Good Writers Borrow

T. S. Eliot famously said, “Good writers borrow. Great writers steal.”

As it turns out, Pablo Picasso and Oscar Wilde are also credited with saying the same thing—which perhaps proves how true the saying is. While we actually can’t find any evidence that Eliot made this statement, he did say say something very much like it:

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.*

What did he mean? In a way, he’s saying all writers, indeed all artists, take inspiration from the past. Bad writers take something from the past and make it less than it was, turning it into nostalgia, sentimentality or sensationalism. We can all think of examples.

Eliot went on to say, “The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”*

Good writers take from the past and add to it, creatively turning it into something different and perhaps deeper. Everyone borrows when creating a new work. No one is entirely original. That’s not the point.

The point is what do we do when we borrow. Art comes not from developing something completely different but from using the materials of the past to make something in the present which speaks to the future.

*T. S. Eliot, “Philip Massinger,” in The Sacred Wood  (Methuen: London; Barnes & Noble: New York, 1920, 1960), 125.

Les Misérables You Never Knew

With the upcoming broadcast on PBS of the final episode of Les Misérables, I offer an excerpt from A Deeper Look at James by my wife, Phyllis, and me. We compare the musical with Victor Hugo’s book, but the same is true for this new six-part Masterpiece Theatre production. While I posted this six years ago when the movie version of the musical came out, this new version also leaves out a key part which explains so much.

The musical based on Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables begins in France in the early 1800s. An ex-con, Jean Valjean, is on his way to see his probation officer after nineteen years on a chain gang. He stops at the house of a bishop, where he is welcomed warmly with a hot meal and a night’s stay; Valjean repays this kindness by stealing the bishop’s silverware. The next day he is captured by the police and returned to the bishop for confirmation of his thievery.

Yes, the bishop confirms, this man stayed with him the previous night. Then the bishop turns to Valjean and asks why he didn’t take the candlesticks too. They could have been sold for two hundred francs. He should have taken them along with the flatware. The police are shocked. What Valjean told them was true? He hadn’t stolen the silver? It had been given to him, an ex-con, by the bishop? They can hardly believe it. But the bishop insists and sends the police on their way without the thief.

Before Valjean leaves, however, the bishop tells him, “Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil but to good. It is your soul I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!”* As a result, Valjean’s life is radically transformed, and we see him sacrificing dramatically for others through the rest of the story.

The over sixty million people worldwide who have seen and heard the musical based on Hugo’s novel are just as astonished as the police at the bishop’s amazing act of grace. In the face of being clearly wronged, the bishop does not call for punishment but literally redeems Valjean, buying him back from imprisonment and darkness and setting him free for a new life. We wonder if we could ever have done such a thing. How could the bishop have suddenly had this stroke of wisdom, courage and strength to give and forgive so generously?

The answer is that this was not a spontaneous act of mercy. It was behavior shaped and honed over years. This encounter between the bishop and Valjean is where the musical begins, but it is not where the novel begins.

In the novel we learn that years before, the bishop had opened his spacious residence to the patients from the overcrowded hospital next door, while he himself moved into the tiny hospital. He walked to make pastoral visits so he could distribute his own carriage allowance to poor mothers, widows and orphans. When a subordinate refused to visit a murderer on death row, the bishop did not rebuke the subordinate but went to the murderer and showed him how to be reconciled with God. He even convinced a gang of thieves he once encountered to make contributions to the poor.

For over fifty dense pages Hugo chronicles dozens of similar episodes in the bishop’s life before he ever meets Valjean. The dramatic act did not emerge from nowhere but was consistent with a lifelong pattern.

This is the very point James seeks to make in his New Testament letter. Character does not result from a single dramatic act of wisdom, and grace is not fully constructed overnight. Rather, they are built, brick by brick and board by board, throughout a life.

*Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (New York: Signet, 1987), p. 106.

Taken from A Deeper Look at James by Andrew T. and Phyllis J. Le Peau. Copyright(c) 2013 by Andrew T. and Phyllis J. Le Peau. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, PO Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515. www.ivpress.com

English Made Fun

Benjamin Dreyer is the Stephen Colbert of grammar, style, and punctuation—informative while always being cheerfully acerbic.

When he tells us in Dreyer’s English to never use actually, it is “because, seriously, it serves no purpose I can think of except to irritate.” When offering examples, Dreyer also gives us cause to smile. Honorary titles should be capitalized, as in, “Please don’t toss me in the hoosegow, Your Honor.”

You’ll have fun with this book whether or not you care or know that “the verb in a relative clause agrees with the antecedent of the relative pronoun”—not least because Dreyer hates that stuff too! Even as a decades-long copyeditor he still has to look things up in dictionaries and style guides. We should too!

His stance toward the nature of rules in English is one I have long advocated to authors. They are helpful, but don’t take them too far because spoken English profoundly affects written English (eventually, usually). And he chirpily breaks, bends, and bruises them all the time—once, for example, suggesting we “give it a good think,” right there in front of God and everybody.

