Earlier this year, I interviewed at the live summit, Spiritual Renewal and the Creative Life. Please enjoy this transcript of our interview.

Dn. Nicholas Kotar: Joel, you talk about the written word in a way that most creatives won’t: in your recent book The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future, you take an engineering approach to language, using things like x, y, and z axes. You talk about books as a technology that changed the world. Our focus in today’s summit is how to renew humanity through the creative act; I want you to be in on this conversation because, as writers and readers, you’re helping us think of the book as an incredible technology that will do the thing I claim we can do.

It’s a huge endeavor to write the history of the printed book, especially because you’re considering not only the historical realities of how the printed book came to be, but also how it impacted society through its various stages. What kind of madness prompted you to undertake a project of this size?

Joel Miller: It is a little bit mad, and it took over ten years to execute. It was a book titled Eyewitness to Jesus that started the whole thing. The idea of the book was that it might be possible to redate The Book of Matthew to about 54 A.D., which is much earlier than most scholars believe to be the case. It turns out that nobody buys that thesis except the author. Nonetheless, it captivated me because it explains things like the origin of the codex, the Christian use of the codex, and other things that ended up becoming obsessions for me.

In 2012, I started thinking about expressive individualism and what I began to think of as the great heresy. I put a book proposal together about the Christian origins of individualism; people talk about individualism as an alien worldview that’s imposed upon us, but it actually extends out of the Christian expression of appreciation for the individual and the individual’s responsibility before God; you can find shimmers of this in the Psalms and elsewhere in Scripture. I put together what I thought was a brilliant book proposal. I was in publishing at the time and thought it would absolutely work. But it was rejected by everybody under the sun. I retooled it, pitched it again, and was rejected again.

But both times I pitched it, editors came back and said they really liked the particular chapter on the impact of the book during the early modern period, particularly during the reformation, because the reformation would not have happened without books. So I thought about expanding that chapter into a book and assumed I could knock it out in a couple of years.

It took ten years because I had to immerse myself in book history. I had to understand not only what made the book unique, but also what I could say about it that hadn’t been said before. What helped me was reading the conversion story in Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine recounts how he is tormented and leaves his friend to go weep in private in the garden, leaving behind him a copy of St. Paul’s letters–the codex–setting it down on the bench. As he wanders off, he hears what he thinks are children saying, “Tole lege,” translated as “Take up and read.” Remembering his book, Augustine runs back to it, opens it at random, and lands on a passage that salves his troubled spirit.

To me, the most interesting thing about that passage is what he does next: he puts his finger, or some kind of marker, in the book. The dots connected in my mind at that moment because I realized Augustine wasn’t talking anymore about the “software,” if you will, of the contents of the book, but rather the “hardware” of the book and what that hardware made possible. The hardware was his ability to find that same passage again to share it with his friend. You can extrapolate from there that he was able to mark any book he owned. If you read, for instance, The City of God, it’s almost like a biography of other books. It’s Augustine interacting with hundreds of other authors. He was marking books, making observations, and drawing connections.

What occurred to me is that it’s the technology of the book that makes this interaction with ideas possible. That’s the inspiration for The Idea Machine.

DNK: You begin by making a point about the form of the book itself and how the form is connected to the function. Could you talk a little bit about that from a technical perspective?

JM: To speak about “software,” or the content of the book, is one thing. I have about three thousand books in my house. They all say a lot of different things on a lot of different topics, yet they’re all bound in exactly the same way. This means technologies like the index become usable features; it means you can separate parts of the book.

When cobbling books together in the first century AD, the ancient Christians would find random texts and bind them together, which enabled certain things to never fall out of circulation. For instance, something like the prayer of Manasseh, which is essentially one page of text, is very easily lost. In a non-print world, where this prayer couldn’t be included with other texts, it would be lost. But by binding the prayer into a Bible, they were able to ensure the text was never lost. As a result, we’re the heirs of that today.

That was true, in fact, for a lot of books. So you’ll find odd collections, like a psalm next to the epistle of Jude. The pairings are random and are particular to specific book users, with particular sections often copied from friends’ books. So the codex enabled people to assemble little libraries of texts that were meaningful to them.

DNK: In your survey of the history of books, you talk about Socrates’ famous objection to the written word, but then you throw a wrench into the works and suggest that, perhaps, either Socrates himself or Plato writing about Socrates was lying. I want to throw a wrench into that and suggest an idea I heard recently from Martin Shaw: the limitations of the written word are real, and it might be time for a return to the oral tradition. So who’s right? Socrates, Martin Shaw, or you?

JM: All of us, depending on how you look at it. These are contextual questions. In the Phaedrus, Socrates attacks the idea that a book has value across several dimensions: one is that, if someone has access to a book, they haven’t really internalized that information. In another context, that’s actually a virtue of the book, that you can have access to ideas you don’t know. That’s why most of us read–we’re there to learn. Socrates’ view was that we have access to everything we need to know through our connection to the divine, that we have a latent memory of all the truth we need to know. Functionally, that isn’t true. If I need to fix my Volkswagen, I’m going to find an owner’s manual and look it up. If I want to find out about the Council of Florence, I’m going to go read a history book.

Another thing Socrates said that is both right and wrong is that a book cannot select its audience: anybody may read a given book and interpret it as they will, and they may get it wrong. For instance, the Orthodox might say that the Protestant Reformation was a grand adventure in missing the point, which happened because people had access to texts that the church would say they didn’t understand. And yet, many of us who are converts came to the church through reading. So my response to Socrates is, “Yes, and…” There’s another side to the technology of books. If we don’t recognize the full range of ramifications, we might take a stance one way or the other without recognizing that it’s context-specific.

DNK: There’s an interesting episode in your book where you talk about how losing Aristotle’s library resulted in “talking bombast about commonplace propositions.” You’re talking here about a loss of access to information, and I think we have something similar going on right now: we have unlimited access to unfettered information with the internet. The result seems similar: “talking bombast about commonplace propositions.” So what are we missing, and what role does the physical book play in moving us away from this?

JM: I have to credit that great phrase to Strabo, who was writing about the loss of Aristotle’s library. It’s a great backstory, by the way: Aristotle left Athens, entrusting his library to someone who died and willed it to someone who wasn’t even connected with Aristotle’s school. So all of Aristotle’s books–not only the books he had written but also the books he had collected–ended up being dragged off. That meant that the people at Aristotle’s school were left with just talking nonsense because they didn’t have access to texts any more.

What you describe is the inverse of that problem. Socrates would also say that books can give you information, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you understand any of it. The problem is that we lack discernment, or wisdom. Books are not a solution to that. Plenty of people read books and still talk bombast. However, unlike a Twitter feed, a book will force you to sit with, wrestle with, and engage your critical faculties long enough and in such a way that your native intelligence may be able to overcome some of the pitfalls, whereas simply responding to a stream of tweets doesn’t put you in that same state of mind.

DNK: Because people are tending toward scrolling and reacting rather than reading and wrestling, do you see an end to the kind of literacy that has made Western civilization, or is there a way out of this?

JM: Nothing is more popular than a decline narrative, so it instantly makes me recoil. We’ve got a tendency to think of peak literacy in the twentieth century as the benchmark, and yet, for the entire history of the book, that benchmark is not remotely accurate in describing how most people engage with literacy. Most people for most of history have been illiterate. Our own practices as Orthodox Christians come from a pre-printing press world where you hear the Scripture by going to church and listening to someone read it to you; that practice hasn’t changed.

As Westerners, we’re used to thinking everyone can read and everyone should read and that’s how we save Western civilization. I don’t think that’s remotely true. For all of its faults and all of its virtues, Western civilization came about with most people being unable to read and write. So if there is a recession in reading–and I definitely agree it’s fairly well documented that this is the case–I don’t know that the ramifications are as dire as people assume. Now it’s still problematic, because what literacy is being replaced with might be bad.

So Martin Shaw’s call to orality is an attempt at saying we need to get away from things like mediated experiences of sharing and reestablish human connection again. There’s real wisdom in that. That will be better than spending yet another hour on Instagram.

At the same time, I do remain very optimistic about certain pockets of readers. There are very rich subcultures of reading, and even those of us who live within those pockets may not appreciate how vital they are to us.

If you’d like to join other writers who are just as excited as Joel to cultivate a rich subculture of reading and writing, be sure to check out our online writers’ community, which has a 2-week free trial!

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DNK: I will add to that: my generation was mostly reading in ebook format, and we’re now seeing a decline in ebook purchases. But that’s not an entirely bad thing, because we’re also seeing that the next generation is going back to reading paperbacks, preferring a physical format.

JM: In some ways, I think Gen Z is a very bright spot in this question of our digital immersion. They are certainly more mindful and intentional than Gen X and Millenials.

DNK: You make an interesting point in your book about Cicero’s library and how once you’ve collected several books in a single place, it’s as though the library becomes its own form of intelligence. This idea of emergent intelligence in the technology of the book is, I think, very powerful. I wonder if you could expound on this in relation to why the book persists as one of the most powerful technologies.

JM: I included that in the book because I was foreshadowing a development I wanted to talk about near the book’s end–the rise of LLMs and generative AI. People have justifiable wariness about AI without recognizing that it comes from a three-thousand-year history of people trying to figure out how to organize information.

This is an underappreciated problem, because most people just take for granted things like libraries, search engines, catalogues, and indices. All of the technologies–whether they’re analog or digital–have been developed to help people solve the problem of how to wrangle all this data we keep creating. There are a million things that separate humans from the animal kingdom, but one of them is that we make a lot of data. We generate so much information, and this has literally always been a problem.

So if you think about the way technology changes, what happens is that we get ourselves into a bind, and then we come up with a solution to the problem. The problem, very early on, became how to organize all the books. Even back in clay tablet libraries, librarians and archivists were using things like metadata, titles, serialization, etc. so that, for instance, if the king needed to find out if he should send his son to go marry the princess in Egypt, he had some access to the treaty they signed one hundred and fifty years prior so he could find it and decide if the marriage was a good idea. That’s a real example, and it’s just one illustration of why it’s so important to organize information.

But imagine what happens when you get to the 1800s. In the 1800s, for the first time ever, you hook up steam engines to printing presses, and now books are being published by the millions every year, not to mention newspapers, periodicals, etc. There’s a flood of information. Humans have been dealing with the term we’ve coined as “information overload” from the Hittite empire until today, and we’ve been coming up with various solutions to deal with it. That includes Cicero’s library.

The observation Cicero made is the most pertinent for understanding this: when you organize information, it ends up having a kind of emergent intelligence; what I meant by that is not consciousness; but it conveys a kind of intelligence that anybody can access. So if the organization of a library is clear enough, you no longer need to have a person holding all of it in their head and directing you where to go based on what you want to know. It’s like a syllogism: anybody can run a syllogism and get the same conclusion. And that’s true for a well-organized library: because it’s now depersonalized, anybody can step in and use the card catalogue or the search function and find what they need.

An LLM does functionally the same thing, just with a different mechanization (statistical probability). It is depersonalizing the information such that anybody can go run the process and get the piece of information they want.

DNK: So essentially, what you’re saying is that LLMs are a glorified index.

JM: An LLM can work that way. It can do a lot of other things, too, which is where we get into the scary stuff like potentially replacing artists. An LLM can write. Does that make the writing valuable in and of itself? No. The point being, it can do all these other things that are bothersome for various reasons, but the core reason for LLMs was to help humans sort data.

DNK: There are a lot of things to say here. You mentioned that LLMs are doing a bunch of problematic things. There’s also the fact of the LLM’s flawed origin story, which involved a considerable amount of intellectual property infringement (for those of you who don’t know, one of my books showed up in the list). And beyond this, we are more glutted with information than ever, a problem to which AI is also contributing. (Think of the number of AI-generated novels being added to Amazon every day; it’s becoming ridiculous, and we’re only in the early days of the technology.)

Given this reality, this information glut does seem to mimic the book explosion of early modern times. Back then, you needed to have human beings actually create indices. What do you think a modern pandectarum should look like?

JM: We’re talking about an index of all the world’s knowledge, which is what the original pandectarum attempted. That’s the problem LLMs are attempting to answer. It may not be a satisfactory answer. But I think, in using LLMs or any other technology, discernment is still fundamental. We need to be asking what we, as humans, bring to the interaction. A lot of the technology we use today without thinking twice comes out of military use. If you’re remotely as peacenik as I am, it’s very troublesome to imagine, for instance, the interchangeability of parts that we take for granted today. But that was an invention of gunsmiths who needed to have the ability to fix guns on the battlefield in a few minutes as opposed to sending the gun back down the line to have it fixed.

DNK: And that was taken to an industrial level during World War II because of the war-time economy.

JM: Exactly. The internet was also birthed for military purposes. All that to say, I think the origin of a technology is not the last word on a technology. We need to remember that humans discern and make use of things for their own ends, though origin stories are also part of that discernment process. We live in a very complicated, sin-riddled world, and I don’t know that there’s any way to walk out clean, especially since I’m not clean. There’s no way I touch anything without making a mess of some of it.

DNK: This makes me think of what you call the “holy internet” in early Christian times, when you have the perfect storm of Roman military technology (the infrastructure of roads) and the Christian embrace of the codex. In essence, it’s a combination of information bearing truth.

Today, we’re obsessed with information. We’re riddled in information. What do you think is the relation between information and truth? How can we navigate the difference? And what’s the role of the book in doing so?

JM: Information can contain truth. It can also contain everything else: misinformation, lies, and so on. I just finished reading Crime and Punishment, and there’s an electric passage where Razumikin is talking to Raskolikov’s mother and sister about his friends and how they lie to him, but he likes it when they lie because only humans can lie, and lying is the most human thing about humans, and if you lie long enough, you land on the truth. First off, that’s not true. But it is helpful in thinking about what it means to land on the truth.

We venture a lot of ideas that are false. We venture a lot of ideas that are incomplete. And it’s only by venturing partial answers that we eventually arrive at full answers. As we think about this problem of too much information, part of what we need to do is recognize that our conclusions about what we’re reading should be provisional. It’s not enough to read something and take it as truth. It’s not enough to consume data and assume we have a complete picture of the world once we’ve read a lot. We have to take it provisionally.

In many ways, this is the proper place for human beings to be. We are not God. We just don’t know most of what there is to know. Being humble enough to be provisional in our conclusions is really meaningful. We also need to remember that books testify to this. Ecclesiastes testifies to this. There’s always another book. And so our understanding of the world is being constantly revised as we discover more new data, and we also have to recognize that even the new information is provisional.

