on the characters.

Lately I explored a character who was sent back in time to kill someone to prevent that person from causing an event that wrecks the future. But he finds that the guy he's supposed to kill is actually engaged in preventing some serious crimes, and is really a nice guy. So the time traveler withdraws and is very troubled by his choice. If he doesn't kill this heroic character, the future will be ruined.

The time traveler's choice not to kill the hero results in the loss of the time traveler's adopted sister. Saving the world is costly sometimes.

[stormiel]

That's interesting that "M." wont put his characters in situations where they can grow. That's kind of the fun part of writing isn't it? Maybe my idea of fun is a little weird lol. It seems that most people think that Christian fiction cant compete with what's out in the secular market. I think it can, but we need more writers that are willing to put their characters through the fire, and sometimes make bad choices. Sometimes it makes it hard to write a situation without getting into some inappropriate territory. However, it does make a good challenge (getting the point across without writing something dirty.) Jeff Gerke's book "The Art & Craft of Writing Christian Fiction" Has a couple of great examples in the part about profanity in the back where he talks about making the characters profane but not the language. In both examples it cuts off to leave the reader to their imagination before anything goes too far, yet still leaves you with a perfectly clear picture of what that character is like and what their intentions are.

[stormiel]

Kessie, that sounds like an interesting story. Have you published any of your work?

[Kessie]

Ted Dekker has some completely psychopathic characters who never swear. But the words they use, as well as their insane behavior conveys how evil they are. I've read lots of evil characters who don't use bad language. Vampires, for instance, don't seem to use a lot of bad language (depending on the author). But you know they're stinking evil.

I've published lots of my work--on fanfiction.net. I'm working on writing some stuff that other people might want to read. The latest moral dilemma my characters have had is what I call the "Spiderman Complex". Like, once Spidey knew he had powers, he had to break up with MJ because the bad guys targeted her. (Except it doesn't quite work the way he thinks.)

My chronomancer character sees that his personal timeline ends unexpectedly soon. So he checks his death event and sees that his werewolf side murders his girlfriend, forcing the other heroes to execute him. This forces him to try to alter that future by any possible means, the first being to break up with his girlfriend. With all of the emotional anguish involved.

[metalikhan]

Oct 22, 2012 18:26:04 GMT -5 Kessie said:

Ted Dekker has some completely psychopathic characters who never swear. But the words they use, as well as their insane behavior conveys how evil they are. I've read lots of evil characters who don't use bad language. Vampires, for instance, don't seem to use a lot of bad language (depending on the author). But you know they're stinking evil.

Exactly, Kessie.

Another route around the swearing issue for SFF writers is to customize whatever bad language a character utters to the world s/he's in. In Herbert's Dune books, dehydrate was a profanity for the Arrakis Fremen because of the extreme aridity of that world. Sounds odd just to say it here, but when you're reading Dune, the impact of that one word doesn't strike you as odd or silly at all.

[Bainespal]

Oct 15, 2012 5:56:38 GMT -5 stormiel said:

I have an idea for a scene in my book where Character A. and Character B. are married. Character B. was kidnapped immediately after the ceremony. Two years later Character A. finds Character B. and rescues and finds out that her memory has been wiped. Character B. has no memories of her husband, her faith or any hard facts about her life. So at this point she is basically starting over.

That brings up some intriguing themes. Is the marriage still legitimate and valid, even though she doesn't remember it? This raises the question about her faith. Is her salvation real even if she has no memory of ever being a Christian and no longer knows anything about the Gospel? We know that marriage is used in the Bible as a metaphor of the spiritual relationship between Christ and the Church, or between the Christian and God, so this is really deep. Does one's memory or lack of memory affect the reality of one's relationship with spouse or with Creator? For that matter, does faith really have anything to do with what you know in your mind? These are great questions for Christian speculative fiction to explore. My thought is that memory or mental acknowledgement has nothing to do with faith whatsoever.

