Tag Archives: Dorothy Sayers

Creativity’s A Funny Thing

If you have a story to tell, tell it. If you have an image to draw, draw it. If you have a song to sing, sing it. A poem, a sculpture, a wall hanging, a garden . . . Whatever.

Maybe you’ll be able to share it with the world. Maybe not. But strike while the muse is hot. Use it, or it will disappear, and you’ll be the poorer, if not the world.

Creativity is a subjective process, not like a journey from Point A to Point B that you plot on a map. The fulfilment of the creative process requires discipline, to be sure, but it is never tamed or owned, only borrowed from the Creator.

“The components of the material world are fixed; those of the world of imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction or rearrangement of what went before. This represents the nearest approach we experience to ‘creation out of nothing,’ . . . Thus, Berdyaev is able to say: ‘God created the world by imagination.’”
                                       —Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Barbara Pym’s Quiet Books

Quartet in Autumn

I recently read a review of the novelist Barbara Pym’s life. Pym, writing in the middle of the twentieth century, wrote gentle stories of ordinary people coping with life.

Pym’s books sold well enough until the mid-sixties. Then, as she said, rather than the ordinary lives she wrote about, writers turned to juicier subjects. Her novels, which she continued to write, were rejected for the next fourteen years.

In 1977 she returned to popularity. Her Quartet in Autumn (previously rejected several times) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Advice to writers these days emphasizes suspense. We must hook the reader from the first sentence and the first paragraph and in every scene thereafter. This is good advice if not taken too narrowly, else we end up refusing to write anything except murder and mayhem.

I enjoy a good mystery, even an occasional dead body, but I’m especially taken with a mystery like Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers. People are murdered in other Peter Whimsey stories, but Gaudy Night is a story of relationships and gray areas of right and wrong.

I have found that with most suspense novels, I’m now apt to skim, even skip, large sections in order to satisfy my curiosity about the end. Having finished, I rarely ponder them. My preference is increasingly for quiet writing, something to savor instead of hurry through. A desire for slow food versus fast food for those in the fast lane.

Dorothy Sayers And The Themes Of My Novels

 

Dorothy Sayers subtitled her book, The Mind of the Maker, as “An examination of God the creator reflected in the artistic imagination.” (Reviewed in From My Bookshelf on this site.) In this book, she dissects her own novel, Gaudy Night, a detective novel, into three parts: 1) A puzzle to be solved (the crime); 2) A human perplexity dealing with the relationships of the protagonists; 3) A conflict of values.

At novel’s end, the first, the puzzle is solved. In the second, the protagonists develop a new relationship, with possibilities for good or evil. Finally, the collision of values, is not “solvable” but the conflicting values, from their tension, may create a new, stronger value.

I applied Sayers’ ideas to my own novels. The romance, mystery, or other plot finds resolution. New relationships (both between the protagonists and between the protagonists and God) begin a growing process, that offer hope but not completion. Finally, a background theme in many of my novels is that of the Christian’s struggle in a postmodern world of shifting values.

In Singing in Babylon, the American protagonists feel exiled by their Christian faith within a country predominantly of another religion. When they return to the U.S., however, they sense exile from their consumer-hypnotized fellow citizens.

Quiet Deception unfolds in this country during the 1970’s, a boundary between a time of generally accepted common values and the time after, when those values changed and collided with others. Kim chooses a path already becoming less favored, one, in a cultural sense, of exile.

In Searching for Home, the protagonists constantly must exchange one home for another and eventually discover that the idea of home is at best a spiritual destination. No permanent home exists in this world.

My characters operate in a world that has lost its way, one in which values, including those common to most religious faiths, are questioned. Kate and Philip, Kim and Todd, Hannah and Patrick are remnant exiles. They struggle with the worth of old values as cultures collide.