I think what this does is put us into a position of radical humility about how confident we can be that we understand the world. Not a bad place to be.

DNK: It isn’t, but–and this has been the case throughout history–we still want some sort of official imprimatur or canon of the kinds of texts that are at least trending toward the kind of truth that we’re talking about. As you were studying the history of the book, you say you came across this idea of canon formation very often. So in your experience of reading about the history of the book, who gets to decide how canon is created? How does it happen? And what, ultimately, determines canonicity?

JM: A mostly useless category, and then a very valuable category. The first is the cultural elites who have an overweighted position, and the second is the common people who receive their recommendations. The creation of canon is a dynamic between those two forces.

In the church context, this plays out with the episcopacy determining which books need to be copied, preserved, and read in church. If you look at the church canon debates, Eusebius’s argument is that there are lists that are approved in each diocese, and if you take all those lists and overlay them, you see a common core of books that make up the canon. The popular receptivity of that comes down to which books are used by the people repeatedly.

Let’s switch gears to the Western literary canon. Books like The Brothers Karamotsov and Crime and Punishment, for instance, live in that canon at a level that other books by Dostoevsky do not because not all Dostoevsky’s books have risen to their level of common readership.

In the literary world, the interplay of canon would be critics, scholars, and literature teachers on one side and the receptivity of the students and common readers on the other. I think that’s where canon more or less comes from: the suggestion of an authority and the receptivity of a listener. We can see that dynamic play out not only in how the Scriptural canon came to be, but also in how any canon comes to be.

DNK: One interesting problem that we’re coming across now is that the first part of that equation–the choosing of select books by elites–is no longer as powerful a force as it used to be in the past. At this particular moment in time, there’s a widespread disregard of the experts, particularly in the book world. Do you think it’s possible to create a canon in situations like this, or do we need to wait out this period until respect for a new group of experts starts to arise among the people?

JM: That’s a really complicated question. For one thing, there is, to bastardize a term, a baptism of certain authors today that still take hold. Modern authors like Colson Whitehead, for instance, have been given the elite stamp that’s been confirmed by common readers. So that dynamic still happens.

But at the same time, you’re describing a widespread lack of trust in authority that’s only getting worse. People do not trust institutions, even praiseworthy institutions, at the level they used to. That means we’re on our own to establish what we think is meaningful. And that’s chaos. If I’m honest, I don’t believe there is a way out of this. This interaction may take different shapes. For instance, I think there will be millions of subcultures that help perform the act of canonization.

As our world gets more fragmented, I don’t know what the source is that pulls that back together. I do think, where there are strong institutions (the Church, for instance), it would be great if there were more conversation about which books are meaningful beside the spiritual classics. There has to be the ability for the church to say useful things about other types of literature.

DNK: I couldn’t agree with you more. Let me suggest a possible way out and see what you think. In one of your chapters, you talk about the common matrix of ideas, specifically how the founding fathers were all formed in the same canon, except it’s not clear to me that this was a canon since it may have been self-selected. These were people who were not as prone to listen to the powers of the age. They were revolutionaries.

I hear you that right now the ascendent model is a whole bunch of microcultures, but is what happened with the common matrix of ideas something that we can look to? In other words, did they choose the books when they made the matrix, or did the books choose them? Was it a canon issue or a creation of a canon issue?

JM: I think it was a bit of a canon issue in that the common matrix of ideas was essentially texts that embody the Western liberal tradition (think Montescue, John Locke, and others). Those books, along with various popular histories of England, popularizations of ancient Greek texts, and so on, helped shape the worldview of the founding generation. The founding fathers (and particularly James Madison) were able to trace a thread of what they thought was the best ideal of human liberty, and then, by looking at other ancient and modern constitutions, they were able to pull together what they thought was the ideal form of government.

But at the same time, there was the ability to read at the margins, because they were reading whatever they could get their hands on. You see that reflected in their personal reading taste. Jefferson read a lot of the same books Madison read, but they still had their own interests. That would have been true for Franklin, Washington, Adams, and so on.

We’re in the same boat in that we in the West, for better or worse, have also inherited a version of that same Western liberal tradition, and yet we can self-select anything we want. If you’re a convert to Orthodoxy, for example, you may very intentionally say that whatever you have that is part of your making, you’re going to bring in the mind of the Church and let it transform you.

I think every individual is doing that to one degree or another. That’s complicated, because, back to Socrates, you may not understand what you’re reading. But then again, who’s to say, because we don’t trust the authorities anymore. It is a bit of a cultural bind.

DNK: Maybe the answer is to be found not in these kinds of technical issues but in embracing the power of a certain form of book: the novel. Your chapter on the power of the novel focuses on the society-altering effects of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A lot of people don’t realize how powerful it was, but it had an incredible effect on America at the time in which it was written. Briefly talk about what it did, and tell us some experiences you had with that peculiar “witchcraft” of the novel that have changed your own life.

JM: Harriet Beecher Stowe grew up in a minister’s household. Her father’s library was crammed with sermons and pamphlets on various social causes. She read some of it, but what really set her off was reading One Thousand and One Nights, Don Quixote, and other novels. Her father did not approve of novels, but he did like Robert Lewis Stevenson (probably because it was historical fiction).

As the crisis around slavery began to intensify, and as the public heat increased around abolition vs secession, Stowe became convinced that the only way to have an impact on people’s minds would not be more oratory, or newspapers, or pamphlets, but rather a novel. She was around slavery enough to know its impact. She could tell she had the ingredients for a great story.

So she sat down and wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was serialized for several months and then finally came out in book form. Despite the fact that it had been serialized, nobody was ready for the impact her book would have once it was produced as a book. It sold gobs of copies, more than any other comparative title at the time. Abraham Lincoln apparently said to her, apocraphically (I don’t think there’s actually any evidence that this happened): “So this is the little woman who started the big war.” But like a lot of apocryphal stories, it resonates because it was true.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin did something no one thought possible: it exposed Northern readers to the life of enslaved human beings, giving these readers access to what it felt like to be enslaved. It became intolerable for people to read this reality and walk away from the pain of their brothers and sisters. The impact of the book was utterly profound. Because people were able to inhabit a life that was not their own, they began to feel the hope, despair, sacrifice, love, goodness, and suffering of those enslaved. It was an earthquake of a book.

In many ways, every book has the possibility of doing that. I just read Crime and Punishment. Here I am ricocheting in this claustrophobic skull of Raskolnikov’s, busy cycling his stupid arguments through my own head, and I get where he’s coming from. Even as his mental faculties disintegrate–I inhabit that character. This is even more powerful in first person narratives, where the character speaks as “I.”

The advent of the novel had a tremendous impact on Western consciousness in that it enabled people to inhabit the lives of people whose lives they could never otherwise have imagined. We have the opportunity to experience this every time we pick up a novel. You called it “magic,” and it really is–it’s a remarkable technology. Arthur C. Clarke’s old joke that once technology is sufficiently advanced, it’s indistinguishable from magic is really true about the novel.

DNK: Yes. I would say the novel is the one thing that is able to combine the two virtues of compassion and empathy in a way that doesn’t allow either to become problematic. Compassion without personal involvement can become distant, while empathy can become so associated with the problems of the other that you lose the foundation of your own reality and then become anti everyone who is contrary to that one person’s problems. This is something we see a lot right now in popular culture.

The question then is, do you think our current society can be moved by a novel, and, if so, what kind of novel would that be?

JM: Yes. Every book that is written has the chance, however remote, to break through all the echo chambers and micro cultures and speak across all of them. We can tell by sales numbers that this is only possible for a very few books. The Harry Potter series might be a good example of a series that transcended every social barrier and community. It was ubiquitous, and it remains ubiquitous despite the fact that some of the original fans have distanced themselves from the author for her positions on the trans movement and so on.

Every now and then, a book does break through and speak beyond a subculture to a wide culture. Every book has the chance to do that, depending mostly on things that are outside the author’s control; there has to be something going on in the world that makes the world receptive to the book. But if the world is receptive, the publisher won’t be able to print books fast enough.

DNK: I’ve noticed that there are these occasional appearances of a book, or even a television show or movie (I’m thinking of Star Wars in particular), that percolate up and transcend the narrow interests of subcultures. But I’ve also noticed that nothing, at least in my lifetime, has completely broken free of the particularity of a given space and time. The closest is maybe The Lord of the Rings, but even that’s becoming problematic, because, like you said, people can read and interpret things in any way they like. I remain hopeful as you do, but I have no idea what the novel that will move our current society is going to look like.

JM: I’m an irrepressible optimist, and I might just be clouded. But I remain optimistic that the written word, in whatever format people encounter it (in fact, the more formats, the better), has the power to change human lives. We have 3,500-something years of history of this happening, and it will continue to happen.

DNK: I agree. Joel, before we conclude, where should everyone get your book?

JM: If you are one of those folks who doesn’t like Amazon (and I understand!), your local bookstore should have it or be able to order it. It’s also available on Bookshop and Barnes and Noble.

I will also mention my work with Full Focus. If you would like to bring peace to your day and wrangle the chaos that is your daily life and encapsulate it on a sheet of paper in a way that will make your life feel straight and organized, you need a full focus planner.

Welcome to step four in a series I’m writing on how to write a hero like Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings. As I’ve been writing these posts, you may have noticed that the line between the writer and the hero we write have been blurring a little.

This was not entirely intentional, but I think there’s an important truth in this development. I’ll be sure to talk about it at more length in the final post in this series. So stay tuned for that.

Recap

For those who are just joining us, allow me to recap where we are: Appendix A of The Return of the King is a part of The Lord of the Rings that a lot of people miss, and it’s one of the most fascinating sections because it recounts the making of a hero.

What we learn is that Aragorn undergoes a seven-step process before he becomes the hero we all encounter at the start of The Lord of the Rings. The hero must:

Phase One: The Testing Phase

1. Find a mentor;

2. Seek solitude;

3. Encounter ideas he/she disagrees with and examine them deeply without forgetting the teachings of the mentor;

4. Find a craft (become skilled with their hands) and expand their lore;

5. Accept their doom (this is a good place to explore the particularities of your secondary world);

Phase Two: The Action Phase

6. Extend their heart (reforge proper relationships with their community; this is difficult when the community is not in the same stage of the quest the hero is in); and

7. Go on the quest (with a mix of humility and purpose, the hero can transform his life and the lives of others).

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been examining each step in depth and looking at how we ourselves can imitate them, either in our personal lives or in the lives of the heroes we write.

Aragorn Goes into Enemy Territory and Tests Hearts

Today, we’re on step three.

After Aragorn decided to embrace his destiny as king, he did something very unexpected. He went out into the darkest, most dangerous places, the places where Sauron reigned, in order to test the hearts of everyone he encountered. He was not afraid of doing this. In fact, it was a necessary step in his becoming the king who could unify divided people in a time of great tribulation.

That means our next step in our hero’s acquisition of resilience and courage isn’t a pleasant one. It means we’re to walk voluntarily into enemy territory. That’s right–after finding a mentor and embracing solitude, we’re entering the danger zone: engaging with ideas we disagree with.

Aragorn went on a physical quest into enemy territory, something you definitely might want to put your hero through

However, this is a step that we might have to put ourselves through first as people, not only as writers. I’m suggesting that we writers might be well served to go on a mental quest into enemy territory.

The Fear of Engaging Enemy Ideas

As society has become more and more polarized over the past several years, especially post COVID, the fear of engaging with ideas we disagree with has only become more pronounced. People in just about any political or religious camp can relate to this. My Christian readers, for example, will probably relate to not wanting to read texts that are anti-Christian or heretical, for fear of contamination.

Now, there’s some nuance here, but there seems to be a bit of magical thinking hidden in this attitude. It isn’t true that if you engage with a dangerous idea you will be affected inevitably and without even realizing it, a kind of curse by association. That seems to me to be a very strange and almost pagan way of thinking.

On the other hand, I do think stories that are antithetical to your worldview can make your heart more empathetic to those worldviews, and that can be a double-edged sword.

Here’s an anecdote to illustrate my point: When “Brokeback Mountain” came out, I was teaching at an Orthodox school in San Francisco, and I was very surprised by how many people in my small Orthodox sphere, after viewing the film, were comfortable expressing opinions about that sort of a lifestyle that they never would have expressed before. While for some viewers the movie no doubt gave them a way to more comfortably espouse ideas they had already harbored in secret, I think something else happened too. What I think happened is what often happens with powerful stories: they enter our hearts and have the power to actually change our minds and even our worldviews.

Am I saying we should not engage with ideas that are antithetical to our worldview because they might change our worldview? Absolutely not. I’m saying we should engage with them, but we should do so understanding the potential danger to our intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life. We have to be honest about the danger. Stories affect hearts.

But a necessary part of becoming a hero is searching out ideas that are different from our own, even ideas we might find to be abhorrent, and decide by a careful, well-thought-out, and protected approach, what the heart of those ideas are.

How do we do this?

What I Learned from Entering Enemy Territory

Personal story time:

Not too long ago, I happened across an article by a Black author named Phenderson Djéli Clark. The article was posted on his blog, “Thoughts of a Disgruntled Haradrim”. (The title of his blog makes the Aragorn parallel of encountering someone you disagree with even more apt!) Clark associated himself with the Haradrim, a people largely under Sauron’s sway, not because he wants to say he’s aligned with Sauron but because he sees Tolkien as a closet racist who lumped dark-skinned people into Sauron’s camp because of their skin color. (An arguable point at best, I think, but again, the whole point of today is to engage with different ideas.)

At any rate, Phenderson Djéli Clark wrote an article about the history of blackface in popular culture. It was a fascinating article about an era of American history I knew very little about, and I got sucked into it. I knew I was in enemy territory because I know Clark does not share my worldview in most things; he made that quite clear in both the name and the about section of his blog.

And yet, there was so much in his article that challenged me, and so much in his article that was appealing to me. His heart is good. I had to decide how much to filter out and how careful to be in engaging with his ideas. Yes, engaging ideas we disagree with presents a real danger. But the benefit can outweigh the risks. I can tell you that, if I had not been willing to enter into Clark’s rather dark view of the world (dark in the sense that he sees enemies in a lot of places, historically where they definitely were and sometimes in places they weren’t [I don’t think Tolkien was Clark’s enemy]), I would never have read the works of N.K. Jemisin.

