When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words.
C.S. Lewis, Till We have faces
It’s a Romantic notion, that words always fail to capture the fullness of what we would say with them. But we feel its truth, still. That’s why we also love paintings, photography, music, film—media that each offer their own inadequate forms of speaking. And that’s why words’ hardness is hard advice for authors to find in a novel.
But that’s what we get in C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces (Harvest/HBJ, 1956)—and near the end, at that. Our heroine and narrator, Queen Orual, comes to her time to say what has been in her soul, and it is full of more passion and fury than eloquence. In brief, she accuses the gods of capriciousness and selfishness, of meddling in human affairs only to take from them and to inflict suffering.
One could hardly imagine the most mellifluous words taking the barb off such a complaint.
Orual has a Job moment. She raises her accusations to the gods, decrying the wrongs and injustices they inflicted upon her or permitted to happen. Unlike Job, when she looks back upon her life, she does not find it blameless. Rather, she sees how selfish her love had been, unbeknownst to her. She sees, in effect, that even had the words of her soul been beautiful, her soul was not itself beautiful.
How is this Advice for Authors?
I’d like to say something Romantic like, “If you nurture a beautiful soul, beautiful words will follow,” but I don’t believe it. In the Christian tradition, we actually believe that evil can sound sweetest, at least insofar as it offers us what we think we want.
But I do think Lewis values words and, what’s more, values the effort of digging them up from your soul.
That may sound like it runs against the grain. In our content-dense Information Age (which is perhaps, now, the Experience Age), words seem cheap and easy to come by. If you ever scan Upwork or even LinkedIn for editing or copywriting work, you’ll see how little people value words (despite what, to me—and others—are their clear value).
But people still like reading. In fact, as countries went into shutdown, people began to stockpile not only food and toilet paper but books as well.
The message, for authors, is that people want to read good words. They don’t have to be the perfect words; they only have to be important. Words that challenge, words that entertain, words that move them. Words that inform, words that surprise, words that form them into better people. Yours can be those words.
Putting the Advice to Work
The surprising thing about Orual’s story is the answer she receives to her accusations:
“Enough,” said the judge.
There was utter silence all around me . . . long enough for me to have read my book out yet again. At last the judge spoke.
“Are you answered?” he said.
“Yes,” said I.
End chapter. She receives no verbal response. In the next chapter she explains, “The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered.”
In other words, doing the work of speaking is, in a manner of speaking, its own reward, is the point of the work.
If, that is, you speak from the soul. Only then are you saying something of real substance and value.
How do you do that?
I think it starts by asking yourself why you wish to say something. If you have a good reason, if it’s something that matters to you, it’s more likely to be something of real significance, something that can help or serve others.
You then must “dare greatly,” in Brené Brown’s words. People respond to vulnerability and transparency. People respond to authors willing to say the things they are afraid to say.
A Couple Don’ts
No advice for authors can be complete without some dont’s to balance the do’s.
Don’t be dismayed if it takes you longer than expected to get the words out in the right order. Don’t be discouraged if your editor comes back with a lot of changes. If it’s worth saying, it’s worth saying clearly and forcefully.
At the same time, don’t wait until all your thoughts are formed or all the words are perfect. You will never finish a book that way. Your first book—your first three or five or eight books—may not be the one that really mines the depths of your soul. It may just be the start of the archaeology of yourself.
It’s okay to put something out there that is important to you even though it’s not quite what you were getting at. You can always try again.
It’s okay if it doesn’t feel like earth-shattering information or insight. If it’s important to you, it will be important to someone else.
The important thing, really, is to make a beginning.
For help finding or shaping the story in your soul, contact me.
Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash
