A Problem with Christian Plots

Plot Device said:

Any time you actually cast God as a character, you have to give him lines.

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The original point was that there can be implied characters who become part of the story, but don't get "lines"--and yet as a part of the story, are expected (by the reader) to contribute to it.

I don't think Gordon was referring to throwaway lines. A character grunting "Jesus!" when hit by a canonball hasn't brought Jesus as a character into the story any more than another one saying, "As my great-Aunt Esmerelda always used to say..." requires Great-Aunt Esmerelda to contribute to the plot.

On the other hand, if the story begins with the heroine going over Esmerelda's things, and telling other characters about her and how wise and wonderful she was, we will expect Esmerelda, somehow, to contribute to the resolution of the story.

Note that no one expects Esmerelda to show up in person. After all, it was Esmerelda's memory that was brought into the story; it's her memory that must resolve the plot.

Similarly, praying or speaking to God/Jesus/Buddha/Mohammed doesn't really bring any of them into the story (unless they answer back). It does bring the character's devotion into the story; thus that devotion must contribute to the plot: Either as a device to get the story going (unanswered prayer) or a solution (an answer to the prayer in bad fiction, a deeper understanding by the pray-er that he or she had the answer all along, in better fiction)...or both.

The issue of actually having God as a speaking character, with His attribute of omnipotence, does cause challenges to the writer, just as writing for Superman (who is nearly omnipotent) does. In the latter case, writers solved the problem when they realized that Superman's powers are also his weaknesses. If you can't help but overhear your friends whenever they speak, how can you respect their privacy? Or, as in the TV show Smallville, what if your knowledge of the future prevents you from allowing your one, true love to marry you?

Similarly, God's omnipotence can be thought of, in story terms, as a weakness. For example, it means that He can not tell a lie. Any word He speaks becomes reality. His omniscience is also a problem, as theologians of the middle ages well knew: If God knows everything, He knew Adam and Eve would fall; and therefore, he might as well have sent everyone to Hell to start with because He knew that was where they would end up. How can an omniscient God create a meaningful "free will"? 'Cause it ain't really "free" if He knows the outcome. Then there's omnipresence and omnitemperance (I made up the last one as a substitute for "eternal". There might be a better term.) Both terms imply that God is "limited" to this Universe, since it contains all space and time. (Other Universes, by definition, must have their own, discreet, bodies of space and time.) If that's true, perhaps God has pals...certainly a jumping-off point for a story!

But as far as devout characters praying is concerned, I disagree that it brings "God" as a character into the story. It makes their devotion a part of the story, which is surely what the author had in mind.

I did write a story with God as a physical character with dialogue and the like, but I had to modify him and make him not the creator of the universe and all that jazz, because it wouldn't have fitted.

I think that the story of Judas, mentioned a few pages back, highlights the problem that the OP was talking about. Here you have something that is prophesied about (allegedly) for thousands of years and that is required for Jesus to fulfil his destiny. The Bible goes as far as to say that an evil spirit takes over when he reaches into the basket for bread at the same time as Jesus. Judas plays a more pivotal a role in the salvation of mankind than any others in the twelve, and at least grasped his assigned role with both hands, unlike that pantywaist Peter. Rather, however, than acknowledging the inherent conflict in the situation, the gospel writers make sure we have not one but two different allegorical deaths to make sure we know just how much of a bad man he was.

Much of the bible reads like many colourful and abused characters picking their way through a rat-maze laid with traps run by a God with equal measure spite and sadism. It's fantastically rich in inspiration for dreadfully abused characters, but it just demonstrates how hard it is to write the alleged character of the Christian God interfering in the world without either distorting him into a crazy sadist or making the story suck ass. It's not impossible, mind. Neil Gaiman's Murder Mysteries managed to present a God -- with dialogue and everything -- who didn't come across as a complete bastard.

However, writing God as he appears in the world today is easy, because he's simply a function of the devotion of your other characters. Most people don't experience a lucid and well rounded God, they experience a mystery that informs their actions. It's easy to write a God like that. CS Lewis and GK Chesterton have great Christian novels -- I recommend The Man Who Was Thursday especially. Probably the greatest Christian realist novel of all time, though, is Silence by Shusaku Endo, where God's appearance is so slight you could miss it. I think it's the best demonstration of the principle that, in order to write the character of God, you can't write about people succeeding, you have to write about failure, because it's in the crisis points of human existence that God finds his niche.

