Helena Mary Cole

Okay, this is me again (not my fiction). 

I know I disappeared for almost the entire summer. A few blog post ideas came to me in the past months, but I didn’t want to post them until I’d left the narrative in a reasonably good spot, and then editing those chapters turned out to take longer and be more involved than I thought. The thing is, it’s one thing to write your backstory when it’s just for you and no one else is going to read it. From time to time, I do read it all the way through because I happen to love it. But letting other people read it… It needed a lot of polishing. It’s the curse of autistic perfectionism, I guess. 

To tell the truth, I was thinking I shouldn’t have started publishing those chapters to begin with. They do not represent my absolute best work, and it was starting to feel embarrassing that I published them at all. But I thought, oh, what the heck, I’ll just publish them and then I can get on with the other ideas I had. It was going to be like ripping off a band aid. Then a funny thing happened. 

After sharing those last two chapters here, I spent a lot of time mulling over what I’d written, letting sentences run repeatedly in and out of my mind, and simply taking delight in them. It happens a lot when I share my fiction with others in my small way. I love these characters I made up out of own head. I love struggling with them through their problems. There’s joy to be had just from having created it. And it’s so good! 

This is a powerful way to connect with God. 

What you want to do in creating fiction is get your reader to connect with the characters in such a way that they won’t want to leave them when the last page has been turned and the last paragraph is approaching. You want them to approach that last paragraph with a profound sadness. The reader’s goodbye to the characters should hurt. “I wanted more time with them!” the reader might think. This is the case for me, anyway, when it comes to the stories I return to again and again. 

I’m glad I didn’t read The Lord of the Rings before I became a person of faith because that story is so unbearably beautiful, in my opinion, that if I hadn’t had faith, I would have gone crazy wondering how I was going to get inside it. How can I get that beautiful thing to be me and how can I get myself to be that beautiful thing? How can this be accomplished? I knew exactly what Sam Gamgee was talking about when he first came to Lothlorien and said, “I feel as though I were inside a song.” 

For me, even something like picking up a cat and hugging it inspires this strange desire to absorb the cat right into my heart. Supposing such a thing were possible without both of us being destroyed. The warm and soft and purring cat is so perfectly sweet, I just want to be one with the sweetness. I want an infinite sweetness. That’s all. 

When praying the fifth Luminous Mystery of the Rosary, which is the Institution of the Holy Eucharist, or the Last Supper if you will, I often use the part where Jesus says, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you” as a gateway into the Mystery. Then I find it helpful to put myself in the place of the Beloved Disciple leaning his head against the chest of Christ and try to let myself get absorbed into the Sacred Heart. It’s the best way I know of to get “inside a song.” 

The madness only comes without faith. Really, I can’t be a song or a story or a beautiful flower or sunset or any other thing that wakens the desire for oneness. To quote Tolkien again, “Jesus Christ is the Lord of men and of angels – and of elves. History and legend have met and fused.” I get it. Wanting to be one with a Beautiful Thing is the same thing as wanting to be one with God. Oneness with God is not only possible but it’s what we’ve been promised, and the one place in all time and space where this can be achieved is in the person of Christ. And so, the most useful thing to do with one’s longing for oneness with a Beautiful Thing is to meld it with Christ, because they were always deeply connected in the first place. Ponder that for a while. And then go to mass. 

Well, anyway, as a writer, I am always hoping to ignite that longing in other people, but it’ll never happen if I don’t feel it myself, will it? For now, it’ll have to be enough for me to give myself up to the delight of my own creative achievements and keep hoping to bring someone else along for the ride. I’m not sure I mentioned that I’ve sent out some queries to literary agents in hopes of getting representation for my novel and I’ve gotten some rejections back, which is what’s supposed to happen. <sigh> That sure didn’t help my confidence in publishing those last two backstory chapters here. 

Maybe after a while, I’ll publish a few more chapters. For now, I want the freedom to write whatever strikes me to write without worrying about whether or not the narrative left off in a good place. These characters have some terrible seasons of misery coming their way, which always makes for good literary material. It’s funny: I noticed that giving myself up to delighting in the characters was a good way to get a sense of oneness with God, and then I seemingly take delight in their misery. But that’s what resonates with people, isn’t it? Misery. We want to watch people struggle through it because that sort of thing also ignites a sense of hope. 

Writing and reading fiction is way more practical that a lot of people think. 

On that note, I wish everyone a quick and minimally painful Monday.