Memorable tips abound. How do you tell if a sentence is passive (with the likely result of changing it to active)? If you can add “by zombies” to the end. “The floors were swept, the beds made, the rooms aired out.” Yep. Passive.

And here I can now confess that I could never keep straight the rule about restrictive and nonrestrictive commas because neither can Dreyer. But he has a dandy new name for it that makes all the difference.

Use the “only” comma, as he calls it, when the noun in question is unique. So “Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert, was born in 1843” because Lincoln only had one eldest son. But if more than one son could be under discussion and must be named for clarity—no comma. Thus “Lincoln in the Bardo concerns Lincoln’s son Willie.”

He also festoons his text with, well, I wouldn’t call them explanatory footnotes. They are more like asides. After offering three acceptable options for use of a possessive he concludes with, “You choose.†” At the bottom of the page we find, “†Psst. Take the middle option.”

What every one of you is wondering, of course, is how Dreyer’s English differs from my Write Better (available October 2019, since you asked). Dreyer’s book is a wonderful journey into the details of punctuation, grammar, and use of numbers, augmented by many lists of misspelled, misused, and miscellaneous words—all whimsically annotated. I say almost nothing about these things.

My focus is on larger strategies for writing which Dreyer does not —such as, how to find openings, focus on readers, develop a structure, battle writer’s block, be persuasive, make a compelling title, increase our creativity, use metaphors, and say more by saying less. The last part of Write Better considers how the act of writing affects our relationship with God.

The two books should be enjoyable and valuable companions.

The Struggle of Our Better Angels

We seem to live in unusually contentious times. Tensions between established ethnic groups and against new immigrant groups seems on the rise. Many wonder if peace and justice still have a place in our future.

In The Soul of America, Jon Meacham says the lens of history can offer a corrective perspective. Our current situation is not unprecedented. By touching on key conflicts and changes over the centuries, Meacham shows that our better angels have always had to struggle to overcome our lesser instincts.

The Civil War to end slavery was one such struggle. But the battle continued on new fronts, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries being one of the most obvious. The decades-long, hard fought struggle to gain women the vote in 1920 was another high point except that it took so much effort to achieve what now seems so obvious.

The powerful fear-mongering of media-savvy Senator “Play Fast and Loose with the Facts” Joe McCarthy in the 1950s was certainly a low point. Yet politicians of both parties were finally willing to challenge him. Soon thereafter the determined efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and President Lyndon Johnson to overcome fear led to the passing of the landmark Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act of 1964 and 1965.

Throughout our history the doors of immigration have also alternately opened wider and narrowed through many cycles. The shameful internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was followed in the 1960s by widening the doors of immigration from Asia.

The three-steps-forward-two-steps-back nature of American history is not new nor is it easy. Meacham suggests nonetheless that this should be cause for hope about our present situation. After all, it will not last.

We are far from a perfect nation. But we are a country rooted in the propositions that “all men are created equal,” that all have a right to equal justice under the law, and that the freedoms of religion, speech, the press, and the right to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances shall not be abridged.

As we strive to live up to our aspirations for the future, says Meacham, we do well to remember our past.

Women in Mark’s Gospel

Ancient writers are known for sometimes considering women to be minor, unimportant, and perhaps not fully human. In the Gospels, that is far from the case. Women are not presented as lesser or one-dimensional beings. They are presented as people who show the full range of human agency, experience, and potential. Consider the array of characters we find just in the Gospel of Mark.

Sometimes women are simply recipients of grace such as Peter’s sick mother-in-law who was healed by Jesus or Jairus’s daughter whom Jesus raised from the dead (Mark 1:30-31; 5:21-24, 35-43). They are no less deserving of divine attention than men, regardless of their age or position.

In other cases women are honored overtly for taking public initiative to show their faith against the pressures of culture and circumstances. These include the woman who was sick for twelve years, the Gentile woman whose daughter was possessed, the widow who gave sacrificially to the Temple treasury, and the woman who anoints Jesus at Simon’s house with very costly perfumed oil (Mark 5:25-34; 7:24-30; 12:41-44; 14:3-9).

At least one woman is presented as evil. Herodias had long wanted to have John the Baptist killed for speaking against her divorce from Philip and marriage to Herod. When the opportunity arose, she callously used her daughter to have John executed without cause (Mark 6:17-29).

Women are also shown to have a complex mixture of faith and fear. Several bravely stood near the cross when Jesus’ male followers had deserted him. Yet two days later, after seeing the angel at the empty tomb, they fled in terror, afraid to tell anyone what they saw and heard (Mark 15:40-41; 16:1-8).

In short, women are presented much as men are—sometimes passive, sometimes evil, sometimes flawed, sometimes courageous. In the ancient world women were rarely allowed to hold positions of responsibility and were often treated much like servants. In contrast Jesus and the Gospel writers see women as full participants in the drama of humanity and of the kingdom.

