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by Faith and Friends, Pat Taylor Ellison Readies Four Books for Publishing Click here to return to the Church Innovations web site. Two issues ago I began a story of a writing leave. This installment will conclude the story of how I wrote, and conclude with my deepest gratitude. I left off last time in the middle of a remarkable moment in writing: trying to get something to happen the way I thought it should, but instead realizing that the characters in the book would have to accomplish it in quite another way, quite in spite of their author. In the final story, the children, I said last time, “had to choose the challenging situation themselves, and for noble reasons, since they are the heroes of the books. And the thing is, they did. And exactly what they did and how it worked remains for me the most astonishing part of writing these books.” It was astonishing, but it probably shouldn’t have been. For of course I was doing this work as a calling. I’d been given what I considered an assignment from the Lord to create these stories out of people and places I knew in order to be helpful to persons who didn’t already have the help and comfort of a Christian faith when they have to deal with death. These stories are for people who need the reassurance that, for believers, death comes right up into resurrection. I had struggled, as my colleagues at Princeton will tell you, with whether to make these stories about explicitly Christian characters who say pious things and are raised in pious homes, or to make these stories about children that both Christian and non-Christian readers can relate to, and, by a first-rate story itself, deliver help to people wrestling with death and resurrection. The former sort of books would be wonderful, and would be taken up by a Christian publishing house and be available in Christian bookstores and read by Sunday School classes. Some good friends of mine are in that very business, and I would have been happy to have stood in their talented company. But the latter books, books with beautiful faithful themes without being flatfooted (and flatfooted was how I seemed to write the “Christian thing” when I wrote it explicitly – it was awful), the latter books where the story itself was a compelling allegory for death and resurrection, now that would be something of use in the wider world. After all, when death comes to Christian families, those good people already know about the promise of the resurrection. But when death comes to people without faith, help and hope is in much shorter supply. And I wanted to be helpful. I shook my head many times, wondering which way would be the right way to go. Would I be denying my call if I wrote a secular book? Would I be selling out? But when I tried to write a “Christian” book, my writing got thick and ham-handed. On the other hand, when I turned the children loose with the story, the writing was nimble and energetic. And then it happened, over the space of three or four days. I was stuck, unable to get the villain into the necessary place to create a crisis, placing the children into grave danger (no pun intended). No matter how I tried to get him loose to entrap the children, his situation held him in place. Suddenly the children showed up, saw a situation they could do something about, and took up the work themselves, risking their lives and depending on the promise of their friend to be there to save them. And once again I could hardly type fast enough to keep up with them. I got to the final page three days before I was to fly home. Sitting in my office on my last afternoon in Princeton, I was feeling a little light-headed, finished with all four book drafts in time to go back into Books 1, 2, and 3 and lay into them pieces the children would need by the time they arrived in Book 4. And I could do it while all four books were still fresh in my mind and I knew exactly where everything happened in each one. I did not have to take some half-baked manuscripts home, hoping to finish them at some future point. The abundance of time was miraculous. Surely the Lord was with me in that place. Since I came home last July, people have asked me how my sabbatical went. Some imagined me resting, as one might do on the Sabbath. I have had to tell them that part of my sabbatical was a failure. I didn’t rest much, and I never slept well. They have asked me how wonderful it was, having nothing to do on any given day but write. I have had to tell them that fiction writing is extremely demanding, and that I wrote every day, and that I planned, organized, then scrapped the plans, started and restarted, wrote and deleted, and did nothing but that for three months. I am a determined person, but I have a short attention span, so to focus on one thing for three months was maddening. They have asked me what it was like to live and work with scholars from all over the world in the community that is the Center of Theological Inquiry. I have had to tell them that these scholars are beautiful, quiet, hard-working, focused persons who operate behind closed doors most of the time and by sheer hard effort they move their fields of scholarship forward. They were supportive in every way at Thursday lunches and Tuesday tea and Wednesday morning prayer, and I will be forever grateful to the ones who drove this car-less Minnesota extrovert to the grocery store and let me talk their ear off as they did it. My family made their way smoothly without me in several big and a thousand ordinary decisions. My colleagues back home protected me from almost everything at work so that I could focus. The very opportunity itself was discovered for me by Pat Keifert, who encouraged me to go for it. He knew that the Pastor/Theologian-in-Residence Grant would provide the time and space for me to concentrate on this called work. The Center of Theological Inquiry’s Director and staff were ever encouraging and helpful, and the Center’s other members-in-residence even read chapters from the first two books and helped me wrestle with my questions of explicit or implicit witness. My parents and sisters read what I was writing and encouraged me to go on and on with it. And several long-time friends found the time to talk me through doubts and fears and extreme loneliness so that I could persist, reminding me that I had always been a writer and this adventure was long overdue and bound to produce something wonderful and moving. These people, their prayers, their laughter, and their love were my great cloud of witnesses. I hope that, despite the busyness that inevitably takes over in life immediately after such a complete separation from the ordinary, I will never see their faces or hear their voices without recalling with deepest gratitude what they helped me to do in my writing leave.
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script: Pat Taylor Ellison, Ph.D., is the managing director of research for Church Innovations. |
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