My most recent character, one Beulah Tanner by name, curses once in the course of a 20 page story, and I've spent the last three months trying to wrestle her to the ground and wash her mouth out with soap. I've tried rewriting. I've tried cutting scenes. It isn't working. In order for the resolution to occur, Beulah Tanner must open her mouth and utter the word "damn." To be honest, that has troubled me.
Such a melodramatic display of authorial force may seem foreign or falsely pious for those of you who have not grown up in conservative Christian circles. But for those of us who do live primarily within the realm of orthodox Christendom, we write under the constant threat of black-marker-edits and Baptist boycotts. And then there is the ever-present (and I would say healthy) concern that if so many of our respected leaders and mentors shudder at the mere mention of sin, are we not in spiritual danger for representing it on the page?
While I have not formulated all of my thoughts on the matter, the following passage from Flannery O'Connor's "Catholic Novelists and Their Readers" has been encouraging and thought-provoking.
I would like, if possible, to open a (gracious) discussion on the topic.
"If [the Catholic novelist] is going to show the supernatural taking place, he has nowhere to do it except on the literal level of natural events, and that if he doesn't make these natural things believable in themselves, he can't make them believable in any of their spiritual extensions.
"The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look. Then he is required to reproduce, with words, what he sees. Now this is the first point at which the novelist who is a Catholic may feel some friction between what he is supposed to do as a novelist and what he is supposed to do as a Catholic, for what he sees at all times is fallen man perverted by false philosophies. Is he to reproduce this? Or is he to change what he sees and make it, instead of what it is, what in the light of faith he thinks it ought to be? Is he, as Baron von Hugel has said, supposed to 'tidy up reality'? . . .
"There is no reason why fixed dogma should fix anything that the writer sees in the world. On the contrary, dogma is an instrument for penetrating reality. . . .The Catholic fiction writer is entirely free to observe. He feels no call to take on the duties of God or to create another universe. He feels perfectly free to look at the one we already have and to show exactly what he sees. He feels no need to apologize for the ways of God to man or to avoid looking at the ways of man to
God. For him, to 'tidy up reality' is certainly to succumb to the sin of pride. Open and free observation is founded on our ultimate faith that the universe is meaningful."