N.K. Jemisin is a very liberal-leaning person whose worldview I do not espouse, and that worldview does come across in some of her novels. Yet she also wrote The Broken Earth Trilogy, which is quite possibly the greatest fantasy trilogy of the last fifty years. There are things that happen in these books that I find to be disgusting and abhorrent, and so without reading Clark, I would never have finished the series. Thanks to Clark, I ploughed through and found Jemisin’s overall story about how the self-sacrificial love of a mother and her child can literally and figuratively move mountains to be incredibly profound and deep. (That’s one of the best messages you could ever get from fiction, and one we desperately need to swallow up whole right now.) And I never would have gotten that had I approached Jemisin’s work with a critical eye and viewed her as an “enemy.”

Looking into anti-racism, which I have been forced to do largely because of the astounding response to racism and anti-racism in popular media, I was further surprised and utterly delighted to find voices like Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, incredible men who are much more intelligent than I and who absolutely refuse to kowtow to prevailing postmodern attitudes about race and critical theory.

Again, I would not have found these voices if I had not chosen to go deep into anti-racism as an idea and search it out. By doing that, I found some of its most trenchant critics and some of the most intelligent and interesting things that can be said about it.

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A Caveat

I want to note something important: I have committed to exploring ideas I disagree with only because I steep myself in the teachings and writings of my mentors and because I regularly make a point of going deep into solitude to assess my own spiritual and intellectual health, which are prerequisites to venturing into dangerous territory.

Vasilissa the Beautiful

Surprise surprise, I’d like to present a Russian fairy tale that gives us some amazing insight into how to deal with the heart of darkness in ideas we fear to encounter, and maybe even find something useful in the process.

This story is called Vasilisa the Beautiful. It has little to do with engaging with ideas that are not your own, but it has everything to do with the fear of engaging with the unknown (the unknown often being personified by Baba Yaga).

Here’s a little excerpt in which we meet three girls, two ugly and bad, one beautiful and good; they are hard at work when their candle starts to flicker and go out:

“One of the girls took some scissors to cut the wick, but instead, she put the candle out. It seemed to be by accident, but actually, she had been told to do it by her mother.

‘What will we do now?’ the girls said. ‘There’s no fire anywhere in the house, but we haven’t finished our work! Someone will have to go get fire from Baba Yaga!’

The first girl quickly said, ‘I won’t go, I can see by the light of the moon as it reflects off my needles.’

The second girl quickly answered, ‘I won’t go either, I can see by the light of the stars as they reflect on my darning needle.’

And both of them turned on Vasilissa: ‘You have to go! Go and get fire from Baba Yaga!’

Vasilissa went into her closet, put her own dinner in front of the doll [a talking doll she got from her deceased mother], and said, ‘Here you go, dolly, eat my dinner and listen to my sorrow. They’re sending me out to get fire from Baba Yaga! She’ll eat me!’

The doll ate her dinner, and her eyes sparkled like two candles.

‘Don’t be afraid, Vasilissa!’ she answered. ‘Go on, only keep me with you always. Nothing will happen to you, even at Baba Yaga’s.’”

What’s happening here? Fear is a reality when we think of encountering the dark (ideas we think are dangerous or antithetical to our worldview). How do we deal with that fear? Well, the story says 1) don’t run away from it and 2) you need to have the blessing of your parent. For us, this means we need to go into intellectual contest equipped with the support and training of our mentor. This is why it’s important not to do so before we have a very strong grounding in our own worldview. If we don’t have this, and if we encounter stories that move the heart and that are not good for us, we will be in danger.

What next? Well, here’s what happens to Vasilissa after she goes into the forest and actually encounters Baba Yaga:

“Vasilissa screwed up her courage and came up to Baba Yaga, bowing deeply to the ground, and said, ‘It’s me, grandmother! My stepmother’s daughters sent me to get fire from you.’

‘Very well,’ said Baba Yaga. ‘I know those girls. Come and live with me for a bit, and do some work for me. Then I’ll give you some fire. But if not, then I’ll eat you.’”

Vasilissa bows deeply, encountering her fear with both respect and courage. What is the response? Baba Yaga gives Vasilissa grudging respect and reminds her that, if Vasilissa is to come out alive, she must work hard. For us, this means we have to actually engage in intellectual exercise when we’re entering enemy territory. And then, maybe the idea will give us what we need. But if we engage without being ready or without having the proper posture, the idea might eat us.

After passing through the first test with a night of difficult work, Vasilissa is given a gift by Baba Yaga. This is the gift we all receive when we overcome the first hurdle of encountering hard ideas. Let us read on:

“By evening, Vasilissa prepared a gorgeous dinner and sat there, waiting for Baba Yaga. As soon as the black rider rode by, darkness fell, then the skulls’ eyes [around Baba Yaga’s house] started to glow. The trees creaked, the leaves crunched, and here comes Baba Yaga. Vasilissa came out to greet her.

‘Is everything done?’ asked Baba Yaga.

‘Come and see, grandmother!’ said Vasilissa.

Baba Yaga looked around, grumbled a bit, because she had nothing to get mad at, [and ate].”

Later, we get this exchange:

“‘Why are you standing there and saying nothing to me?’ asked Baba Yaga. ‘Are you a mute?’

‘I don’t dare say anything,’ answered Vasilissa, ‘but if you allow it, I’d like to ask you about a few things.’

‘Ask away! But not every question leads to good answers. If you know too much, you’ll get old faster!’

‘I only wanted to ask, … who’s the black rider who rode past me at your gates, grandmother?’

‘That’s my dark night. They’re all my faithful servants.’

Vasilissa remembered the three pairs of hands, but said nothing else.

‘Why aren’t you asking anything else?’ asked Baba Yaga.

‘What do you expect?’ answered Vasilissa. ‘You yourself said if I know too much, I’ll get old faster!’

‘It’s a good thing,’ said Baba Yaga, ‘that you only asked about what’s beyond my gates, not within them. I don’t like busybodies, and the over-curious I like to eat! Now I’m going to ask you a question: How do you manage to do all the work I give you?”’

This is a fascinating exchange, because it shows the proper posture for this engagement: Vasilissa doesn’t come in guns blazing. She doesn’t come in insisting on her own way of doing things. If she did, Baba Yaga would eat her. This is the same for us and for our heroes. If they don’t come in with the posture of humble respect, with a willingness to actually listen and assess later, then nothing will come out of the important step of entering the heart of darkness, to be tested, and we might actually be eaten in the process.

Something else that’s really interesting is that, because Vasilissa assumed this posture of respect, Baba Yaga begins to ask Vasilissa questions. At that point, they have a conversation. With the right approach, the hero in our story can move from just listening to an opposing ideology to also enjoying a mutual exchange in which the two sides can share deep convictions about the world.

But there’s more. Vasilissa notices the three hands Baba Yaga has that do work for her. But Vasilissa chooses not to ask about these hands. Why? This shows us we should not be constantly open when we are engaging with a dangerous idea. Baba Yaga commends Vasilissa’s wisdom in not asking and says Vasilissa would have been eaten if she had been overly curious. In other words, our heroes shouldn’t cede too much ground or over-extend, leaving themselves open and vulnerable.

This is how we (and our heroes) should engage–carefully asking, respectfully listening, giving (but only a little), and taking (but not too much). If we do that well, the story tells us what ends up happening. Vasilissa gets the gift of fire, and then:

“Vasilissa ran home, her path lit by the glowing eyes of the skull. Finally, on the evening of the following day, she arrived home. As she approached, she thought about tossing the skull away. ‘They probably managed to find some fire on their own,’ she thought her herself. But then, the skull started to talk to her.

‘Don’t toss me away. Take me to your stepmother!’

She looked at her stepmother’s house, and seeing not a single fire lit in any window, decided to bring the skull. For the first time ever, they met her kindly and said that for all the days since she had left, they had no fire in their house. They couldn’t manage to so much as catch a spark, and everyone who brought them fire couldn’t bring anything past the threshold. It immediately went out!

They brought the skull into the living room, and the eyes on the skull started to stare at the stepmother and stepsisters, so intensely, it was like they were on fire! They tried hiding, but it didn’t matter. No matter where they went, the eyes followed them everywhere. By the morning, the eyes had burned them down completely to ash. Only Vasilissa remained untouched.

That morning, Vasilissa buried the skull in the earth, locked the house, and went into the city.”

Fire is useful, but a skull on fire indicates magic, which means we have to be careful about how we use what we’re given because it can endanger not only ourselves, but also others. (Now it’s important to note that Vasilissa does use the fire properly: her stepmother and stepsisters have been rotten to her. It isn’t vindictive for her to simply bring the fire they asked for; the comeuppance comes because of the power of the idea, not because of Vasilissa’s intention.)

The Gift and the Danger

Even if we emerge from our encounter unscathed, the ideas we’ve gained still have the power to burn those who are not ready to accept them. So be aware that ideas can kill others and not just yourself. The best thing you can do is use the wisdom you’ve gained for what’s useful and then bury it again and leave (unless the heart of the idea is good, at which point, you can use it).

This is especially true of your hero, because if the hero becomes too enamored of “enemy ideas” he may become afflicted with a dangerous disease–movie-Aragorn-syndrome. This is a common modern ailment in fiction where the hero is unable to do anything because of crippling self-doubt. “I might become a second Isildur!” movie Aragorn says to himself, refusing to take up the shards of Narsil.

Book Aragorn had no such qualms, precisely because he had done all the work on himself that we’re talking about in this series.

Do yourself and your readers a favor. Do not let your hero fall to movie-Aragorn-syndrome. No one likes movie-Aragorn-syndrome-afflicted heroes.

As so often happens, this fairy tale grants us really interesting insights about how we and the heroes we write should engage different and dangerous ideas: respectfully, courageously, cautiously, and carefully, with the blessing and training of our mentor and the knowledge that comes through solitude. That is how we might win a gift in enemy territory.

But more on that next time.

Hello dear friends!

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As I’ve been writing this series on how to write a hero for our modern times, it occurred to me that the next step in emulating Aragorn’s journey is just as useful for the writer as it is for the hero that we write.

This is a bit of an inconvenient truth, but I have faith in you, my dear fellow authors! You are a brave and mad breed. You can handle a bit of harsh truth from your fellow-traveler in the wilds of the writer’s life.

(Read part 1 and part 2 if you haven’t yet, though you don’t need to to appreciate this post.)

Here, in this short excerpt from the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen in Appendix B of The Lord of the Rings, we get to the crux of the matter. After his lineage was made known to him, Aragorn doesn’t become exalted and filled with the greatness of his calling or his future kingship. Instead, he does something quite different:

Aragorn took leave lovingly of Elrond; and the next day he said farewell to his mother…and he went out into the wild. For nearly thirty years he laboured in the cause against Sauron; and he became a friend of Gandalf the Wife, from whom he gained much wisdom. With him he made many perilous journeys, but as the years wore on he went more often alone. His ways were hard and long, and he became somewhat grim to look upon, unless he chanced to smile; and yet he seemed to Men worthy of honour, as a king that is in exile, when he did not hide his true shape.”

We see how Aragorn finds a mentor first, but then he takes the wisdom given by the mentor and does something strange. He ventures into the wild alone. He embraces solitude.

And the same is true of the author. Before we can write the hero we need, we need to go through some personal transformations of our own. We could do much worse than committing to embracing solitude.

Noise Is Nothing New

Let’s begin with a fun quotation from Seneca:

Imagine what a variety of noises reverberates about my ears! I have lodgings right over a bathing establishment. So picture to yourself the assortment of sounds, which are strong enough to make me hate my very powers of hearing! When your strenuous gentleman, for example, is exercising himself by flourishing leaden weights; when he is working hard, or else pretends to be working hard, I can hear him grunt; and whenever he releases his imprisoned breath, I can hear him panting in wheezy and high-pitched tones. Or perhaps I notice some lazy fellow, content with a cheap rubdown, and hear the crack of the pummeling hand on his shoulder, varying in sound according as the hand is laid on flat or hollow. Add to this…the man who always likes to hear his own voice in the bathroom, or the enthusiast who plunges into the swimming-tank with unconscionable noise and splashing…

“So you say: ‘What iron nerves or deadened ears, you must have, if your mind can hold out amid so many noises… Among the sounds that din round me without distracting, I include passing carriages, a machinist in the same block, a saw-sharpener near by, or some fellow who is demonstrating with little pipes and flutes at the Trickling Fountain, shouting rather than singing.” ~ Seneca, Moral letters to Lucilius, 56

What’s so interesting is that Seneca’s experience is very similar to what’s going on in any big city at any point in history. From ancient Rome till now, some of our human problems just don’t change that much.

And yet, despite being surrounded by noise and distraction, Seneca was a remarkably productive man who wrote some of the greatest philosophy ever. How was he able to do this?

He had figured out the secret of solitude.

Too Much Noise Can Lead Us to Despair

Now for those of us who work from home and share our space with children, we face a whole different level of din and difficulty when it comes to finding that quiet, solitude, stillness, and peace that are so necessary to meaningful work.

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Add to this the sad reality that, though we are social animals, we tend to absorb negative energy from others much more easily than we absorb cheerfulness and joy. This is the first (and likely the last) time you’ll ever hear me quote Nietzsche, but it’s absolutely true that:

“A single joyless person is enough to create constant discouragement and cloudy skies for a whole household, and it is a miracle if there is not one person like that. Happiness is not nearly so contagious a disease.”

Nietzsche has hit on something important here, and I will use a favorite novel to illustrate the point.

Despair in The Book of the Dun Cow

At the end of The Book of the Dun Cow, the author does something very brave, emulating Tolkien in this particularity: he has his main character, Chanticleer the Rooster, fail in his quest. Chanticleer is able to turn back the tide of tremendous and horrifying evil in the form of a swarm of basilisks that are the progeny of a snake-rooster amalgam called Cockatrice; Chanticleer is even able to destroy Cockatrice himself.

But these victories happen at the cost of Chanticleer’s faith. As soon as Chanticleer kills Cockatrice, the true evil appears. And this great evil is Ouroboros, the worm at the heart of the earth that gnaws its own tail. Chanticleer, faced with the real enemy, is overcome with utter despair. He is so defeated that when he is surrounded by the two characters who love him most, he cannot find in them any consolation; he can only see them as enemies.

This is a profound illustration of how we tend to react to negative energy if despair begins to overcome us. Even the kind words of loved ones can be perceived as weapons. It’s a frightening thing, and many of us have experienced it to some degree.

