If art is, in part at least, the imitation of reality, it’s an imitation that’s largely bounded by and grounded in artistic convention. That’s something I’ve long been aware of from a literary/critical perspective, but writing a novel myself — and then seeing the reaction of different readers to the specific choices I made about where and how to be “realistic” — has borne that truth in on me in a particularly vivid fashion.

No one actually writes scenes, dialogue, storylines, and internal thoughts to match the way things happen in real life. Stream-of-consciousness, that most famous of experiments in literary style, tends to strike readers (in my experience) as self-consciously attention-drawing rather than realistic: yet another way for the writer to get between the reader and the experience. Attempts at realism can, ironically, make readers all the more conscious of the writer’s craft.

And then there’s the fact that what strikes one reader as realistic isn’t the same thing that strikes other readers as realistic. Case in point: the dialogue of my teenage character in No Going Back. I’ve had reviewers comment on the awkwardness of their dialogue as a negative thing. Other readers described the realism of my teenagers as a particular strength. It’s occurred to me that both may be true, since one of the things I was trying to imitate was the awkwardness of teenagers in grappling with serious subjects. They start and stop sentences, they interrupt themselves, they dance around what they’re saying. I’ve wondered if that attempt at realism is part of what irritates some of my readers, and whether a smoother and (to my mind) less “natural” style might have kept them more engaged. It’s hard to know.

Listening to my children talk, I’m struck by how repetitious and bizarre a transcript of their speech would look, lifted verbatim into a story. And then there’s the matter of capturing intonation, tone of voice, gestures and other signals that accompany speech. Which details do you include? Frequently, I wound up cutting pieces of information just because they made a scene or paragraph or sentence go on too long. Less is more.

Thinking about this now, I’m reminded of BYU professor Steve Walker’s insight into the invitational nature of J. R. R. Tolkien’s prose: that by including only a few key details, he invites readers to co-create his characters inside their own minds. It is, as he points out, a rather different approach from the values of the realistic tradition in fiction, where the goal is seen as creating a picture of life that is so detailed and real readers can imaginatively step directly into it.

Extending this thought, the value of an approach like Tolkien’s may lie in its implicit acknowledgment that stories are not independent realities created by the writer and passively experienced by readers, but rather negotiated interactions that take place within the space of the reader’s mind. Of course, there’s a certain irony in applying such an insight to Tolkien, the great proponent of story as sub-created experience and one of the most detailed world-creators in all of fantasy…

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Writing my novel, I was struck by just how little real time is depicted in a typical narrative. Looking at the timeline I created of scenes from the year and a half covered by No Going Back, it’s quite common to see gaps of a week or more during which there’s simply nothing written.

Decisions about which life-details to include serve several masters. One is realism, which I think is essential to feeling sympathy for the characters in a story. We have to believe they are humans like ourselves before we can care about what happens to them.

The other is strategic importance to the story. Events and details that don’t play a part in advancing the story inevitably take time and attention away from that story. Stories (and readers) can take only so much of that before distraction sets in. Just how much varies, depending on the story, the genre, and (most especially) the tastes and mental/information processing habits of the individual reader.

Personally, I’m the sort of reader that rather likes a meandering storyline. I like the time that the hobbits spend in the Old Forest and the house of Tom Bombadil. One of the attractions of story reading, for me, is spending time in worlds and with characters I enjoy.

An author’s judgment in such areas is inevitably suspect. How much detail is needed to bring one’s characters and settings to life? The author can’t possibly know, because for him/her they already exist. On the other hand, as their creator, the writer is probably the last person who will tire of spending time with them.

There’s a fair amount of detail I wrote that didn’t make it into No Going Back. For example, given the age of my characters, it occurred to me at one point that they almost certainly would be getting driving lessons during the course of the novel. I decided this could provide fodder for some entertaining parent-child interaction, and drafted a couple of scenes based on that. And then I went back and took them out, because no matter how I tried to fit them in, they felt like a distraction to me.

It’s likely that I should have done the same thing on a few other occasions. Details about video games and teenage music and the like were (for me) a way of giving a more concrete sense of how my characters filled their lives when they weren’t working on homework. (I actually had included a reference to watching YouTube videos until my editor pointed out that YouTube hadn’t been founded yet at the time of my story. Hurray for Chris!) It’s my impression that some readers like those details, but I’ve had more than one comment on how distracting they can get.

And then there are the details I had originally left out that Chris forced me to put in. Most often, these were stage details, as I think of them: information about where people are physically situated, how they move and where they go while conversations and other interactions are taking place. Thinking about the way I read, it makes sense that I might miss these small details, since I tend to process scenes auditorily rather than visually. With more practice, I hope to gain a clearer sense of just how much of this kind of stuff to include. In the meantime, I’m glad I had a good editor.