[stormiel]

Those are exactly the questions that I have about writing it. It's going to mean a lot of time reading my Bible and a lot of time spent in prayer before I can even write this story out completely. I may have to scrap the idea. What I'm thinking though is that even though this character has no memory of what happened. In her spirit she knows that God is real, but her own motives create some interesting opportunities for her to see how deep her own corruption runs. For example if she were to act violently out of anger, she would feel a deep sense of remorse and would be compelled to find out why. I think I would treat the marriage the same way as faith. The marriage would be valid but not acted upon until it was remembered or renewed. With her faith she would still know deep down that it was real and that she loved God but she would be desperate to find out more about God. Or she might act certain ways that go against what's normal and wonder why. The other characters would be instrumental in showing her what God is like and in helping her remember who she once was. I've only seen one other example of tampering with the memory of a character's faith in fiction. That was Kathy Tyer's book "Wind and Shadow" so I guess my idea is not original but it is going to be fun to write about.

[newburydave]

This raises the further question about how much God will allow human agency to accomplish. To put it in Church-speak, how far will the Lord allow Satan to go in trying and testing his children.

Or to put it another way, under God's providence, what can actually be done by human science, as opposed to what can we imagine.

One of the famous paradoxes which unbelievers throw at us is "Can God create a rock (a mass) which is too large (massive) for Him to move?" If you try to reason this out using human logic you will just run yourself in a circle and never reach a conclusion.

What this example does prove though is that is it possible for our fallen minds to conceive of a theoretical situation which is obviously impossible.

I'd like to open another thread of this discussion using only divine logic and reason. To do this we can only use scripture and the principles of scripture.

Fact 1: All humans are subject to Divine providence guiding them. "The steps of a (good) man are ordered of the Lord."

Fact 2: Jesus promised that He would not lose anyone who put their trust in Him.

Fact 3: God's wisdom and power is greater than all of the wisdom and power of men.

Fact 4: There have been many examples of elderly saints who are so far gone in dementia that they don't know their familes but when Jesus name was mentioned they still knew Him.

Fact 5: The witness of the Spirit, spoken of in Romans, is a direct, supernatural communication of the Soveriegn, Omnipotent God directly to the souls of each of His children.

Fact 6: The soul is not dependent on the body to exist. Our soul is a spiritual essence not a physical construct. Though tied to our body during life is not controlled by our body.

Fact 7: If you've read Foxes Book of Martyrs you know that nearly all of the martyrs received the Lords help under their torments so that they didn't feel the pain of their tortures but rather were filled with Joy and the pleasure of sharing Jesus' sufferings. God made them transcend the physical facts of their martyrdom.

Fact 8: God will not allow Himself to violate our free will in matters of faith and devotion to Him. He created us as free moral agents and He won't take that away from us. Will He allow agents of Satan (the evil people are agents of Satan because they advocate for evil things) to do what He won't let himself to do. Consider that we are each personally are part of the rewards of Jesus' sufferings.

I believe that this is a start to defining the problem, it is not an easy problem to deal with.

**************

Now our Calvinist bretheren, who believe in Sovereign Predestination, won't have a problem with this question. Salvation is all about God's choosing and what happens to us doesn't make any difference in His choice.

However for those of us who are more of the Free Grace or Wesleyan Arminian theological perspective this is a real conundrum.

I confess that the only way I can see to resolve this is to invoke the supernatural aspects of:

1. the nature of our soul, (cannot be "wiped" by a naturalistic process that works on the physical makeup of our brain);

2. and/or God's witness to our souls (independent of our physical circumstances)

He talks to us by non-natural means which are not dependent on our memory, knowledge or resources. He spoke to me unexpectedly, when I was still an atheist, in a very unlikely situation. That is what started me on the road to seek Him. He speaks to me every day, multiple times, now that I'm his child.

He is a sovereign, omnipresent personality not some dead doctrinal idea which we must "carry" by our intellectual processes.

3. and/or God's Sovereign, Omnipotent Providential care over us. We may forget him (backsliders try to) but He never forgets us and His care over us is continuous.

Miraculous providential care and supernatural healing are part of the normal experience of Christians who live close to him and even nominal church members find these things when they call out to him in extreme danger.

*************

I know some of these things are supposed to be tropes, but shall we hew to the line of the Scriptures and the actual lives of God's children, or will we be frightened off by what we think will be the mocking of the world?

God has worked miracles by my hands during my various work assignments in his kingdom. When the impossible was needed for His reasons, He worked the impossible. I just happened to be his instrument in the midst of the situation.

****************8

On a larger issue, I think we need to be careful not to write conflict that goes beyond what God would allow the Devil to do in attacking us. Consider Job and David, there's a good template there for the kinds of things that God does allow.