How does this happen?

Chanticleer’s problem was both his pride and his inability to embrace solitude in the right manner. I’ll explain this in more detail momentarily.

Despair in Our Daily Lives

Lest you think this kind of thing happens only in novels, let me illustrate what it looks like in our daily lives: imagine you awake ready to face the day, and then you encounter a stray word from someone, and already your foundation of happiness begins to crumble; this happens again; and then it seems like everyone you encounter happens to meet you at the worst moment of their day; and you become the bearer of all that negative energy.

Soon, any remnant of joy you had in the morning is completely gone. You keep hammering away at the day, forcing yourself to do the next right thing. But by the end of the day, you’re worn down, and even the comforting moral support of those who love you most feels like a knife.

Solitude: The Remedy to Despair

What is needed in this moment?

Not another person’s love.

No, what you need is to go to a quiet space, descend into your heart, and try to reconcile the noise and insanity of your thoughts with the stillness of your heart. Once you enter that stillness, you’re able to re-enter communal life with equanimity and even joy. This is exactly what Chanticleer could not do because his heart and his mind were too proud and were buzzing with the battle ahead.

In his wonderful book, Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport includes an anecdote about Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln used to go and visit a small, secluded cottage in the middle of Washington D.C. He would go there for hours, even days–in the middle of the Civil War! Imagine that. He would be completely incommunicado. No one could reach him. He did that because the solitude of that quiet, comforting, beautiful place was the only space in which he could enter the proper thought process to make the necessary decisions to fight the bloodiest war on American soil.

Again, the secret is solitude. Some people call it stillness.

This idea is being preached by many productivity experts. Entire philosophies of work culture are being developed around this idea.

This is what we know: whether we like it or not, we absolutely need either a physical place to go to that is quiet or else a quiet state of being that we can manufacture through intense focus. In other words, we need to be alone with our own thoughts. Why? If we stay in that state of stillness long enough, our brains are able to leave their everyday realities and begin to make strange, unusual connections.

We need to become comfortable with boredom. We need to seek stillness. We need to wait for inspiration to happen.

The Fatal Flaw in the Wrong Kind of Solitude

But guess what?

All these systems have a fatal flaw.

This inspiration that is supposed to come, these connections our brain is supposed to make–where do they come from? Do they come just from the information and experiences we already house within ourselves? The experts say yes.

But here’s the problem: what if we are not the kind of people who have yet developed the practice of filling ourselves with the right kind of stimuli/information/reading/conversation with people who are wiser and better than we are? Then what?

Well, what happens is that we still get the elation of synthesis. Our brains still manufacture insight based on unexpected connections. But these connections might not be all that substantial if we look at them objectively.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I was going through a crisis of personal, professional, and intellectual life. I decided to go live at Valaam Monastery on a frozen island in the middle of Northern Russia. And yes, there was a moment of synthesis, and I remember it as one of the most brilliant and elated moments of my life. But recently, I went back and thought about what it was that I had actually figured out while at Valaam.

And what I figured out was the same level of insight that I have on a weekly basis now. It wasn’t a big moment of anything. It was just me figuring out a tiny bit about my life. Of course, I was very young, and I was emotionally immature (as many men in our time unfortunately are), despite the fact that I was very well-read. So while the insight I got from solitude felt great, it was not advanced.

What I’m getting at is that solitude is necessary, but if you skip to solitude without having found a mentor first, then the insights you get from solitude will always be limited. You will think you’ve come up with incredibly brilliant things, but you will not know how little it is that you actually know.

How do we overcome this? Simply by reading more? No. When I was at Valaam, I had read extensively thanks to my upbringing. And still, my insights were limited. That’s because my solitude was not a synthesis with anyone other than myself.

This is also why Aragorn does a strange thing in response to his coming into his kingship. He embraces an advanced form of solitude. A solitude that went so far as to embrace a kind of exile from his own self:

He went in many guises, and won renown under many names. He rode in the host of the Rohirrim, and fought for the Lord of Godnor by land and by sea; and then in the hour of victory he passed out of the knowledge of the men of the West, and alone far into the East...”

This kind of self-abnegation, both in ourselves and in our heroes, can lead to tremendous insight in solitude. But there’s an even deeper way of embracing solitude that can lead to more profound transformations.

Solitude as Synthesis with the Divine

In “The Red Flower,” the Russian version of Beauty and the Beast, we see something very interesting happen with solitude. In this version of the story, the beast is not cursed for being shallow, petty, and evil, as he is in the American movie. Rather, he is punished because a sorceress didn’t like his father. And so he was stolen from the cradle and raised by a witch who hated him and cursed him to look like a beast, telling him that he would remain a beast until somebody could love him in his bestial form.

Listen to my retelling of “The Red Flower” here:

What’s so amazing about fairy tales is that we’re given gaps we have to fill with our own imagination. And so it is with this tale: we are invited to wonder how it is that somebody who was plucked out of his cradle, cursed by someone who hated him, and settled in the middle of a dark and distant forest with nothing to give him internal meaning could create a place so beautiful. (In the Russian version, the beast’s home is not manufactured beauty: it is not fancy furniture or Rococo decor or manicured grounds; it is a profusion of natural beauty that manifests as a perfect garden. The crown of this beauty is a flower that grows of its own accord, without cultivation.)

I think this is a vivid image of the fact that the beast was able to embrace a solitude in which he gleaned insight and meaning through participation with a higher power. We don’t get any glimpse of this higher power in the story, but it’s the only possible answer because the beast is an extremely virtuous character. (Again, the beast in the Russian version is not at all similar to the beast in the American version!)

This is why having a mentor is so important. The only good solitude is when you descend deep into the thorny wilderness of your own heart, face it bravely, and have the help of your mentor to navigate what you find there. Who was the beast’s mentor? It’s a mystery, but it’s certain he had one.

Find a Mentor to Find a Self Worth Encountering

There are some wonderful strategies on how to ensure your solitude isn’t solipsistic. Many of the experts who tell us to embrace solitude talk about encountering your deep self through meditation. But what if your self is not yet worth encountering? You need an encounter with the other. What sort of other are you going to encounter? That’s where the mentor comes in, and that’s why you need to choose your mentor carefully.

Like Aragon, we (and our heroes) must “explore the hearts of Men, both evil and good, uncovering the plots and devices of the servants of Sauron”.

Next time, we’ll dive deeper into Aragorn’s solitary journeying, learning not only how best to write a layered and inspiring hero, but how to deepen our own encounter with the process of creativity and writing. It’s a tough next step: we have to engage with ideas he hate.

But more on that next time.

For the past twenty years, anti-heroes were ascendant. The almost child-like enjoyment of traditional fairy-tale heroism that we got with the original Star Wars trilogy gave way to the torturous path of Anakin Skywalker to the dark side. Then came grimdark everything, along with that genre’s preferred protagonist: the tortured killer who is trying to make good, but keeps failing because the world is so terrible.

And so is he.

Even the slightly more heroic treatments of this sort of main character treated the very idea of heroism as something either accidental or ultimately doomed or actually not heroic at all. I’m thinking in particular of Joe Abercrombie’s approach to heroism or any of the many versions of dark heroism you see in the Warhammer universe.

But recently, the ironic approach to the traditional hero is starting to grate. Even the people who are good at it (James Gunn) can’t seem to do it well anymore. Supergirl is a particularly bad example of this. The energy for the ironic, snarky, I-know-more-than-you-stupid-people hero or heroine is gone out of the room.

It seems that we may be coming back to a market and a reading public that are ready for more traditional takes on heroism, a point I made in last week’s post about Aragorn as a model for the modern hero.

But before we can describe what contemporary writers should be doing to craft their perfect new-but-classic hero, we need to consider the question of the mentor.

Is the Mentor a Cliche or an Archetype?

If you’re writing a fantasy or a myth (in the generic sense), then you won’t be able to avoid one archetypal step of the heroic quest–the encounter with a mentor. Trouble is, most mentors in fantasy novels these days look and feel like Gandalf. The reason isn’t that writers have no originality. It’s that most of us modern people have not really had mentors as our heroes must have.

So instead of writing into an archetype (which is at least partially connected with the author’s own experience of how the world works), too often cliche becomes the automatic haven for the writer. Or its mirror image–the anti-mentor who is basically the inverse of Gandalf in all things. Again, Joe Abercrombie does this very well in First Law by essentially making the mentor the secret villain of the whole series.

So what are we left with if most examples of contemporary fiction are not good enough, and we are not lucky enough to have had a mentor in our own lives?

Let me suggest the wisdom of Russian fairy tales.

What We Can Learn from Russian Fairy Tales about Finding a Mentor

The Tale of Prince Ivan and the Grey Wolf

In Prince Ivan and the Grey Wolf, Ivan goes out into the wild to find the firebird for his father. He falls asleep, and when he awakens, his horse is gone. Ivan searches and searches for the horse, and finally, he finds the horse’s bones. Ivan is very sad, and he continues on foot until he is utterly exhausted, at which point he sits on a log and begins to weep. At this point, a wolf appears and asks Ivan why he is weeping. Ivan explains he has no horse. The wolf confesses he ate the horse and promises to aid Ivan in his quest to find the firebird. The wolf becomes a great ally and mentor.

The takeaway?

Very often, it is not you who finds the mentor; it is the mentor who finds you.

That does not mean we should sit around and wait for a mentor to appear. Notice what Ivan did: first, he did everything he could to pursue his quest until he became utterly exhausted. Then, he wept. This is a symbolic gesture in stories that almost always indicates an abandonment of one’s own desires in order to obtain the object of the quest by any means necessary.

And it is at that point that the mentor always comes.

What does this mean for the writer?

It means that, without the right disposition of the heart, without humility, without an abdication of the will and its desires, even if our main character were to encounter a mentor who might be helpful to him, he might not be able to recognize and take advantage of what that mentor could offer him.

What happens if the main character doesn’t have this humility? Well, he messes up. And that’s exactly what happens to Ivan. The wolf gives Ivan extremely specific instructions, and Ivan cannot fully follow them because he has not fully released his own will. And so, Ivan ends up in prison. You see, when Ivan met the wolf, he had reached a point where he was ready to abandon everything, but his heart was not yet ready to accept the teachings of his mentor. Unfortunately, most of us don’t listen very well until we go through the difficulty of failing.

So this is the first thing we need to remember when we’re designing a mentor for our hero: don’t be too quick to introduce him. And have his appearance be connected with some kind of traumatic or pivotal moment in the main character’s desire line or journey.

The Flying Ship

The second thing we need to remember is illustrated by another fairy tale, “The Flying Ship.” Here’s the story:

An old man and an old woman have three sons. The first two are smart and very capable, and the third is an idiot. (This is a trope, and, of course, the idiot is not really an idiot.) The king of the land issues a decree that whoever can build him a flying ship may marry the princess. So the first two sons get their parents’ permission to go off into the forest, fell a bunch of trees, and try to build this ship. (They have no idea how to build a ship, much less a flying one!). Suddenly, an old man appears to them and asks what they’re doing. They tell him to get lost. They give up on the project, get drunk, and head home.

So the third son, Ivan the Idiot, decides to try his hand at building the ship. He finds his brothers’ felled trees and starts putting them together. The old man pops up again, and Ivan invites him to share his food. They sup together, and the old man tells Ivan how to proceed with the ship. And suddenly, the idiot builds the flying ship!

Now, that’s only the beginning of the story. The set up is, of course, that those who believe themselves to be intelligent end up being the fools, and the one who believes himself to be the fool ends up being intelligent. Or, as Michael Hyatt says, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

All ancient wisdom traditions tell us not to trust ourselves, not to consider ourselves intelligent, and not to assume we’re able to govern ourselves. We need to remember we don’t have the answers.

So what does this have to do with designing a mentor for our heroes?

Sometimes, mentors don’t look the part. In fact, there’s good reason to have your mentor look anything but the part. If you haven’t watched the Russian movie “The Island”, it’s a perfect example of this. As seen repeatedly in the Orthodox tradition, it’s often the one who voluntarily assumes a posture of foolishness who is secretly hiding wisdom.

In other words, consider a holy fool for your mentor. Or one who uses foolishness as part of his arsenal. This is what I did for the my mentor figure in my first novel The Song of the Sirin and my latest novel The Son of the Deathless.

And let me tell you: these characters resonate very strongly with readers.

(By the way, if you’d like to hear me tell the entire story of the Flying Ship, here it is:

The Feather of Finist the Bright Falcon

What if you have a heroine, not a hero? There’s a different traditional structure for the mentor figure in heroine’s quests.

Let me draw your attention to one more fairy tale: “The Feather of Finist the Bright Falcon.” In this tale, a young woman is in love with a falcon who turns into a young warrior in the evenings and visits her in her room. Her sisters grow jealous and put knives in her windowsill. The young woman awakes to see the knives dripping with blood. She weeps bitterly, waiting and hoping, but her falcon does not return.

Finally, she asks her father for a blessing to go out into the world. She orders three pairs of metal shoes, three metal staffs, three metal hats, and three metal loaves of bread, and then she sets off in the direction the falcon flew away. She walks and she walks. Her first shoes, staff, and hat are all worn through, and she has eaten the first loaf of metal bread. Yet she continues to walk until she sees a hut on chicken feet that spins around on itself. Of course, this is the hut of Baba Yaga!

Now, Baba Yaga is usually trouble, but in this case, she is nothing but helpful to our young heroine. Why? What is it about this young woman that makes a known villain suddenly so helpful?

The answer is that unlooked-for help comes to those who suffer.

(Yes, I’m aware of this meme–we Russians do tend to impose suffering upon ourselves:

Regardless, it is true that those who suffer often emerge having acquired wisdom.

This is also often the pattern for heroine journeys. The mentor comes late in the story, after a great deal of disasters have already struck the heroine.

What this kind of crone figure offers the hero or heroine is passage from the world of suffering to the world of magic that can only happen as a result of suffering having essentially forced the main character to painfully shed a few snakeskins. The help of this mentor is short-lived and does not constitute the kind of mentor-mentee relationship that persists throughout the journey as it does in heroic quests.

Putting it all Together

These three stories offer a few starting points for how the oldest stories in Russia’s tradition treat the question of the mentor for the hero.

1. The mentor often appears at an unexpected moment, after the hero has had his first experience of failure. This mentor accompanies the hero on the journey and offers help, but the hero in this paradigm is unworthy of the help and keeps failing, until he finally gains wisdom and heroism at the end of the story.