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Stories — even nonfiction stories — are different from reality. We all know this, I believe, no matter how much we may allow our vision of reality to affected by the stories we hear and read. As Patsy says in Monty Python and the Holy Grail after they’ve been oohing and ahhing at their first glimpse of Camelot: “It’s only a model.”

The thing I hadn’t truly appreciated until I tried to do it myself was just how arbitrary and unintuitive the choice of details can seem, in trying to tease readers/viewers/listeners into supplying what’s missing to create the internal illusion of reality. Over and over, I found myself deliberating quite basic questions, from whether to accent a bit of conversation with an accompanying eyebrow lift to how much detail to include about a boy’s physical reaction to a hormonal moment. Something that had appeared quite seamless to me from a reader’s perspective was revealed to be the result of considerable craft, at a nuts-and-bolts level. Maybe that’s one of the things they talked about in all those creative writing classes I never took…

The next time I undertake to write a story, hopefully I won’t be quite so clueless about these things going in. In the meantime, I feel that I’ve gained a greater understanding of one of the things that makes narrative writing such a complex and judgment-driven endeavor. I hope it’s made me not only a more wary and alert writer, but a more appreciative reader as well.

It’s interesting being the author of a novel about a topic that matters so much to a lot of readers. Sex and religion are topics that people care about passionately (if you’ll pardon the double pun), and when they intersect, there’s little that’s more potentially volatile.

That’s all to the good when people like my book. I’ve gotten some amazing comments from people, not just about how the book affected them as a story but about the positive good they think it can do in the world. I’d like to believe those comments are all true. But it can be especially unpleasant when people don’t like my book — especially those who share my religious beliefs.

Most of the comments I’ve received from believing Mormons have been highly positive. Some reviewers have cautioned that this is a book “not for the faint of heart.” I agree. I recently emailed a friend, “I have to admit that it’s a pretty intense book, so if you don’t feel up to that, it may be better that you avoid reading it.”

Which brings me to the topic of this blog.

A few readers criticize No Going Back for being too realistic and/or not optimistic enough. I don’t have an unequivocally happy ending. I don’t show Paul’s gender orientation changing. I show him describing himself as gay, not same-gender attracted as the LDS (Mormon) Church encourages. I show him going to a GSA club. I show him (and other teenage boys) cussing and making crude jokes, as well as some serious mistakes. I don’t show all the LDS Church members acting perfectly toward him and his mother.

Well, hello. That’s the way the world is. Kids are confused. They make mistakes. They pick up the attitudes of the world around them. They have to make choices, and sometimes the choices they make aren’t good ones. What positive purpose is served in creating literature that denies this?

My goal, in writing this novel — beside telling a story that would engage readers, about characters they would care about — was to depict realistically what an LDS teenager in today’s world might go through in feeling same-sex attracted but also wanting to stay true to his religious beliefs. I wanted to depict fairly both his desires to live his religion and the struggles that might present for him. I wanted to present a story that had a hopeful ending, but also one that took seriously just how hard things might be for my main character going forward.

I’ve written on my website about issues such as gay identity and why my book doesn’t focus much on the possibility of Paul’s orientation changing. What I want to do here is say why I think there’s value in writing a tough, challenging, realistic novel about a topic like this, instead of always writing the happiest, best, or most positive outcome.

I believe in the Atonement of Jesus Christ. I believe it has the power to change and heal all our infirmities — not just those that are the result of sin, but also those that relate to things we didn’t choose, such as same-sex attraction in most if not all cases.

I don’t necessarily believe this change and healing will all happen in this life. In fact, I think we’re given a pretty clear indication in scriptures that in many cases it won’t. However, I do believe we’ll be given strength to meet the challenges we confront in life, if we go before God and sincerely ask him for that help.

I think stories — nonfiction and fiction both — can help us to see and feel better just what the Atonement can do for us. But in order to show the true power of the Atonement, they have to also show the conditions in which we live. If they don’t show realistically what we need to be rescued from, they aren’t really showing us the power that Jesus Christ can have in our lives.

Teenagers, as much as any of us, live in a fallen world and fall victim to it in a variety of ways. Despite that, they too are capable of receiving grace through spiritual realities such as prayer, scripture study, personal pondering, and service in the priesthood. In order to show the power of the spiritual side of things, I felt that I needed to include a small (and fairly tame) dose of the cruder realities of high school as well — in order to demonstrate that the Spirit can operate in the conditions of real teenage life.

The process of change and healing that comes through the Atonement often takes a long time. I think showing it all happening at once makes the Atonement seem like less than what it is — and has the potential to make readers despair when they realize that the reality of the lives they lead doesn’t match what they’re reading. And it can make the rest of us less compassionate by reinforcing a sense that other people’s trials aren’t as challenging as they really are.

