My Slow Uncertain Journey into the Writing Life
Pimps and Johns, Morals and “Messages,” Faith, Hope, and Divine Partnership
by Heather Morton
From an early age I longed to dwell in the realm of story. Through novel reading, imaginative play, and privately concocted stories, I tried by every means available to a young child to prolong my time in a world of make-believe. In kindergarten I wore the same dress and bonnet to school every day—never mind that my blue-and-red “Laura dress” (inspired by the writer of the Little House books) clashed with the hot-pink polka-dotted bonnet I’d purloined from a doll. I signed all my papers “Laura” until the teacher called me out publicly. Then I put childish ways behind me.
I also enjoyed just playing with language, though this came a bit later than the make-believe. My fifth-grade teacher assigned monthly book reports that included a creative component, like turning the paper into an ancient-looking scroll, for instance, or dressing up in character to give the report orally. These book reports were the highlight of my year, and creating them the first time I remember feeling something like a thrill in writing.
I went to a small Lutheran school where the principal, who was also the eighth-grade teacher, would give a short tribute to each graduating eighth-grader before handing out the diplomas. At my graduation he mentioned my gift for writing, which I might have found gratifying. But the year before he’d said of another student, Brittan Rumpeltes, that he “looked forward to reading her first novel someday.” That he did not say this about me, and that I still remember it more than thirty years later, tells me fiction writing has been a habit and a goal for a long time.
Writing as Vocation
When I was in my 20s I read several books by or about missionaries who gave up everything for the sake of the gospel—books with titles like A Chance to Die and No Compromise. Though I did not feel called to missions, still I perceived in these books a challenge. If God asked me to surrender this passion for writing—to give it up, or lay it down—could I? In my mind this “surrender” always involved a wholesale renunciation: turning my back on it forever, never writing another word. I did wonder if it was in keeping with God’s character to impart a gift or passion but forbid its use. But I also knew that what appears as inactivity is sometimes merely a season in a cycle of fruitfulness. For land to remain fertile it must at times lie fallow.
Through years of wrestling in prayer, and perhaps too through years of parenting, in which I was asked to practice self-denial daily across a whole spectrum of desires, I came to another kind of surrender. Not a disavowal of the gift, but an acceptance of it as a vocation. If the call to write came from outside myself—if it came from God—well, that changed things.
Just how it changed things, and when, is harder to put my finger on. It was a subtle process, a change worked in me over a period of years, in which I came to trust God with failures, successes, timing—all of it. The shape of my desires changed, and the objects of my delight changed too. To be sure, this is still an ongoing process. I will probably never outgrow the daily need for surrender. But suffice it to say, the lens of vocation cast the project of writing in an entirely different light.
Cultivating a Christian Imagination
For too long I inhabited a Christian world that didn’t recognize the imagination as a dimension of Christian discipleship. In the church of which I was for many years a member, discipleship consisted of holding right doctrine, pursuing personal holiness, and of course evangelizing the lost. But it had little to say to the realm of beauty and the arts. These weren’t evil; they were simply beside the point. For years this stirred in me an uncomfortable tension. It did not keep me from urgent novel-reading or compulsive writing. But it kept me from understanding this work as vocation, something more than a “hobby” or even a passion. It made me feel guilty and furtive—like everyone privately agreed that the time I spent writing would better have been devoted to some church activity, so I had to do it on the sly.
For too long I inhabited a Christian world that … had little to say to the realm of beauty and the arts. These weren’t evil; they were simply beside the point.
A great encouragement to me during this time was the memory of my pastor in graduate school. When he was a seminary student, he once said, one of his professors pulled him aside and advised him to take a summer off from theology, and to read only fiction—to cultivate, as he put it, a Christian imagination. The professor gave him a reading list that probably included writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and Flannery O’Connor. I don’t remember the details, only that phrase “Christian imagination.” Years later, when I was at a church that focused on cultivating a Christian mind, and putting on Christlike behavior, it called out to me like a whisper in the dark. A Christian imagination. I wasn’t entirely sure what it was, but I wanted it.