2. The obviously wise and sage mentor with a long beard is a cliche. The “wise fool” of old fairy tales is an archetype. And it’s an element that more authors should try out as they design their mentor figure.

3. Heroine’s stories can often lack the kind of persistent mentor that hero stories need. A short, intense experience of a wild crone at the end of a series of personally devastating disasters can be a very effective way of moving your main character into the heroic stance that is necessary to overcome the villain and bring the story to its satisfactory ending.

What about you? Who are your favorite traditional or non-traditional mentor figures from literature? Do they fit any of the three Russian fairy tale archetypes?

“Fantasy is a natural human activity. It does not destroy or even insult Reason… for creative Fantasy is founded… on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it.”

~ J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”

Back in the days of the pandemic, many of us were floundering, surprised and beaten down by disease and political overreach. We hoped that all it would take would be a bit of resilience to get through and return to something like normal life. But, of course, if the pandemic was anything, it was a revelation that our manner of living was just not good for us, that those we trusted to take care of us care about little other than increasing their power, and that the society and culture we live in is little more than a machine.

So when I did an audio series on resilience and courage in stories, using the life of Aragorn from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings as my model, I thought it was something that would be strictly useful for a specific historical moment.

But then the world kept on getting crazier.

War in Europe for the first time since World War II…

Rioting in the streets and even at the seat of government…

Mistrust (for good reason) of pretty much everyone in power, no matter their political affiliation…

The list goes on…

It’s become increasingly clear that we could all use a few more heroic examples in our own fiction, especially if we believe (as I’ve tried to demonstrate) that the best stories bypass the rational objections of readers to go directly to the heart.

And there are some good reasons to believe that people are ready for more traditional heroes again…

The Odyssey as a Model for Navigating Hardship

As I emerged on the other side of a very large hump in my emotional and spiritual response to the pandemic, I realized that my telling stories had been helpful, not only to my readers and listeners, but also to myself. Sometimes, we storytellers tend to get into preaching mode and forget about the fact that we’re telling stories not only for others, but also for ourselves.

I had been listening to Cal Newport’s “Deep Questions” podcast. Cal Newport is one of my heroes and the author of “Deep Work,” “Digital Minimalism,” and “Slow Productivity,” among others. Cal talked about how, after the initial panic of COVID, many people started to look at the hardship it brought as an opportunity to reset their lives, their work, and their personal relationships. He called this “the deep reset,” using an example from The Odyssey.

Odysseus, after coming home and resetting his house, traveled into the depths of the mainland of Greece, carrying with him an oar, as a sacrifice to Poseidon.

The point here is a bit ambiguous, but in Cal’s telling, it was not enough for Odysseus to complete the heroic journey and return home. It was not enough to rest in the arms of his long-suffering wife after twenty years of war and travail. He needed to fully transform his life into somethign new.

For that to happen, he needed to make an offering to the divine as both a supplication and a peace offering (Poseidon had been spectadcularly opposed to Odysseus throughout his adventures). This required an additional, deeper sacrifice.

In Cal’s words,

“But then — and this is the key to the entire myth — he humbles himself on an inland journey, where he ritually moves beyond the easy comforts of his old life, laying the foundation on which to build something more meaningful.”

Cal goes on to say that there are two stages to dealing with unexpected hardship. If you remember, some people compared the responses to COVID to the stages of grief. I found that interesting but less compelling than Cal’s two-pronged approach. Cal suggested that the first step is simply survival and progress (that’s Odysseus battling through trials on his way home). Then, when you’ve reached a point where you’re no longer constantly reacting to dangerous stimuli, you can, with a mix of humility and purpose, commit to transforming your life into something deeper.

That something deeper is what Cal calls a “deep life.” Cultivating the deep life means not putting energy into shallow, surface concerns but instead investing in the lasting things that will affect you, your family, your community, and your relationship with the divine.

For Cal, the story that brought all of this together was the story of Odysseus. For years now, I’ve looked to another hero as a more contemporary ideal when it comes to writing heroes who are made stronger by trials–Aragorn.

The Making of a Hero: Aragorn in the Appendices

My source material here is The Return of the King, Appendix A, which tells of the lives of Aragorn and Arwen.

Aragorn’s father was killed in what was, effectively, a warzone. Aragorn was two years old. He never knew his father. (Immediately, readers have a connection point: so many young men today go through life either without fathers or with absent fathers. This is a real epidemic.) Aragron’s mother was very young when this happened. She was taken to live in Rivendell with Elrond. Now, we shouldn’t think, just because she was removed from the warzone, that she was having a happy life. Aragorn’s mother is a tragic figure who was never able to overcome the trauma of losing her husband. In fact, she also died quite young.

Aragorn was called Estel, which means “hope.” He did not know his true identity. From his youth, he was basically raised in an atmosphere of Guerilla warfare, and he made his name, even as a teenager, by going out on military raids with the sons of Elrond.

When Aragorn was twenty, Elrond called Aragorn to himself and told Aragorn his true identity as the heir to the kingdom of Westernesse, to Numinor. Elrond gave Aragorn the heirlooms of his kingdom: the ring of Barahir and the shards of Narsil (the sword that belonged to Isildor, who used it to chop off Sauron’s ring). And yet, Elrond did not give Aragorn all the gifts of his kingship. Elrond told Aragorn, “The Sceptre of Annúminas I withhold, for you have yet to earn it.”

This is very interesting. Aragorn has been given his full purpose, but not his full gift. This is because Aragron has not yet fully embraced the reality of the difficulty that has been given to him. That difficulty is constant, unremitting warfare against Sauron and his minions.

And so Aragron becomes a fascinating figure who is given a kingship with no throne. His inheritance is a kingdom that doesn’t exist, a kingdom he must restore without an army. He steps into a life in which he must constantly travel and face the ever-present danger of impending death.

I keep harping on this because writers tend to write heroes who accomplish their goals too quickly and easily. But true heroism is earned on the page. And there is something compelling to the modern reader about a king without a throne. It feels right to modern sensibilities, but it also allows for a true catharsis at the moment when the throne is once again returned to him. So your readers can have their cake and eat it too, as it were.

Here’s how Tolkien did this with Aragorn:

“Then Aragorn took leave lovingly of Elrond; and the next day he said farewell to his mother, and to the house of Elrond, and to Arwen, and he went out into the wild. For nearly thirty years he laboured in the cause against Sauron; and he became a friend of Gandalf the Wise, from whom he gained much wisdom. With him he made many perilous journeys, but as the years wore on he went more often alone. His ways were hard and long, and he became somewhat grim to look upon, unless he chanced to smile; and yet he seemed to Men worthy of honour, as a king that is in exile, when he did not hide his true shape. For he went in many guises, and won renown under many names. He rode in the host of the Rohirrim, and fought for the Lord of Gondor by land and by sea; and then in the hour of victory he passed out of the knowledge of Men of the West, and went alone far into the East and deep into the South, exploring the hearts of Men, both evil and good, and uncovering the plots and devices of the servants of Sauron.

Thus he became at last the most hardy of living Men, skilled in their crafts and lore, and was yet more than they; for he was elven-wise, and there was a light in his eyes that when they were kindled few could endure. His face was sad and stern because of the doom that was laid on him, and yet hope dwelt ever in the depths of his heart, from which mirth would arise at times like a spring from the rock.”

~ Appendix A, The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen

7 Concrete Actions Aragorn Took When Facing Hardship

This short section from the life of Aragorn provides an interesting blueprint for the author trying to write a compelling hero narrative in a world that has serious superhero fatigue, and yet yearns for traditional heroes (a point I will be making in some forthcoming posts about Nolan’s Odyssey)

1. He begins by finding a vetted mentor (Gandalf).

2. He embraces solitude, traveling alone and becoming grim to look at but holding joy deep within.

3. He hides his name and seeks renown under different names, trying the hearts of men he did not know. He goes into perilous realms and looks for both evil and good in men, delving deeply into their hearts. (We often talk about the importance of getting to know people of different races, genders, ideologies, etc. Aragorn did that.)

4. He becomes very skilled in 1) doing things with his hands and 2) learning the lore of both men and elves (elven lore being effectively angelic lore).

5. He accepts the doom laid upon him. And he moves forward.

6. He returns home after thirty years of wandering, sees Arwen again, and renews his vow of love to her.

At this point, Arwen chooses Aragorn and mortality over the immortal life of the elves. Aragorn then does the proper thing and goes to Elrond to relay Arwen’s choice.

I will quote at length here before returning to the seventh and final point, because this is important. We are told:

“When Elrond learned the choice of his daughter, he was silent, though his heart was grieved and found the doom long feared none the easier to endure.

“And when Aragorn came again to Rivendell, he called to him, and he said:

“‘My son, years come when hope will fade, and beyond them little is clear to me. And now a shadow lies between us. Maybe, it has been appointed so, that by my loss the kingship of Men may be restored. Therefore, though I love you, I say to you: Arwen Undómiel shall not diminish her life’s grace for less cause. She shall not be the bride of any Man less than the King of both Gondor and Arnor. To me then even our victory can bring only sorrow and parting–but to you hope of joy for a while. Alas, my son! I fear that to Arwen the Doom of Men may seem hard at the ending.’

“So it stood afterwards between Elrond and Aragorn, and they spoke no more of this matter; but Aragorn went forth again to danger and toil. And while the world darkened and fear fell on Middle-earth, as the power of Sauron grew and the Barad-dur rose ever taller and stronger, Arwen remained in Rivendell, and when Aragorn was abroad, from afar she watched over him in thought; and in hope she made for him a great and kingly standard, such as only one might display who claimed the lordship of the Numenoreans and the inheritance of Elendil.”

I want to go back and talk about the doom imposed on Aragorn. Elrond tells Aragorn:

“‘Aragorn, Arathorn’s son, Lord of the Dúnedain, listen to me! A great doom awaits you, either to rise above the height of all your fathers since the days of Elendil, or to fall into darkness with all that is left of your kin. Many years of trial lie before you. You shall neither have wife, nor bind any woman to you in troth, until your time comes and you are found worthy of it.’”

After Aragorn’s thirty years of labor, he can go out from his internal and external solitude to his family and community. He is worthy to tell Arwen he loves her and to hear her response saying she will be his wife.

This is wonderful, because it charts for us the proper order of writing a compelling hero. It shows us that the initial reaction to survive and become better, as Cal Newport would have it, is not enough. At this point, Aragorn has to make a second choice to go back out into the wild, not for the purpose of becoming better himself, but for the purpose of accepting his doom and the doom of all men.

This doom is, in fact, the doom we all have of being people living in a world that does not make the achievement of our purpose very easy. And yet, only through the achievement of that purpose, a purpose found by living a deep life, can we fulfill our quest.

Which leads us to the seventh and final step:

7. Aragorn utterly rejects the shadow and pursues his quest to become king.

Rant about Movie Aragorn

I’m going to come back to Aragorn’s path and how his life applies to our lives.

But first, an aside about movie Aragorn: many of you will already know that movie Aragorn and movie Faramir make me mad. I will try not to rant, but… movie Aragorn is a man chewed through with doubt. He has not passed through thirty years of testing in the wild. He sees the shards of Narsil and freaks out, and Arwen tells him he’ll be okay, and he just whines about how he can’t do it and how he might not be able to say no to the ring because Isildor didn’t say no, blah blah blah! And when movie Legolas declares Aragorn is king at the council of Elrond, Aragorn is super annoyed. And then there’s Boromir’s stupid reaction: “Gondor has no king. Gondor needs no king.”

Of course, none of this happens in the book at all! In the book, Aragorn towers over Boromir as the king!

Movie Boromir, of course, is the embodiment of the modern, tortured, self-reliant hero who makes his own fate and is susceptible to evil because that’s more relatable, but he is not the king; Aragorn is.

Book Aragorn is not afflicted with movie Aragorn’s self-loathing, which has become very popular in modern “heroic” characters. No, not at all. In the book, Aragorn says, “‘Since it seemed fit that Isildur’s heir should labour to repair Isildur’s fault, I went with Gandalf on the long and hopeless search.’” That’s the real Aragorn.

And of course, in the book, the sword is reforged before they leave, not way later as it is in the movies. This is very important, because Aragorn has already shown himself to be worthy. Going with the fellowship is his capstone quest–he’s done all the work already. He doesn’t need to be tested.

Now, I understand why Peter Jackson made these choices for the movie–it might even have been necessary for dramatic tension. But it makes Aragorn a much weaker figure. We cannot look to movie Aragorn as a hero in the same way we look to him in the books.

This is very important. We have to be careful about the kind of stories we view and read. This is why reading is often so much better than watching a movie: the characters we encounter in books are not subject to the realities of a 90-minute drama. Because of this, they can be truly heroic, and we can encounter them in a way that is much more visceral and effective in our daily lives.

Okay… movie rant over.

7 Lessons from the Life of Aragorn

In conclusion, here are seven lessons from the life of Aragorn that writers can use to deepen the emotional backstory of their heroic characters, especially exiled heroes or kings. There are two phases for the development of your hero:

Phase One: The Testing Phase

1. Find a mentor (the right one!).

2. Seek solitude

3. Try out different ideas (encounter ideas you disagree with and examine them deeply without forgetting the teachings of your mentor).

4. Find a craft (fix things with your hands) and expand your lore (become book-wise).

5. Accept your doom (this is a good place to explore the particularities of your secondary world).

Phase Two: The Action Phase

6. Extend your heart (reforge proper relationships with your community; this is difficult when they’re not in the same stage of the quest the hero is in).

7. Go on the quest (with a mix of humility and purpose, the hero can transform his life and the life of others).

“Two years ago, I quit my full-time job as communications coordinator of a nation-wide nonprofit so I could focus exclusively on my writing and coaching practice. This was not the first time I had made such an attempt, but it’s the one that’s gone most successfully. Still, it’s also created unexpected challenges and dilemmas, both professionally and personally. In this session, I share about my professional journey and how I wound up being able to write and coach full time. More importantly, I share some of the things I wish I’d known before striking out on my own so that others can learn from my mistakes. This talk is for anyone struggling with how to integrate their creative vocation into other professional identities and financial realities, particularly those with a background in academia or helping professions.”

If you enjoyed this author summit, and would like to learn how to publish your books and find your readers in an age of AI, please sign up for next week’s free webinar.

Enjoy!

We had some technical difficulties and had to do some last-minute switching.