I believe that short of God’s ultimate healing, the single thing that helps us most in getting through the trials of life is the support, understanding, and love of other people. I think that’s particularly important in the case of teenagers for whom God is (let’s admit it) largely an abstract concept, and for whom the notion that they might change 10, 20, 50 years down the road provides little if any comfort. Even more than my book is about God and spiritual healing, it’s about the comfort that can be provided by other people — and the damage that can be done when others aren’t supportive and understanding.

There’s a lot that doesn’t happen in my book that I’d like to see happen in the life of a teenager who was struggling like Paul. There’s a lot I’d like to say to him myself, if he ever happened to wander into my ward or family. I hope that by reading my book, other people will be more likely to say those positive things to the Pauls in their lives, or at least to understand a little better what they’re going through. If my book is real enough to do that, I’ll be content.

But last week I finished reading William’s graduate school paper (available in his July 31st post, Slowly Flowering: My grad school paper on Mormon literature), and I realized that I’m uncomfortable with the way that England has presented this history. I’m not sure it tells the whole story. And I’m not even completely sure that most literary histories tell the whole story.

Again, I’m not an expert in any area of English, I just dabble in studying Mormon literature. I know more about Portuguese and Brazilian literature than anything else in literature, and I’m no expert there either.

Before I address my doubts about the classification of Mormon Literature, let me first give a bit of an overview of England’s history. He divides Mormon Literature into four periods:

The first period, Foundations (1830-1880), England characterizes as “largely unsophisticated writing, expressive of the new converts’ dramatic symbolic as well as literal journeys to Zion and their fierce rejection of Babylon, and often intended to meet the immediate and practical needs of the church for hymns, sermons, and tracts.”

The second period, Home Literature, 1880-1930, begins with Orson F. Whitney’s call for a “home literature” in Utah, which England calls “highly didactic fiction and poetry designed to defend and improve the Saints but of little lasting worth–-and also the refining of Mormon theological and historical writing, especially in James E. Talmage and B. H. Roberts, into excellent and lasting forms.”

England calls the next period The Lost Generation, 1930-70, which he says was “a period of reaction, by third- and fourth-generation Mormons, usually well educated for their time, to what they saw as the loss of the heroic pioneer vision and a decline into provincial materialism, which impelled an outpouring of excellent but generally critical works, published and praised nationally but largely rejected by or unknown to Mormons. Most of them wrote from “exile”–out of Utah, hence the comparison with American literature’s “lost” generation of Hemingway, Stein, and other expatriates.”

The last period, Faithful Realism, (1960-present), England calls a “slow growth and then flowering from the 1960s to the present of good work in all genres, combining the best qualities and avoiding the limitations of most past work, so that it is both faithful and critical, appreciated by a growing Mormon audience and also increasingly published and honored nationally.”

I’m with England for the first two periods. They fit my own observations. But when I get to the third period, I see a problem. Specifically, I wonder how it is possible for a reactionary group that wrote from exile to characterize most of what was happening in Mormon Literature at the time! Surely there were a substantial number (and probably the majority of authors) that were NOT outsiders. I suspect that not only the majority of works created during that time, but also the majority of copies of works sold in those years don’t fit the label of “The Lost Generation.”

I see a similar problem when I look at the final period in England’s divisions of Mormon literary history. I’m not sure that all (or even most of) the works we now see really fit this characterization. I have doubts about characterizing many of these works as both “faithful” and exhibiting “realism.” For example, I have a hard time characterizing Orson Scott Card’s work (or even Stephanie Meyer’s work) as “realism,” and I think many of members of the Church would not call works by critically noted but extreme Mormon authors like Brian Evenson, Walter Kirn or perhaps Brady Udall particularly faithful.

There is a possible solution to my views — I may simply misunderstand what is going on when academics divide literary history into different periods. Are periods meant to represent the majority of what is going on among all works published during that period? Or do these divisions represent the avant garde of the time — those works that are paving new ground or are of interest and lasting value.

If so, then I guess I have a bit of a problem with literary histories in general. Surely it is of more value to give a larger picture of literature than just what is academically interesting, isn’t it?

For example, I suspect, from the little bit of reading I’ve done of Mormon works published in the middle of the 20th century, the period of England’s “Lost Generation,” that Home Literature continued during most of that time, parallel to what was written by the expatriate authors, who perhaps represent the works of lasting value.

More recently, Mormon literature, like American literature, seems to have fractured into several genres, each with different styles and even their own divisions into periods. I don’t believe that some genres really have less value than others. Wouldn’t a more complete picture look at histories in all genres, or find some way of looking at styles across genres (if such a thing is even possible).

Of course, this all probably demonstrates my ignorance of literary criticism. If so, well, I warned you.