“Messages” and Moral Vision
It’s one thing in a swell of emotion to “surrender your passion to God.” It’s another to cultivate an understanding of what it means to practice your craft and vocation as a Christian, within the particular demands of your discipline. I believe this kind of reflection is best done in community with other believing artists. For many years, lacking such community, I asked questions in isolation and read any books I could get my hands on.
I had to fight the sense that my writing should have some explicit Christian message. Nonfiction might lend itself to this. But if you feel called to write stories, the “messages,” if they can be called that, may lie buried deep and require careful excavation. Works of fiction are more like prisms that refract different meanings, and should be hard to reduce to clear messages. If messages are clear and unequivocal, there’s a chance the work qualifies more as propaganda than as art.
What kinds of sins could I let my characters commit, and did they all need to be redeemed in the end?
For years I struggled with what kind of moral vision a Christian writer of fiction should have. This was always framed in my mind as questions about what was permissible. What kinds of sins could I let my characters commit, and did they all need to be redeemed in the end? What were the moral lines we—my characters and I—could not transgress? I always felt myself writing for a certain type of reader who needed a great deal of reassurance—that biblical values would be exalted, that the narrative point of view would be unambiguously on the side of truth and goodness.
Surely some of these anxieties were shaped by the kind of novels I consumed as a child. For a season in middle school, I read a series of Christian murder mysteries in which a character always got saved in the end. Each book concluded not only with a climax that involved the solving of the mystery and capturing the murderer, but with a parallel conversion climax in which a character came to faith. Around the same time I also read a series of novels about prostitutes who came to faith. I checked these out, incidentally, from the church library and read them during the Sunday morning sermon when I was in about sixth grade. So around 11am in the red-carpeted sanctuary of First Baptist Church, while the pastor was preaching inspirational gospel messages, I was lost in the world of “pimps” and “johns”—designations I’d only just learned from the Christian novel of the week.
Write What You See
Given my early reading, it’s no wonder I held a reflexive conviction that the true climax and resolution of any novel written by a Christian must be a conversion—or, failing a full-scale “decision for Christ,” that somehow the gospel must be vindicated. By this point I’d read plenty of good literature and knew what we call “Christian fiction” often lacked subtlety and complexity. Over time, I came to understand—at the risk of over-simplifying—that the most important thing I could do as a writer was to portray the world honestly, according to my perception and experience.
This is how Flannery O’Connor puts it in an essay entitled “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers”:
The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is nothing edifying, he is still required to look. Then he is required to reproduce, with words, what he sees. Now this is the first point at which the novelist who is a catholic [or we might just say “Christian”] may feel some friction between what he is supposed to do as a novelist and what he is supposed to do as a Catholic, for what he sees at all times is fallen man perverted by false philosophies. Is he to reproduce this? Or is he to change what he sees and make it, instead of what it is, what in the light of faith he thinks it ought to be? Is he…supposed to “tidy up reality”? Just how can the novelist be true to time and eternity both, to what he sees and what he believes, to the relative and the absolute? And how can he do all this and be true at the same time to the art of the novel, which demands the illusion of life?
She goes on to say later in the same essay, “The Catholic fiction writer is entirely free to observe. He feels no call to take on the duties of God or to create a new universe. He feels perfectly free to look at the one we already have and to show exactly what he sees.”
This is, incidentally, the charge given John the Evangelist in the opening chapter of Revelation (as Luci Shaw notes in Breath for the Bones): “Write what you see.” What I see as a Christian is informed by my own individual experience, of course, as well as my redeemed mind and imagination. Through the eyes of faith, I will recognize reality differently from those who lack faith. And if my mind and imagination are steeped in and shaped by scripture—which is filled with the most shockingly realistic and vivid stories—that’s a good place to start. And not just with the epistles. Start with the really good narrative sections. Start with Genesis. Consider, for example, Abraham’s nighttime visions and angelic visitations, Jacob’s deceptions and flight, his nighttime vision—the ladder to heaven—and his wrestling match with the Angel. Think of Simeon and Levi’s revenge at Shechem, mass murder by way of circumcision; think of Tamar’s desperate wrangling for a son. Remember Lot’s wife and Lot’s daughters. In Genesis, sin and redemption are drawn in detail that is, by turns, both lurid and glorious.