That means that you get a special gift: a special sneak peek at my forthcoming free webinar for authors, coming next week:

How to publish your books and find your readers in an age of AI.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

What a conversation!

And a fantastic opening to the Weavers of Story Author Summit 2026.

To apply to Dr Martin Shaw’s teaching program in Vancouver, check it out here:

https://www.themythicmasculine.com/connlaswell

And don’t miss my webinar on How to Get Published and Find Your Readers in an Age of AI.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

Join me for a free author webinar next week, June 17, at 6 pm Eastern Time.

How to Publish Your Book and Find Your Readers in an AI Age.

See you then!

How to Run a Creative Writing Business without Selling Your Soul: a Free Summit for Authors

Session 7:

Gathering Your People in a Machine World

and are an incredible team. Not only do they write for Substack publications that routinely make it to various best-of lists, some of them from Substack’s own team of curators, but they do all their work with an intense and holistic sense of the importance of keeping their worldview and their humanity in the driver’s seat.

In this conversation, we talk about the importance of “soul” in the life of a professional creative, and how the best work—and, indeed, the most successful work—often comes not from chasing trends or being popular, but from the deep and long-term work of cultivating a family culture.

I’ll be in the comments section from 5 to 6 pm to answer questions and address comments.

How to Run a Creative Writing Business without Selling Your Soul: a Free Summit for Authors

Session 6:

The Origin Story of the Symbolic World

Jonathan Pageau—icon carver, symbolic thinker, fairy tale writer—is perhaps the gold standard for an independently-minded artist who is driven both by the craft of the practice of art and the creative challenge of running a professional creative business.

His many successful projects have resulted in the multi-media experience known as “the symbolic world”.

Find out how he started and what sorts of principles he followed on his path to artistic and financial success.

I will be lurking in the comments to answer questions and address comments from 4-5 pm Eastern. Thanks everyone!

How to Run a Creative Writing Business without Selling Your Soul: a Free Summit for Authors

Session 5:

Harrowing Tales (and Insights) from Running a Successful Small Press

’s tale of taking over a floundering small press is riveting and instructive to all authors, whether or not they decide to eventually open their own small press.

Please put your questions and comments into the comments section. I will be answering them for the next hour (3-4 pm).

1. A bunch of angry people make snide comments about artists selling out.

2. A bunch of artists run away screaming in fear.

The latter might even express themselves a bit like dear old Harold Pinter in this letter:

What both sets of people are, respectfully, misunderstanding, is this:

Writing and publishing are two separate things, but both can be an art.

Recently, I read a great post shared by from her blog. In it, we find this great quote:

Art and commerce have always occupied the same room, yet they are not the same thing: a composition is not a recording, a painting is not interior design, and architecture is not real estate. Likewise, writing is not publishing. One is the act of making; the other is the act of selling.

I would change the last sentence to this:

“One is the art of making; the other is the art of selling”

This is why I run two summits for authors during the course of a calendar year. The first is all about the art of making, and we had a wonderful summit on the subject of “The Creative Act and Spiritual Renewal”.

Our second summit is about the art of selling, and it features some of the best people who treat the second part with as much respect and love as the first part:

Here is the list of sessions, with a short description of each:

How to Run a Creative Writing Business Without Selling Your Soul

Date: July 10th

Time: 11 am EDT to 6 pm EDT

• , 11 am EDT: Lessons for the Professional Creative from Liturgies of the Wild

  • Dr. has become one of the most well known oral storytellers of our time. In this session, we dive into his latest book, Liturgies of the Wild, which is a story of his conversion to Christianity, but is also a mythic guide for storytellers for their life, their craft, and their creative calling in general.

• Orna Ross, 12 pm EDT: Three Viable Indie Publishing Models for 2026

  • ’s work on behalf of indie authors is well documented. Her books and her public appearances are not to be missed. But perhaps the most important breakthrough that she has articulated for authors is her articulation of seven processes of publishing and especially her specific description of the three publishing models that exist for indie authors today. This session may be the most transformative thing you’ve ever heard in your author career.

• Christopher Ruocchio, 1 pm EDT: Hybrid Publishing for the 21st Century Author

  • ’s Sun Eater series is one of the greatest publishing successes of our time. He is one of the only authors alive who can actually say that a publisher that dumped him later came back begging for the rights to the same series they had previously abandoned. From the beginning of his career, Christopher has been serious about building a sustainable author career by using both traditional and indie publishing options for his books. In this conversation, he will explain how he navigates both words—indie and trad—successful and joyfully.

• Nicole Lyon Roccas at 2 pm EDT: What I Wish I’d Known Before Quitting My Day Job(s)

  • From : “Two years ago, I quit my full-time job as communications coordinator of a nation-wide nonprofit so I could focus exclusively on my writing and coaching practice. This was not the first time I had made such an attempt, but it’s the one that’s gone most successfully. Still, it’s also created unexpected challenges and dilemmas, both professionally and personally. In this session, I share about my professional journey and how I wound up being able to write and coach full time. More importantly, I share some of the things I wish I’d known before striking out on my own so that others can learn from my mistakes. This talk is for anyone struggling with how to integrate their creative vocation into other professional identities and financial realities, particularly those with a background in academia or helping professions.”

• , 3 pm EDT: Harrowing Tales (and Insights) from Running a Successful Small Press

  • Dn Seraphim’s tale of taking over a floundering small press is riveting and instructive to all authors, whether or not they decide to eventually open their own small press.

• Jonathan Pageau, 4 pm EDT: The Origin Story of the Symbolic World

• Ruth and Peco Gaskovski, 5 pm EDT: Gathering Your People in a Machine World

  • and are an incredible team. Not only do they write for Substack publications that routinely make it to various best-of lists, some of them from Substack’s own team of curators, but they do all their work with an intense and holistic sense of the importance of keeping their worldview and their humanity in the driver’s seat. In this conversation, we talk about the importance of “soul” in the life of a professional creative, and how the best work—and, indeed, the most successful work—often comes not from chasing trends or being popular, but from the deep and long-term work of cultivating a family culture.

In preparation for our second author summit this year, coming on Friday at 11 am, I’m happy to offer this conversation from our first summit about the professional and personal life of a writer of faith in the current climate of publishing.

Dn. Nicholas Kotar: Welcome to the fourth in our series of interviews for the recent St. Basil Writers’ Workshop summit on Spiritual Renewal and the Creative Act. As all of our speakers have stressed, the creative act is integral first to renewing us as creators, and then, ideally, to creating a ripple effect that renews our communities.

I’m very excited to have Katherine Bolger Hyde with us today because she has done this her whole life. She has had one of the most successful careers of any Orthodox fiction writer in the U.S. Katherine has been a great mentor and inspiration to me for many years, and it was a joy to welcome her as a writing coach at the St. Basil Writers’ Workshop, of which I am the Dean. Katherine and I teach alongside Paul Kingsnorth, Jonathan Pageau, Nicole Roccas, and Samira Kawash.

Katherine, I’ll start by asking about your experience as a professional writer and an Orthodox Christian. You’re someone who has always been cognizant of the fact that faith is an integral part of writing, but you don’t write what we typically think of as “Christian fiction.”

Katherine Bolger Hyde: I’ve always been a generally creative person, as manifested through writing, fiber arts, and performing arts. I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was eleven, but it took me a while to realize my career as an author. I did nothing more than scribble in junior high and high school, and in college, I was too busy academically to write creatively. I married the day before I graduated and had two children soon after. I started to write seriously with two small children while also operating a sewing business, all within the context of a bad marriage with an abusive husband. I don’t recommend any of these things! Regardless, I produced a couple of stories. I submitted these to magazines and got nothing but crickets. Given the total lack of support from my husband and–I have to say–from my church, I quit writing for a while.

Later, I got out of the bad marriage and into a good marriage and had two more children. I started working for Conciliar Press, which later became Ancient Faith Publishing. And in the midst of all this, I was also a caretaker for my elderly father. These were all good things, but again, I had very limited time to write.

At the time, my husband was working full time and putting all of his spare time into his craft as a musician. I realized that if I didn’t express my own creativity, I was going to shrivel up and die. So when my youngest son was in kindergarten, I started working on my first novel. It took me four years of writing and rewriting, and in those first four years, I think I wrote the million words Ray Bradbury says you have to write before you can write one good one. That novel was both practice and therapy, and it will never see the light of day! Initially, I did try to publish it in the evangelical Christian world, mainly because they host the Mount Hermon Christian Writers’ Conference, which took place just down the road from me. I got good feedback when I pitched this novel, but it was clearly not the kind of book that would succeed in that world–it was too raw, too honest, too Orthodox… too everything.

But I kept writing. My second novel, The Vestibule of Heaven, took two years to write and another sixteen years to publish. This was in part because, at that time, there were no Orthodox outlets for fiction, and the book wasn’t a fit for the evangelical world. I then wrote another novel called The Ghostwriter, which will be released by Chrism Press this August.

After writing those three novels, I got sick of writing books no one wanted to publish, and I started writing cozy mysteries based on classic authors. This series was picked up right away by Minotaur, a subsidiary of one of the big five. They published the first two books in the series, and then my editor was shuffled out, so I moved over to Severn House for the next four books in the series. The seventh and final book I decided to self-publish. I also wrote and published two standalones while writing this mystery series.

Let me connect all of this to my spiritual life: I was raised in the Methodist church and had my own faith (not just an inherited faith) as a child. When I was a teenager, however, I started asking all of the tough questions teenagers ask, and there was nobody around who could answer with anything other than senseless platitudes. I drifted away from the church, and this may have had something to do with the fact that I was producing nothing more than fragments of creative writing. It was while attending Reed College–whose unofficial model is “Communism, Atheism, and Free Love”–that I became a Christian. I became a Christian largely through reading fiction, specifically C.S. Lewis, as well as the works of Dostoevsky and other Russian writers (I majored in Russian literature). Eventually, I became Orthodox.

Although my spiritual life was on an upward trajectory, my personal life was in a bad place for years. The spiritual life and the creative life do not form a one-way street. They feed off each other. I was depressed throughout my first marriage, and depression is not a good place from which to write. I was able to be creative in other ways, like fiber art, but writing was very difficult. My personal context had a lot to do with my lack of decent output during those years. From that first marriage, I carried the idea that I just wasn’t good enough, full stop. It took several years of a very loving and supportive marriage to get me past that feeling to the point where I had enough confidence in myself to actually try to write again.

There were, of course, other blips along the way. For example, COVID totally disrupted my church life, which was the center of my life, and I could not write at all for months. And then there have been other times when inspiration flooded in.

In 2019, I had the opportunity to go on one of the pilgrimages that Fr. Seraphim Aldea leads on Mull and the surrounding areas. I had harbored, for years, the germ of an idea to write about Irish saints going to Russia. There is no actual history of this, though there is some evidence (for example, there are Celtic crosses on Valaam). I felt like I needed to do in-person research. So I traveled both to Mull and to Valaam. After all that, the book I had in mind just fizzled out and died. I no longer had any impulse to write it. But something sprang up in its place: I got two totally different books out of that trip.

One of these is a book I just finished called The Thin Place. It’s about a woman who has lost everything and inherits a sheep farm on Mull, where she encounters an Orthodox monk (whom I worked really hard not to model after Fr. Seraphim!). Through his influence, and the influence of other people she meets there, she is able to be healed of her immense trauma and come to the beginning of faith, though previously she had blamed God, and specifically the Orthodox Church, for her misfortunes.

In all of these things, the hand of God was very present. My ability to go on the trip was miraculous, as were the things that happened in my mind and heart while there.

DNK: Interestingly, this is the second pilgrimage story mentioned in our summit so far, and both pilgrimages resulted in creative inspiration. In Dn. Seraphim Rohlin’s example, a long overdue poem came to him. And in your case, a long overdue novel fizzled out and died, though other books came in its place. I had a similar experience: I went to the holy land in 2007. It was the first time I had ever practiced daily writing, and it was such an intense experience that I thought I would type up my journal notes afterward. But I couldn’t do it. So I decided to retell it as a story, and that became my fantasy series, a series which has nothing to do with my pilgrimage! It’s interesting that the divine inspiration we feel very intensely sometimes pushes us in unexpected directions.

What is your experience when it comes to allowing your faith to emerge, not just in the act of writing, but in the finished project? As we mentioned earlier, there’s a generic conception of “Christian fiction” that is often accompanied by a knee-jerk reader reaction to freeze up on the inside whenever God is mentioned. I would never say that any of your books are even remotely propagandizing, so how do you navigate this tension in your own work?

KBH: For me, it’s virtually impossible to tell a story without bringing God into it in some way. The two standalones I wrote for Severn House had nothing more than secondary Orthodox characters. But for the most part, I haven’t been able to keep my faith out of my fiction, even when I want to. For example, in my mystery series, my main character is Orthodox, though there’s no fanfare about it. But I have received feedback from readers saying, “This is so Christian! You betrayed me and deceived me into thinking this was a normal book.” You just have to let that kind of criticism roll off.

There was one book I had to alter to please my editor: I had a fire-and-brimstone preacher who constantly quoted scripture, which I had to change per my editor’s direction. That surprised me since the preacher is not presented as a positive character. Interestingly, I had an almost opposite experience with my forthcoming novel through Chrism Press: one of my characters was a long-lapsed Catholic, and my editors wanted her to be presented as a practicing Catholic since Chrism is a very Catholic press.

DNK: It’s hard to find editors receptive to this kind of fiction, which is strange since speaking about Christianity is starting to be accepted and to bubble up more and more in the common consciousness of readers. But the publishing industry has always been slow to adapt to any kind of cultural change.

I want to go back to something you said earlier: you mentioned you came to faith through fiction. How universal is this experience?

KBH: I’m not sure I’ve ever talked to someone whose experience paralleled mine. I think the role fiction plays is to till the ground of the soul, to make it more receptive to the truth. In most cases, it probably takes something else to push the person to convert. Even in my case, I was almost Christian after reading the Space Trilogy, but it took Mere Christianity to tip me over the line. I think what we can say is that good fiction moulds the heart to be compassionate, truth-loving, and receptive to spiritual truths.

DNK: It seems to me that the ability to write that kind of fiction is not just a matter of beautifully-formed sentences, or talent, or even technique. It’s necessary that we not only live a spiritual life, but also that we do the things with our own hearts that we hope will happen to our readers’ hearts. Do you ever think about that when you create, or do you keep those things separate?