I don't think this is any more than some more suggestions, hardly a definitive argument.

Hope it helps

Write on beloved Siblings

SGD
dave

[stormiel]

I'm probably going to either alter the idea or scrap it completely. The idea came from when I saw some writers (in other places) bend the rules to write some inappropriate stuff. So I wanted to kinda turn that idea and use it for good instead of evil so to speak but it has a lot of other aspects I didn't fully think through before posting. I love Jesus and I want to use my writing to glorify Him. I think this idea probably does go a bit too far (if left unaltered). The above post as well as the post by Bainespal have been very helpful

[Kessie]

Storm: You could always just make it into a short story. Short stories are all about posing questions and never giving an answer. :-)

[Kristen]

Stormiel, don't give up. You've got an intriguing concept that raises some important questions. It may need to go on the back burner and simmer awhile until it comes together, but don't give up on it. It has a lot of potential.

[newburydave]

Stormiel;

I really like the concept of your title to this thread by the way. From the standpoint of Pastoral Theology and Pulpit Homiletics, the technical details are the most important parts of Christian teaching and living. When Jesus talked about the Apostles "binding and Loosing" things on Earth the issue He was dealing with was the Jewish authority of the Rabbi's to set the "practical rules of living" for their disciples.

What he said them gave them, the God chosen leaders of the Christian Church, the authority to tell the disciples under their pastoral care how they must live in order to be consistent with their faith and please God. IMHO this is what Paul called the "milk of the gospel" [KJV] or "elementary principles of Christ" [NKJV] (as opposed to the strong meat) in Heb. 6:1. These are the basics of Christian Virtue (Divine power to live in a morally excellent way) that Peter tells us is the result of Genuine saving faith (2 Pet. 1:5).

In this sense I feel that you have taken hold of the central key of writing effective Christian themes.

*************

RE: your conundrum with the plot device you propose.

I don't think that the idea of human science "attempting" to suppress a believers memory, faith and personality is in itself wrong to use. Christians do suffer debilitating stokes, head injuries, chemical trauma from the harmful drug interractions, etc. which render them "temporarily" unable to remember themselves; but medical literature abounds in accounts of people who made sufficient recovery from such things to function again.

I think that the Christian themes could be in the recovery process. For instance:

- God speaks to the mind wiped wife and restores her faith and makes her recognized her husband. In a sense God superanturally breaks the mind blocks that the captors installs.

This can be totally God's sovereign action (like the conversion of Sammy Morris) or the result of your hero using 2 Cor. 10:3-6 as a battle plan and a promise for his wife.

- The evil scientist's technology does all it can but is ineffectual in truly erasing her soul. She goes along with her captors for some good story reason, but drops the charade as soon as hubby comes to the rescue.

This may hi-light the difference between believers and unbelievers. Believiers are hid with christ in God; also not Homo Sapiens any more but rather Homo Espiritus, alive in the transcendent Spirit of Christ. No fleshly science can touch that. Unbelievers can be "mind wiped" because they are trusting in the flesh and living by the strength of the flesh. They can be overcome by fleshly power. We of the spirit cannot be overcome by power of the flesh.

- Hubby could get one of the Christian Seers (you do have those don't you? How can there be Christians without Seers?) pray over her for healing and God answers with healing.

Talk about ordinary miracles. The elders anointing and praying for healing is one that every disciple has access to in the church. I've seen many miraculous healings wrought by this means during my Christian life. In some of them I was the instrument that God used.

- God could send providential "events and people" across her path to reawaken her real personhood from the programming that the evil scientists tried to imprint in her mind. (awakening memories that break down the programming) This is a method I've seen used even by secular writers to address this idea of imposed personalitie/hypnotic suggestions.

*************

There are many possible scenarios you could use which are exampled in the scriptures.

I believe the general principle here is the power of Satan, manifest in the fleshly power of secular science, arrayed against the power of God, manifest in the power of the Holy Ghost who is God Himself mainfest in, co-dwelling with us in our vessels of clay. The Christian theme that I see in your proposed plot device is that God is able to overcome all the power of the devil.

So my brother, don't cast away a good plot device, rework it into a stronger testimony to the reality of our Christ.

Write on Bro

SGD
dave