Creative Work as Royal Rule
Genesis holds, too, an important theological connection that helped me understand my vocation. For years I had absorbed conflicting messages from various well-meaning Christians. One, that all of life is sacred; but two, that really, the time you spend doing Christian work is more sacred. What finally helped me resolve this tension was tracing the language of royal rule throughout the Bible. It starts in Genesis 1, when God creates the first humans and charges them to rule creation in a sort of divine partnership—to subdue the earth and have dominion over it. This rule is finally realized in the new heavens and earth, portrayed in Revelation 20 as the saints seated on thrones ruling and reigning with Christ.
What I see as a Christian is informed by my own individual experience, of course, as well as my redeemed mind and imagination. Through the eyes of faith, I will recognize reality differently from those who lack faith.
We see echoes of this theme throughout the Bible, from Yahweh’s promise to Abraham that he would be a blessing to the nations, to God’s charge to the Children of Israel at Sinai that they be a nation of priests, to Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom together with physical healing and deliverance.
This was the theological point I had to absorb: We were made to rule with God; we will someday rule with God. Understanding this has helped me to grasp and, I have to say, justify my vocation as a writer. The creative tasks, the “ruling” tasks assigned Adam and Eve at creation, have a claim on me as an image bearer and as a Christian. They are intrinsically bound up with what it means to be human, and as believers we don’t just throw them out to focus on saving souls. We take them up with even deeper meaning as pointers to the kind of rule inaugurated when God raised Jesus from the dead. This is the righteous reign of peace that the prophets talk about so beautifully—the leopard lying down with the goat, the child playing over the adder’s den—which will one day be realized in the new heavens and new earth. And in some way I don’t fully understand, the creative work I do now for God’s glory will find continuity in that consummated World.
There’s a brief, lovely portrayal of this idea in the Chronicles of Narnia. At the end of The Last Battle, after Aslan recreates a new Narnia, the children (by now no longer children) glimpse in the distance the professor’s old house in an England they thought had been obliterated. This is the house where Lucy first discovered the wardrobe that led her to Narnia.
“Why,” exclaimed Peter, “It’s England, and that’s the house itself—Professor Kirk’s old home in the country where all our adventures began.”
“I thought that house had been destroyed,” said Edmund.
“So it was,” said the Faun. “But you are now looking at the England within England. The real England just as this is the real Narnia. And in that inner England no good thing is destroyed.”
This is how NT Wright puts it in The Challenge of Jesus:
If you build on the foundation in the present time with gold, silver and precious stones, your work will last. In the Lord your labor is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that is soon going over a cliff. Nor, however, are you constructing the kingdom of God by your own efforts. You are following Jesus and shaping our world in the power of the Spirit; and when the final consummation comes, the work that you have done, whether in Bible study or biochemistry, whether in preaching or in pure mathematics, whether in digging ditches or in composing symphonies, will stand, will last.
I am called to attend to my craft today. In and through it, God is doing a work of eternal value.
Craft and Creative Process
My creative process, probably like that of many writers, requires time and solitude and silence. I need these for long enough to disengage from my ordinary surface-level life and sink into a different frame of mind. If I’m working on fiction, it’s a kind of dream world that requires focused concentration, sustained solitude—but also bears a bit of resemblance to the imaginative wanderings of my earliest years. My best work is done when I can get away for at least a couple of days by myself, though this doesn’t happen often. Then I can drift in and out of reading and writing, with occasional breaks for a walk, or a run, or a meal, and these activities all feed each other, so there’s no real interruption in the flow.
