AD: Good Beginnings, Bad Advice

It is widely advised in literary circles that one cannot write good fiction by beginning with a theme and constructing a plot and characters around that theme. This is often said to be the path to propaganda. Some read “Catholic Novelists” in Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners and arrive at just this point. The author, they say, must allow the theme to grow from the natural interaction of the characters, trusting that the author’s world view will flow organically from the plot and characterization. That is art, whereas to methodically construct a plot and characters to express a predetermined theme is artificial. But I believe Ms. O’Connor would have agreed that the difference between art and propaganda has to do with the end result and not the method.

I did not start out a writer. I was trained at the college level in painting and sculpture first, and then moved on to architecture for two decades. Throughout those years I noticed two kinds of artists: those who treat their medium as a kind of partner in the search for something meaningful, and those who treat their medium as a tool to communicate a meaning they have already found. These two types can be quickly identified by looking at two ways beginning landscape painters work. One kind of beginner paints with bold color and spontaneous brush strokes but minimal attention to the proportions or perspective of the scene before her. Another kind of beginner works meticulously to get the scene correctly documented but somehow it ends up feeling stiff and awkward. If they have native talent, both painters will improve in time and each will do so by crossing over into the other’s territory. The best painters get things technically correct (insofar as they conceive “correct”) yet they do so in a bold and apparently spontaneous way. But while each artist must move into the other’s territory to paint well, that does not mean they must start out there.

Similarly, the Roman architect Vetruvius taught that a good building must have “firmness” (a good structure), “commodity” (maximum results, minimum investment) and “delight” (the intangible quality of beauty). This is just a different way of stating what our two landscape painters learned: the secret of good art lies in striking a proper balance between essential qualities, regardless of which quality first attracts us to the project. Exciting plots and rich characters that say nothing of substance are doomed to join the millions of novels that are forgotten virtually in the moment they are read. Themes that overpower the story and characters are equally doomed. But so long as the end result includes “firmness” (a good plot and interesting characters), “commodity” (maximum message, minimum moralizing) and “delight” (the beautiful turn of phrase) it does not matter where the author begins.

Athol Dickson,
Author of River Rising, and The Gospel According to Moses