To Tell You The Truth, by David Rhoades – Making Marks | @MDWorld
March 27, 2015 Victor El-Khouri 0 Comments
“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
- C.S. Lewis
I’ll get it out of the way now: I’m a Christian, so C.S. Lewis is sort of like our Christian J.D. Salinger. Me and a lot of my same-faith friends all read him in one form or another while in junior high and high school. My friends tended towards his fiction (e.g. Chronicles of Narnia, Out of the Silent Planet), but to be honest I much preferred his essays. I think his thoughts on creativity and love and faith are simple, elegant ways of describing pretty abstract ideas, and as a young person being thrown about by hormonal tidal waves and weekly end-of-the-world scale crises, simple and elegant was what I craved.
That, and I honestly thought The Chronicles of Narnia was just Lord of the Rings for kids who didn’t have the attention span for a story that takes 150 pages and three months to leave the main character’s home county. Today I’m a little more humble and favorable regarding Lewis’ fantasy, but it’s still not to my taste.
Anyway, this passage has always been one of my favorite things that Lewis has ever written. One of the most important things I’ve ever been asked is why I make stories. I guess I’ve heard writers hate that question with a passion, as though writing were as fundamental as thinking. Nobody has a reason for why they think — they just do. While I feel like storytelling is a part of who I am, I can still try to answer the “why” of it all. After all, it’d be ludicrous to ask an architect what his purpose is in designing buildings only to receive an answer akin to “well, why does anyone do anything?”
It took a few more years of reading and personal development before I realized why I tell stories, and why I suspect so many other people do: to tell the truth. Or, more accurately, to show the truth. Which might be a very first-year creative writing student conclusion to come to, but that doesn’t make it wrong. Stories with conviction are the ones that “stick the landing,” that ring in our heads for days after we first see them. Now, don’t misunderstand me — I don’t mean preachy stories are the best ones. Often, those are the worst ones because they tell a truth unopposed (which a significant reason why so many Christian films are terrible — many of them don’t have the guts to challenge the central premise of their film). What I’m trying to say is that the best stories reveal something about ourselves that we suspected, or perhaps we thought it but never articulated it.
I think that’s what Lewis is getting at — reaching for the truth, the Why, takes us further and deeper into ourselves than novelty ever will. Innovation is great, but telling the truth is why one of the most impactful films this year is Whiplash, which essentially follows the same plot structure (albeit inverted) as any cheesy “inspirational teacher meets misfit prodigy” film that you’ve ever seen.
Whiplash stuck in my head. It did things that had been done before, and asked questions I’d seen posed before in other films, but it spoke its truth with such conviction, such verve and belief, that it made me look at myself more closely. And that’s what I think is so miraculous about the best sort of literature and art, that someone took a bunch of lies and told the truth with them. And that telling affected my actual life.
That’s why I think Lewis’ passage here is so important. Innovation comes and goes. Things get edgy then retro then retro-edgy then edgy again, but those things don’t speak to our hearts. Our tender little hearts, buried deep under years of walls and justifications and scars and sadness and evasion, are touched by the same things that gripped the hearts of Stone Age audiences huddled around campfires, and the hearts of the people who (may) live here long after we are dust will be gripped by the same things.
And good stories are built out of those things.