KBH: They are definitely not separate. My spiritual life is not, and never has been, what it should be in terms of consistent prayer and whatnot. But most of my books have had a patron saint. For the Mull book, it was St. Brendan. For my current book, it’s Julian of Norwich (not an official saint, but she should be). For my last mystery novel, it was the newly canonized St. Olga. For most of the mystery books, my “patrons” were the authors I themed the books around, some of whom were faithful Christians. I pray before I write, and I ask the prayers of whoever is the patron of the book I’m writing.

I’ve certainly seen that when my spiritual life is healthier, my creative life is healthier, as is my mental health.

DNK: You mentioned that your first book was writing as therapy, but you also said it’s impossible to create beautiful things in a state of depression. What is the role of writing as therapy, and should that kind of writing be left between the author and God?

KBH: It depends on whether the writing is directly reliving your trauma or whether it’s using everything you’ve been through and processed to inform your work. In my first novel, I was directly dealing with past trauma. In my most recent book, the main character is deeply traumatized, but her trauma is not something that comes from my own experience. Rather, she has gone through my biggest fear in life. So I was able to emotionally project myself into that place, but I myself wasn’t actually in that place.

I don’t want to say categorically that dealing with your own trauma through writing can’t make for good fiction. It didn’t for me, but I hate to draw boundaries around anything to do with the creative life.

DNK: Perhaps the answer is to have a healthy sense of caution around making that sort of writing the go-to, because then the writing process becomes more an act of self-rumination than an act of harmony with the Creator. In all these talks, we’ve spoken about how writing is an act that does not proceed only from us. In fact, sometimes, the less we’re involved, the better the writing is.

A lot of writing advice out there is banal or generic. Is there any particular advice you’ve heard from mentors that you find important and would like to pass along?

KBH: I’m not sure I would necessarily call this advice, but I think the greatest predictor of whether or not a writer will succeed is humility. You have to be humble to improve. If you start out thinking you’re a great writer, you’ll never get anywhere. And nobody starts as a great writer. There’s the humility that enables you to learn; there’s also the humility that keeps you level-headed if you succeed and people start saying nice things about your work; and there’s also the humility that gives you the impulse to share what you’ve learned with less experienced writers.

DNK: One of the beautiful things you do at St. Basil’s is to inhabit the role of a wise, humble, and strict editor. For me, editing is a very fraught subject. There are some very successful writers who make claims like, “No truly financially successful writer ever edits their work.” One of Heinlein’s Rules is, “Never edit your own writing unless you are writing to an editorial order.” What is your approach to editing, and what is your response to people who insist that self-editing is the death of the creative?

KBH: My response would be to show them pictures of the manuscripts of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky, all of which are so covered with self-editorial markings that I don’t know how anyone could read them. Of course, I’ve been an editor throughout my entire writing life, so I come with the perspective that writing can always be made better. When I’m in draft mode, I try to turn off the critical brain, but I do begin every writing session by rereading what I wrote the day before. This helps prime the pump, and while I do light editing during that process, I’m not diving into critical voice.

After the first draft is complete, I do a few read-throughs in which I employ various levels of editing. These days, I work with a critique group that meets weekly. A lot of the necessary editing happens in that group, which means I make fewer editorial passes upon project completion.

It is absolutely possible to over-edit, especially if you’re working with a critique group and getting a lot of feedback. You can kill a book, or a first chapter, to the point where it has no life left in it at all. There’s a balance.

DNK: Agreed. Here’s an adjacent question: We see examples of those who start out as prolific writers and then move to editing as their primary profession, often with great success. But, having given themselves over completely to editing, they are no longer able to write. Even attempting a few sentences is excruciating because the critical voice is so deeply engaged. What sort of spiritual approach would you recommend for writers to navigate between those two states of being without too heavily engaging either mode?

KBH: I do my writing first thing in the morning (after coffee!), before the world has time to take over. For me, that means I’m tapping into my creative brain. A lot of people use rituals–like writing in the same place, drinking from the same coffee cup, or playing certain music–to engage the creative brain. Prayer can certainly play into that. Writing immediately after one’s morning prayers is a great idea.

DNK: The other thing you’re probably too humble to say, so I will say it for you, is that you are proof of the fact that a consistent spiritual life combined with a consistent practice of getting to the writing desk as often as you can, regardless of whether or not you feel like writing, is, very often, the ultimate solution for the problem of writer’s block/the blank page/critical voice. Would you agree?

KHB: Yes. When I get stuck, it’s usually because I haven’t thought my story through well enough. It’s very rarely the typical “writer’s block.”

DNK: I’m not sure writer’s block actually exists. It’s similar to what people say about being tone-deaf. My wife teaches music, and she believes that no one is tone-deaf, but rather that an excess of critical thinking gets in the way of their being able to harmonize themselves with the music that is outside as well as inside.

You mentioned that when you get stuck, it’s usually because you haven’t fully developed the idea yet. This is something we forget: there are multiple stages to writing. Too often, we consider the act of writing to be putting words on paper. But writing is much more than this: It’s thinking about the story, it’s doodling, it’s sleeping, and it’s doing something other than writing so that the ideas can bake in our subconscious. Most people forget about the pre-writing period. This is exactly what we’re discussing in my online writing community, The Story Hearth, this year: we’re examining each stage of the writing process and giving it appropriate attention.

KBH: Absolutely! Doodle, take walks, talk out loud to yourself, write things adjacent to your story, participate in other cultural events and activities, and play! Eventually, the words will flow.

DNK: It’s wonderful how central the idea of joy in writing has been today. I never again want to see that awful meme: “I love having written; I hate writing.” Let’s remember writing is joyful.

Katherine, it’s been a pleasure to have you with us today. Friends, I invite you to check out Katherine’s Substack, The Vestibule of Heaven, Justice with James, The Ghostwriter, and her many other titles!

And if you want to do a deep dive with me on the seven stages of the creative process and learn how projects actually get done, I invite you to join me on The Story Hearth! You can sign up for free to see if our community is the right fit for you.

Check it out!

If you’re a writer, you’ve probably heard this question millions of times. And you’ve probably died a little on the inside every time you’ve been forced to answer, even if you’ve worked out your origin story.

Because most of us have probably been writing since we were kids, right? And “chosen one” narratives are a dime a dozen and a bit cringey if the chosen ones are telling it!

Perhaps a better question would be something like this:

“When did you start taking your writing seriously?”

or:

“When did you stop being an amateur and stop playing around with your writing?”

That’s a much more interesting origin story to me. Because you find out what the person is really made of, what sorts of challenges they’ve faced, what sorts of dragons lurk in the darkness of their life.

For me, it was no casual decision while walking through a field of golden daffodils. It was almost a matter of survival. Here’s how it happened.

I was newly married with a toddler and a second one on the way. I had recently had one of the great moments of a writer’s life. I received “the call” from an agent who genuinely sounded interested in my book, over which I had been slaving for seven or eight years. Yes, “the call” is everything it is cracked up to be, and the possibilities that arise in one’s imagination really are endless.

But that euphoria was quickly replaced with something darker. Because of a series of disastrous meetings with my boss, I was effectively fired. And I wasn’t making very much to begin with. As I scrambled to find some way to support my young family, we decided to take an extended trip to Belarus to reassess our future.

I was hopeful that the cheap cost of living would help me get my writing career off the ground. So I proceeded to do everything in my power to start building my platform. And I did ok, certainly better than many authors with a single unpublished book.

But my agent was not coming through. Not a single offer, not a single email, not a single call. Occasionally, I would reach out to him, and he would put me off with vacuous phrases that included the always popular “these things take time” and “you need to be patient.”

I was, but things were getting desperate, and it was deep winter in a badly heated house in a small village in Belarus. I was ready to push play on my author career, but nothing was happening. Finally, I called my agent a final time.

He didn’t even recognize who I was when he answered the phone. I had long been relegated to some list of languishing authors who are not worth this time.

So I fired him.

But I was no better off than before. I started to study the publishing industry. What I found out made my hair stand on end. Soon, I began to thank God loudly and insistently that my agent never sold my book. Because the realities of traditional publishing for someone like me—who wanted an active career, with lots of authorial input and creative control—were dire.

In fact, they were nonexistent.

So I started to build my own publishing company.

It was hard work, but it was a joy. Fast forward a few years, and my first Kickstarter campaign for my first series of fantasy novels exploded and raised $25,000.00.

I had never seen that sum in my life.

At that moment, I understood that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

These things were non-negotiable for me:

• creative control over my stories

• the ability to set a publishing rhythm to suit my writing

• multiple streams of income

• the opportunity to create community around my books

If any of this sounds interesting or inspiring to you, I’m happy to invite you to an event that celebrates authors who take initiative and publish their own books and take control over their own stories.

Each of these wonderful people have created beautiful works, gathered incredible people around them, and cultivated a new culture of beauty and meaning exactly at a time when people seem to need it more than ever.

But most importantly, they show us how you can take control of your own stories to help sustain you financially as well as creatively. This is a rare gift that we have in our times, thanks in part to the technological revolution we are living in.

Here is the schedule for our event, along with links for each livestream and video post:

How to Run a Creative Writing Business Without Selling Your Soul

Date: July 10th

Time: 11 am EDT to 6 pm EDT

• Dr. Martin Shaw, 11 am EDT: Lessons for the Professional Creative from Liturgies of the Wild

• Orna Ross, 12 pm EDT: Three Viable Indie Publishing Models for 2026

• Christopher Ruocchio, 1 pm EDT: Hybrid Publishing for the 21st Century Author

• Nicole Lyon Roccas at 2 pm EDT: What I Wish I’d Known Before Quitting My Day Job(s)

• Dn Seraphim Rohlin, 3 pm EDT: Harrowing Tales (and Insights) from Running a Successful Small Press (Link will go live at 3 pm)

• Jonathan Pageau, 4 pm EDT: The Origin Story of the Symbolic World (Link will go live at 4 pm)

• Ruth and Peco Gaskovski, 5 pm EDT: Gathering Your People in a Machine World (Link will go live at 5 pm)

This free summit will be featured on Weavers of Story and will be available exclusively to subscribers of Weavers of Story (at all tier levels):

Recap of Part One

In part one, we explored why all the advice you hear about writing is wrong: the advice we hear is based on an erroneous understanding of the human person as nothing more than a body-mind duality; this leads to the incorrect assumption that if you can harness the power of your mind, your body will follow like an obedient servant.

This is only a sliver of what it means to be human. All the ancients talk not about a body-mind duality, but rather about body-mind as a single aspect of a tripartite person. The other two aspects of the human person are soul and spirit. All three are intertwined. The implication is that anything you do to access your full capacities requires that you address all three aspects, not in separation, but in harmony.

Recap of Part Two

In part two, I presented Cal Newport’s “deep life stack” and showed how–although he gets closer to ancient wisdom in his framework for how to become a competent human–he still doesn’t quite get at the deep truth of what it means to have a body-mind, a soul, and a spirit, nor does he address how each of these needs to be working in concert if we are to be truly transformational artists and writers.

Cal’s wisdom is in identifying the hard truth that, because of the ubiquitous and ever-changing technologies that are fragmenting us as a society and as individuals, and because we have lost touch with ancient ways of thinking and being, it is no small thing for us to have to do the work of becoming competent humans–that is, getting to a starting line or “zero point” before we can even begin the journey.

(Imagine inheriting a piece of land that is covered in deeply rooted trees and shrubs and invasive species, all of which have to be uprooted or contained before you can even start thinking about how to use the soil to plant the proper seeds to eventually cultivate the garden of your dreams.)

Sustainable Success as a Writer Requires Hard Work

Before we move on to discuss Cal Newport’s framework for transformation, I want to emphasize again why discipline is so important.

I honestly believe, with the massive disruptions we see every day on every level of society and the breakdowns we experience of small communities and families, that it’s a lot harder for us to simply be human. I hate to be this stark. But there’s a lot of work all of us need to put into the cultivation of basic competence before we can sit in front of a blank computer screen and write.

Much less write well.

Unless we do this work, we cannot create a legacy of books, each of which is the perfect creative encapsulation of a certain moment in our lives, a reflection of the people and places we love. We cannot hope to accomplish this in any repeatable or sustainable way until we put in the work first of reorienting the way we look at the world and then of disciplining body-mind, soul, and spirit through control of time, commitment to craftsmanship, and the removal of everything that hampers our work as sub creators.

We haven’t done enough hard work yet.

The implication is, of course, difficult and even offensive: in spite of the fact that many of us have already done some wonderful things when it comes to our creative talents, we have done these things not because of our abilities but almost in spite of them.

Perfect Conditions Don’t Necessarily Result in Perfect Creativity

So if you’re like me and you have a fantasy of inheriting a sudden influx of money that enables you to spend five months in a cabin in the Adirondacks to do nothing but create… if you dream of how productive you’ll be when there’s nothing but you and the beauty of nature and the written word… if you imagine how the ideas will flow out of you just as they flow out of the natural fountainhead of water nearby… I have to shatter that illusion.

If any of you have actually tried this, even in a small way, you’ll know that the reality is far different than the fantasy. You see, I occasionally do rent out remote cabins with the intention of removing myself from the distractions and cares of everyday life; I do have the blissful silence and nothing but the stories I want to write.

And what ends up happening ninety-nine times out of a hundred?

I check my email. I go from there to check my Facebook. I go from there to check my Instagram. Then I loop back: I check my email, and maybe I write a few in return. And then I decide to clean out my Inbox, because I really need to get rid of clutter before my brain can properly enter creative mode. Oh, and then there’s all those files on my computer that are old and cluttering up the desktop. And you know what? I need to have the perfect workspace, and my cabin is a little messy, so I’d better clean it up.

And to write well, I really need to feed my mental energy with physical energy, so I should make sure I have something to eat first. And everyone knows that walking is really helpful for creativity, so I should probably take an hour-long walk to enjoy the beauty of nature, and then I’m going to be really productive!

Well, two days pass, and I’ve written half a page.

Raise your hand if this has happened to you! Why does this happen?

It’s not because we’re incompetent losers. It’s not because we’re fatally flawed. It’s simply because the perfect combination of external mess and internal disorganization–which we all have to deal with, no matter what stage of life we’re in–means we’re trying to do things that are proper to someone who has done the hard work of addressing the rudimentary first. We’re trying to do that transformational stuff without having prepared the perfect soil in which to lay those seeds so that they can go on to flourish and grow and become roses and lavender.