McDuff said:

I think it's the best demonstration of the principle that, in order to write the character of God, you can't write about people succeeding, you have to write about failure, because it's in the crisis points of human existence that God finds his niche.

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What a terrific, profound observation!

You are, of course, speaking of the traditional, Christian God. The New Age, co-creator God can stand side-by-side with His/Her creations. But He/She/It isn't considered to be a "person", just the self-aware gestalt of All That Is, which doesn't make Him/Her a good choice for a fictional character. It's understood by each character that that person's perception of "God" is their perception of their own highest aspirations and possibilities; so failure isn't phrased as "Why did You let this happen?" but rather as "Why did I set this up for myself--and what can I learn from it?"

That sounds like the pagan "god" would be pretty much what every well-rounded character in a book would be expected to have anyway. But yeah, the Christian God is for freaks and weirdos and losers. So much Christian fiction falls down because the authors want to be all aspirational and evangelical or something, so they try and sell all their Christian characters as Supermen with God-Power, and just end up with arcless wonders.

Y'know, not that I've thought about this a lot or that religion features heavily in my work or anything

Well, religion, epsecially spirituality, does figure heavily in at least two of my novels. In The Sun City Cannabis Club (on sale now!) one of the characters is a devout Pagan--to the continual consternation of her more traditional best friend. And in my new one, When Falls The Sky, the protagonist is traditionally raised but is forced, piece by piece, to release every last bit of dogma ever drilled into him. The result is a truly spiritual and enlightened person with no interest in "religion".

The result is a truly spiritual and enlightened person with no interest in "religion".

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Don't make me haunt you!

In order to clear all of this up, you'd have to get into a major religious debate about the nature of God, man and man's free will (and just about everything else).

The only problem with including God in a work tends to be the writer, not God. I don't read Christian novels (even being such myself) because frankly, they seem to fall flat for the same reason a story would if it tried too hard to 'sell' anything else. That seems to be the only real problem with it.

That being said, no, it would not be easy to portray God because ultimately, you've got to have the correct idea of Him in order to have Him in your work. Someone said, for instance, if He was in the work, and a character committed murder, than it would be like He did it. That's not even true in real life. God doesn't sit there and manipulate people like puppets. If He did, then surely He'd have made us all simply love Him and obey and respect Him, and that would've been the end of it. But He gave man a free will, which presupposes a second option, without which any love we had for Him would ultimately be meaningless. If you write a book where God appears to be responsible for sin, you're just going to look really ignorant. Even logically speaking, it doesn't pan out. But I'm sure there's a lot of that kind of blatant ignorance also 'stinking up' the fiction shelves out there.

I have seen a novel portray God realistically, and without problem, but I have qualms about a couple lines of dialog in the novel that come from sinful characters, so I cannot give the name. But I have seen it done, for the record.

It can be done. But not easily, and certainly not easily if you've got a head full of illogical, irrational misconceptions. God being perfect, wouldn't make half the blunders in reason and logic people often accuse Him of. (Heck, even the devil, being an angel and having an angelic intellect is far smarter and more logical than we human beings. So even accusing him of stupidity would make one look ignorant.)

Well, I guess it's like they say... "Write what you know."

Free Will vs. Predestination (i.e. A character who knows what is going to happen ahead of time and has the power to change everything, therefore making everything that happens His choice even if only because He allowed it to happen when He could have changed it) is something which requires a degree of just throwing everything to the "I don't understand it but I have faith" bucket of non-thought. While this can fit in a personal philosophy, it doesn't work in literature. It doesn't matter if one of your characters is God, you still have to run the damn story and make it work as a block of prose with an underlying narrative.

Even the Bible's portrayal of God doesn't portray Him very well. It's all over the place, you've got Genesis vs Job vs Ezekiel vs Exodus, then the Christians came and ballsed the whole thing up with the Jesus character. As narrative it's ramshackle and difficult to understand without making lots of jumps and leaps and fitting it into a pre-prepared framework of interpretation. The conclusions of the Catholics or Evangelicals or Lutherans do not, despite what the proponents of those belief systems say, spring unbidden from the text in the same way that the characters of Hamlet or MacBeth do. In order to write a God as consistent and well constructed as Hamlet one would have to discard much of the, well, the richness of the Bible if we're being charitable or the contradictory complexity if we're not, in order to make the character into one that serves a literary purpose rather than one that exists as an object for study in theological colleges.

It's easy to think that God has been "well written" in a story if the character agrees with your own personal conception of God, but this is not necessarily an indication of actual good writing.