On a normal day, though, after I drop my children off at school, I usually go to a coffee shop to try to work for a couple of hours. If I’m fairly consistent with this on most weekdays, I can eek out progress. I should also say that the beginning of a project, and often the middle, require this kind of discipline. I have to force myself to put in the time. Usually at some point the project overtakes me and becomes an obsession for a time, and then I struggle to stay engaged with other dimensions of my life.
At some point it’s helpful to bring in a friend to read what I’ve written. This has happened at increasingly later stages as I’ve grown in maturity as a writer. When I was younger I craved feedback very early on in the process. What I really needed was just encouragement to keep writing. As I’ve grown more confident in my instincts, I’ve been able to wait until I think a piece is pretty “finished” before asking a friend or two for feedback.
Through the years I’ve also realized how important it is to choose the right friend—usually, though not always, it’s another writer. Some are more helpful than others. And having been in writers’ groups for many years, it’s been my experience that the best writers aren’t always the best readers. But over time I’ve collected a number of readers who are both perceptive and gracious.
Slow Work, Sabbath Rest
I’ve realized through the years that I’m a slow processer. I think we tend to associate talent with prolific output. I am not prolific. I’m a perfectionist, and I love to tinker with the language. I could spend twenty minutes tweaking a single sentence and feel like the time was well spent—maybe one of the best things I did that day. But perfectionism isn’t my only problem. It also can take me longer than I’d like to understand meanings and make connections. There might be an image I feel compelled to use, or an idea I want to explore, or an experience I need to narrate on the page. But it can take a lot of writing for me to understand what truth these are speaking, how to make sense of them on a conscious level, and how to convey that meaning to a reader.
I intensely dislike this quality in myself. I’ve spent years complaining to God about it, but I’m learning to accept it. God is not bothered by time the way I am bothered by time. I think slow is often the way God works, and I need to press on in hope, driving toward the finish line, even as I’m not always sure what that finish line is, or how long it will take to get there, or if there will be any reward at the end, aside from my own internal satisfaction. But this internal satisfaction is, I have come to see, exceedingly important. I liken it to God’s delight in creation in Genesis 1. I actually think that when I experience pleasure in something I’ve created—when I hear a resounding “this is very good” in my spirit—I am acting as an image bearer. I am entering into a kind of seventh-day Sabbath rest, and in that moment, God rejoices with me.
Writing as a Sacred Exchange
Writing, like every act of faith, involves risk. Risk that you’re wasting your time, risk that you will fail to achieve what you set out to achieve, that your words will not, in the end, hold any power. They will fall flat. They will not mean to others what or how you intended them to mean. And you will feel foolish for even having made the effort.
Writing, like every act of faith, involves risk. Risk that you’re wasting your time, risk that you will fail to achieve what you set out to achieve, that your words will not, in the end, hold any power.
Sometimes when I sit down to write I have no idea where the material I’m exploring will take me. I just know that I have to push forward in the exploration—one word in front of the other. This itself can feel dangerous, since there’s no guarantee that authentic exploration will take you somewhere safe. Other times I can see the end point with stark clarity, but I have no idea how to get there. This is perhaps a different kind of risk, fraught with false starts and dead ends.
I am encouraged to press on by this honest confession from arguably one of the twentieth century’s greatest English-language poets. A man you would not think had ever struggled with words. Writes T.S. Eliot in The Four Quartets:
So here I am… having had twenty years…
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
If a writer of Eliot’s stature felt that sense of impossibility when he approached a blank page, I know I’m in good company. Frankly, it’s not a bad place for a Christian writer to be—facing a task that feels impossible. It’s then I turn to God and ask, “What would you have me write?” In that moment the act of writing becomes a sacred exchange, the kind of creative partnership for which you and I were created.
These remarks were originally delivered in March 2022 at Opus Bonum, a mini-conference for creatives presented by Trinity Church Seattle and Trinity Songworks.
Heather Morton's work has appeared in Plough, Fathom Magazine, and other publications. A native Oregonian, she lives with her husband and their three children in Cheverly, Maryland. Read more of her writing at www.heatherfmorton.com.