Three Steps to Move From Competency to Transformation

So this is where we find ourselves. We’re at a place where we’ve decided to pursue discipline, time control, craftsmanship, and simplification with the proper mindset of cultivating every aspect of the human person. (And lest we get too depressed, I will note that we don’t need to achieve perfection in this before we create and start reaching toward transformation. We’re talking about a process of becoming.)

Where do we go from here?

Well, here’s what Cal Newport says about the transformation stage: he says that this is when you have to articulate your values.

This is interesting to me, because this is something that is very popular and that people tend to do too early in their creative journeys. In fact, the freedom to articulate your own values is something our modern culture upholds as one of the great hallmarks of post-Christian, secular life.

But what ends up happening more often than not? The values you articulate will change since they are not rooted in anything more than your feelings at a particular moment in your life… unless you consciously decide to root yourself within a tradition.

This idea of rooting ourselves in tradition is hard for writers, because we picture artists as crazy, solipsistic, consumptive recluses who shun human contact for the sake of genius. This is the tradition of the artist that we’ve inherited from the 19th century. And it is nonsense. It’s the worst possible thing you could do as a writer!

This is something that there’s already a group of us doing together in my online writing community, The Story Hearth. In fact, last year, we went through this very exercise of trying to articulate our own artistic values, and we did it as a community. A lot of people came away from that exercise with great success and personal inspiration.

From there, we examined how to cultivate the lifestyle of a writer through a twelve-month webinar series. Each webinar tackled one aspect of Cal’s framework, from shifting our focus from mindset to lifestyle, to practicing discipline in all areas of life, to improving our craftsmanship, to articulating our values, to creating a vision of what success means in our writing life.

This 2025 series on How to Cultivate the Lifestyle of a Writer–a series which is available in our Story Hearth webinar library–became the foundation for our current 2026 series on The 7 Stages of the Creative Process: How Projects in Work and Life Actually Get Done. Recently, I shared an introductory video to this series publicly.

My exhortation to you today is simply this: we thrive as writers in community. Whether you join an online writing community like The Story Hearth or simply follow along on this Substack, I hope that you will not pursue your craft alone.

Join the Story Hearth Today

With this tradition, how on earth are we to articulate our values and raise ourselves from being competent humans to writers whose work will be remembered?

This leads us to step one in moving from competence to transformation:

Find a community to help you articulate your author values

The most enduring values don’t come from your own experience of life. They come from a community that has lived those values for a long time. It’s almost easier to talk about things like values from a religious perspective, because in those cases values come from first principles, which themselves come from revelation. Your work is then living out the reality of the values as passed down through community, received originally from a divine source.

There is, unfortunately, no easy set of received divine instructions for writers.

Personally, I believe there is a great deal that one can learn from religious tradition about how to best live a writer’s life. But there is no Christian credo or manifesto for the ideal writer.

That being the case, we need a community to help articulate the best values for us, if only because it is easier to find wisdom with others who are all engaged in the same task of cultivating the writer’s lifestyle.

The second step is an important one, and will eventually need its own post, because it is a profound and important topic for the writer:

Develop rituals for your writing

Rituals don’t stifle creativity, they help it flourish. They speed up work, they prevent mistakes, and they can help you reach a state of flow, where your writing seems to come of its own volition, and your characters take on a life of their own.

All great writers have developed personal rituals to help them write better. Maya Angelou used to write in a rented hotel room, lying on her side on the bed. She did this so frequently that she developed callouses on her elbows.

Some take it to an almost maniacal intensity. Here’s Haruki Murukami’s ritual, described in his own words:

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m.

I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.

But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

Such ritualization, even the simpler variety, does require mental and physical strength. It also requires something else, something like a commitment to a spiritual practice.

Because truly transformative writing is not only about you, the writer. It’s about your readers as well. And it’s about the source that inspires both toward a more meaningful end. Andrew Kern and I talked about this at length in our conversation about Logos, which you can read here.

For the purposes of cultivating a writer’s lifestyle, we can formulate these important ideas in the third step:

Treat your writing as part of your spiritual development

This is the hardest thing of all. It’s something that resists precise formulations and strictures, because it comes from a place of absolute freedom, a freedom that comes from being created in the image of a free Creator, called to develop our likeness to Him in that same freedom.

This is also an important theme here at Weavers of Story. I know that many of you want more from your writer’s life than just financial gain or recognition by peers or the consolation of telling stories that claw their way out of you. Yes, those things are all perfectly legitimate goals.

But I think many of us want to do more, to “burn the hearts of people with our words,” as Alexander Pushkin wrote in his wonderful poem The Prophet.

It feels strangely old-fashioned and romantic to talk about such things. But I have a sinking suspicion that many of us hope that we talked about this more.

I’m certainly planning on doing so here at Weavers of Story.

Stay tuned.

Moving from Mindset to Practice

Last week, I wrote about the number one mistake you hear when it comes to writing advice—or indeed, productivity advice in general. That mistake occurs because most frameworks leave out an important part of what it means to be a human being. So when the experts prescribe various lifestyle changes for self-improvement, these changes only improve part of who we are. Therefore, the quest for self-improvement inevitably fails.

The most important and powerful parts of us as writers are left on the backburner because of an incorrect dichotomy that separates body from mind and excludes our soul and spirit, hampering our ability to attain basic competence as human beings.

Today, we’ll talk about how to cultivate the lifestyle of a writer with the tripartite understanding of humans as body-mind, soul, and spirit. As a framework, I’m using Cal Newport’s “deep life stack,” about which he speaks and writes regularly. I love Cal’s work on this, because he’s one of the only people who thinks deeply and nontraditionally about the problems we’re facing at this particular time in which technology is growing so rapidly.

He writes about how we, as professionals who need this technology in order to bring our work into the world, can still navigate it more intentionally so that we are helped and not hampered by it, becoming better human beings rather than pale imitations of our own technology.

Can Newport makes a wonderful distinction between the two stages of cultivating a deeper life. Stage one, which I briefly introduced last week, is becoming a competent human. Stage two is the stage of transformation and cultivation, where you take what you built in stage one and raise it up higher and higher. For now, let’s focus on stage one in more detail.

But Do We Really Need To Focus on Basic Competence To Be Good Writers?

Many people either dislike or discredit the idea that you need to attain a basic level of competence before you can get to the good stuff. Some people simply lack the desire or motivation to work on the mundane things of life, assuming these things will take care of themselves. These people prefer to immediately jump to the important, transformational things we ultimately hope to achieve.

But it’s simply a fact that if you are not doing the basics, you’re not going to be able to do the lofty things you hope to achieve as a writer, an artist, or any kind of creative professional. Ancient philosophy and theology bear this out, as does simple human experience.

Cal’s framework is not necessarily the best or the only one out there. I’m using it because I like his work and because his framework is one that is easy for me both to critique and to use. I’m going to take his framework and adjust it just a little bit considering the more ancient and accurate tripartite structure of the human person.

The Hidden Flaw in “Mind over Matter”

But first, I want to bring your attention to something: in a lot of self-help literature, there is a pervasive idea that if you have the right mindset, you will be able to bend reality around you so that reality itself will begin to serve what you are focusing on. This idea was made famous by Earl Nightingale in his record “The Strangest Secret,” and all the big self-help gurus talk about it a lot.

Yes, I’m simplifying this, but the central idea is that if you want to achieve something, you need to focus your attention on that thing, and if you think positively enough about it, then eventually, everything around you will begin to accommodate your desire. All you have to do is dedicate your thoughts entirely to the process and end goal.

If you read my last article, you probably know where my critique is going: we have an overweaning attention on the mind as the thing that causes the change. On a certain level, this makes sense: our aptitude for complex reasoning is one of the most obvious ways in which we are different from animals. So it’s understandable that people assume the thing that makes us human is also the thing that brings transformational change.

Believe me, transformation does happen for people when they use these self-help techniques. But if you look closely at the process Earl Nightingale and others use, you’ll realize that it isn’t the mind that’s making it happen. Rather, it’s the absolute, whole-hearted attention given by the entire person—body-mind, soul, and spirit—to the accomplishment of the thing. And yes, we are able to use these techniques to accomplish great things.

But here’s the rub: we’re not actually the ones accomplishing the great things. That’s the other hidden message in self-help literature: though much of the literature out there isn’t explicitly religious, it does use spiritual language in talking about resonance, serendipity, and an answer to our problems from some other force that is outside of us.

None of this should surprise us.

The thing I want to note is that so much of the self-help advice focuses on using your mind. And if you’re only paying attention to what these self-help gurus are saying instead of what they’re doing, you might think self-improvement is just a trick of the mind, and that if you focus solely on training your mind, you will be able to accomplish fantastic things. That simply isn’t true. The people who do use these self-help frameworks successfully focus on the entire human person, not just the mind.

That being the case, let’s look at how Cal Newport’s framework can be useful in bringing us from a focus on mindset only into a focus on lifestyle. This approach encompasses the human person in a way that helps us attend to realities that are meant to make us competent human beings. This means we’re preparing the soil to eventually plant the seeds of our cultivated garden of creativity, which is what we’ll be talking about next time.

How To Become More Competent

Step 1: Discipline

Cal talks about several concrete steps that can and should be accomplished simultaneously. He starts with the one nobody likes to talk about: discipline. Without discipline, none of the other things can happen.

Cal divides discipline into the categories of body, mind, and heart.

1. According to Cal, the body aspect of discipline involves things like fitness, diet, sleep, and balancing work with leisure.

2. Discipline of the mind involves learning. For Cal, this almost always means reading difficult books, not because they’re difficult but because they contain important truths. (“Fluff,” or reading for enjoyment, is certainly a valid and important part of the human experience, but the fullness of what will make us more competent as individuals is found in reading difficult books.)

3. For Cal, discipline of the heart involves interacting with other people. This is a very important step, because it’s true that we creatives tend to become solipsistic, focusing in on ourselves to the detriment of our loved ones and our social life. (It doesn’t help that many of us are introverts!)

I will adjust this framework a bit. A lot of it is good, but it’s missing one of the key components I talked about last time.

1. As I argued, body-mind is a single part of the human person, so disciplining this part of yourself through tending your physical habits and your reading is only addressing one part of who you are.

2. The second part of you is your soul. A lot of people either conflate the soul with the spirit or else miss tending the soul entirely. Disciplining your soul means cultivating your taste. It has to do with filling the creative well with inputs from different artistic disciplines. I’ll talk more about this in a moment.

3. Third, we have what Cal calls heart and what I call spirit. Spirit does not have to do with other people. It has to do with attending to the realities that are beyond us. If you are a religious person, this means actually doing the practices of your religion. For example, my Orthodox readers will know that the daily practices in Lent are very immersive and difficult, but that they also put into proper perspective the directionality and hierarchy of the things we do in order to simply become competent human beings.

That is the discipline piece. I could give many more examples of how to apply discipline in your daily life, but for now, I’m only presenting the framework. Use it as you wish.

Step 2: Controlling Your Own Time

The second step after (or concurrent with) discipline in this first phase of becoming more competent as humans has to do with the control of time. I had planned to write all about the different methods you can use to control time (e.g. blocking your day for each activity and ensuring you’re doing the thing you should be doing in each block), but I decided to be less rigid. Here’s why:

I was recently reminded by a friend and fellow writer that the control of time is only partially something that we can manage. The reality of having a family, being a member of a community, or both means that sometimes—if not often—our time is outside of our control.

We are often told that our control of time is something that is indispensable, so when we fail to control it due to factors outside our control, we tend to blame ourselves. There are ways to manage this, some of which I’ve discussed inside my author community, but we need to acknowledge that there are certain things outside our control that we won’t be able to lay a system on top of.

Start by Cultivating Attention

Once we acknowledge this fact and set aside the unrealistic expectation of ourselves that we can put tremendous amounts of time into our creativity, let us at least determine to be responsible with the sliver of time we can control. This is very important to something I discussed in my last article: we need to do everything we can to eliminate distractions, so that we can be attentive. The word “focus” is very popular in the productivity space, but “attention” is, I think, a better word. There is something about giving your whole self to a task that activates the entirety of your person—body-mind, soul, and spirit.

To cultivate attention, we must do everything in our power to eliminate technology’s incursion into that sliver of time we can control. This means following the principles of Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. For example:

• During the block of time you’ve decided you’re working, keep your phone in a different room. The world will not end if you do this, believe me. If there’s a real emergency, people will find ways of contacting you that don’t involve this very recent technology that we lived without for hundreds of years.

• The other thing you may want to do is limit the automatic and autonomic access to the internet that will happen the moment you start focusing intensely on anything, especially if that focused task is happening on your computer. Some of the best and most prolific writers I know use the simple hack of having two computers: one computer with internet for admin work, and one computer with no internet for creative work.

• You might also write in a notebook and keep your computer in another room. Or you might have two desks or two entirely separate work areas. A lot of writers do their creative work in cafes, for example. This is something that has helped me a lot.

It’s fine and dandy to read about these transformational practices for the serious writer, but it’s easier to implement them if you do it with others. Come and join us at the Story Hearth to cultivate a writer’s lifestyle with others who are just as committed to it as you are:

Join Story Hearth Today!

Step 3: Having an Ethos of Craftsmanship

The final thing I want to say about this particular stage of becoming competent as a human being is that this is where you develop the desire for craftsmanship as an identifying characteristic of your life. It’s important for us to understand that cultivating our taste and developing our objective ability in the craft is not something we can simply wish away. We need to learn how to 1) cultivate our taste and 2) develop our ability. We do this in the basic competency stage.

So start by developing an ethos of craftsmanship that imbues everything you do, including body-mind, soul, and spirit. For example, for me, this meant that it wasn’t enough anymore to simply decide on being more physically active. It wasn’t enough for me even to follow a specific training plan. I tried both. But to make it stick, I had to make my body-mind training an art in and of itself.

I decided to take up something called adventure racing, which I won’t go into here except to say that it involves all aspects of your person, and it never has an endpoint in its potential cultivation. Even though adventure racing has nothing to do with writing, the actions I take to become more competent as an adventure racer do help when I sit down to face the blank page and the absolute terror of not knowing whether I’ll be able to get over the hump of beginning a new thing…

… which happens Every. Single. Time.

Once we manage to at least start the process of becoming more competent as humans, we have to embrace the fact that this is a stage that has no end. It is a helix that constantly moves toward an end but never reaches it

From Competency to Transcendence

But that doesn’t mean we stop here. Because stage one is still only the level of competency, not transcendence.

How do we get to the next level? We’ll talk about that next time.