New Look, New Book

This fall I’m releasing my new book, Write Better. To help celebrate that, we’re giving Andy Unedited a big facelift. What’s the new book about then?

Writing is hard work. So in Write Better I want to make the job easier, especially for nonfiction writers, and help them do it better. I’ve loved words, reading, and writing almost my whole life, and want to share what I’ve learned with others.

Why Write Better when there are already many good books on writing? First, many books on writing are actually memoirs of the writing life without much help on how to write. Many other helpful books get into the details of grammar, punctuation, and very specific style issues without considering broader topics. Write Better instead considers the larger issues of craft and art in writing, offering practical strategies on a wide range of topics.

Second, few books consider so deeply the spirituality of writing—that is, how the act of writing and publishing affects our life with God. The very personal and very public nature of writing can make us vulnerable in many ways. So I explore how knowing who we are and who we are in God make an enormous difference, as one example, when facing success or failure.

What are some of the things you’ll learn from Write Better?

  • Coming up with strong openings and closings can be difficult. I not only show the wide variety that are possible but offer very practical strategies for developing the best ones.
  • Being creative is not the sole domain of people who seem to have especially creative personalities. It is for all of us. In the book I show how we can develop these skills by following some simple, concrete practices.
  • Using story and narrative is vital for nonfiction writing, not just for fiction. You’ll find how to use narrative to touch not just the mind but the whole person, moving readers not just emotionally but to live differently.
  • Persuasion is often a dirty word these days. In the book I suggest how this time-honored skill can and should be redeemed and rehabilitated.
  • Working to develop the right tone in our writing can set our writing apart and give it a power that lasts in the lives of readers. In Write Better you’ll find out how.
  • On the issue of spirituality, writers can often bounce between great insecurity and a sense of superiority. I consider how to nurture, for example, the spiritual disciplines of humility and thankfulness which are especially important in properly ordering our relationships with God, with others, and with ourselves.

Having spent my whole career as a writer and editor, I am happy to offer a book on craft and character for writers because who we are as writers is as important as how and what we write.

The Seedbeds of Extremism

How frustrated are you? Really, how frustrated are you with the culture, the government, the economy, the church, your world, your career, your life? If you are a lot, you are a candidate for becoming a true believer.

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In his classic book The True Believer Eric Hoffer unpacks the dynamics of mass movements–who they attract, the phases they go through, the types of leaders they possess, how different groups react, and how they move forward or fail. His working hypothesis is “that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own accord” (p. xii).

They are so dissatisfied with their present world that they are willing to wreck it for only the possibility of a new future. Their dissatisfaction extends to themselves–and as a result they are ready to give themselves over unconditionally to something greater than they are (their party, their nation, their religion, their race). Two generations after Hoffer’s book, J. D. Vance hints at some of these themes in Hillbilly Elegy.

But leaders and followers grow out of somewhat different soils of frustration. Hoffer observes, “Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some” (p. 29). Thus leaders of mass movements are often people of modest talent who yearn to join the elite but have been shut out.

When I first read this book fifty years ago, I thought it was a book of history about Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, the French Revolution, the Reformation, the rise of Islam–and so a book about a distant past. On rereading it, the book feels as current as today’s Twitter feed where political and religious true believers so often dominate.

It is hard to categorize this book. Hoffer, a longshoreman by trade, was called a self-educated philosopher but the book is more one of social and political psychology. He is dense, pithy, provocative, and intensely insightful. Each sentence is like an aphorism that could bloom into a book.

Consider one example: “Equality without freedom creates a more stable social pattern than freedom without equality” (p. 33).

Or this: “It is the sacred duty of the true believer to be suspicious. He must be constantly on the lookout for saboteurs, spies and traitors” (p. 125).

The True Believer was one of the most important books of the twentieth century. It deserves to be one of the most important of the twenty-first.

Thinking with Grace

In a world of extremist language on all sides, what saddens me most is Christians who fail to speak with grace, humility, wisdom, and love. In short, who fail to act like Christ. No, actually, what saddens me most is when I fail to.

Alan Jacobs puts his own advice into practice in How to Think. He winsomely walks us through important dynamics regarding how we can and should think and talk when we believe something strongly.

Jacobs highlights, for example, that “when people commend someone for ‘thinking for herself,’ they usually mean ‘ceasing to sound like people I dislike in starting to sound more like people I approve of.'” They forget that we are all influenced by others and by our communities. “Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social” (37). And terrifyingly social, because changing our minds can mean losing our friends, our family, or our community.

No one wants to be completely open-minded either. “No one wants to hear anyone say that, while there is certainly general social disapproval of kidnapping, we should keep an open mind on the subject” (126). And no one wants to hear that thinking requires balance.

Sometimes facts or reasons do come to light which should alter our views. We want to have commitment in our convictions along with the humility and honesty to hear different perspectives.

If we can shrink others to less than human or more than evil, then we can absolve ourselves of the need to open our ears and our minds. To listen takes courage. Yet, “working toward truth is one of life’s great adventures” (150). In that lies hope.