Writing as Pure Play
Old enough to once again create with childlike joy
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Raed Truett Gilliam
It starts as pure joy. It starts with toy castles and soldiers taking shape from the blunt end of a crayon. It grows into hours spent after school writing out the scenes that formed while daydreaming in class. The words flow with a youthful inventiveness. It’s an Edenic scene. You are innocent, unashamed.
Then comes the luring hiss of a greatness that could be yours. It hinders the ease and inventiveness that used to come so naturally. At some point, you begin to pick up on the rules—the do’s and don’ts; the tired tropes to avoid. Eden is infiltrated. A voice whispers that literary god-likeness could be yours, knowing good writing from bad; great writing from simply good.
The purity of playfulness falls prey to a new presence in the garden: perfectionism. You see your nakedness now; the raw, naive, cliche-ridden writings you once never questioned. You feel embarrassed about it for the first time. You can do better, you have to do better. And Eden is lost.
I remember the first time I wrestled with the meaning of Lewis’s famous quote, “Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” I was nestled in the lower bunk of my childhood bedroom, buried in blankets and bathed in bright reading lamp warmth. I puzzled over the dedication to his goddaughter Lucy Barfield: how could one outgrow fairy tales? How can a favorite food ever stop being delicious?
And for a few years, I happily forgot that such a time could arrive. I sketched imagined world maps on corners of school notebooks, and became an expert at switching back-and-forth between mental scene-creation and classroom participation. The daily trip between the Vivaldi-themed school bell, and the settling in at my family’s laptop in our 8th floor apartment in Lebanon couldn’t come soon enough.
I’d find my spot in the Microsoft Word doc titled something like The Great Adventure of the Kingdom and would be immediately transported to the Peninsula during a time of revolution—traced through an underground escape from goblins, or in training with the scorpion-master of the Desert. These were not places I invented; they were places I knew and explored; they are places I long to return to one day.
These early bursts of writing were not entirely devoid of ambition—I knew publishing was a thing; someone had to take the Word document, print it, bind it, and sell it. I never read Eragon but knew the Paolini story, and the fact that it was possible for some kid to get published assured me that my efforts were serious, not just play.
Looking back, that dream of being a published author, though harmless on its own, was the serpent in the garden of those happy days. Every moment I spent thinking about how publishable my work was slithered away with the initial sense of innocent, playful creation. I don’t know how things could have gone any other way—it seems an inevitable part of the growth process towards actual good writing, and like many things, the way to more life is often a kind of death.
Most writers end up internalizing similar crippling messages over the years: “You have nothing original to say.” “That story’s been told a million times.” “No one cares about your opinion.” “You need to read more, wait longer, get more degrees, build an audience.” All the objections, both within and without, can shackle the freedom of storytelling. We find every reason not to go back to the maps and the drafts and the ideas of dragons in distant lands, and the calling is buried in the bill-paying and glad-handing of maturity.
And so my youthful dreams lay dormant in their strapped helplessness for a few years, as I attended to the business of early adulthood. But exactly a week after my college graduation, I found myself old enough, once more, to step into Fairyland in the midst of the foggy mountains of Vancouver, Canada.
In the spring of 2022, Malcolm Guite, poet-priest-scholar, had just wrapped up his lecture on the Poetic Imagination in the auditorium of Regent College. Staffers stretched out a couple mic stands in the aisles for questions. I had one burning on my mind.
Guite had just brilliantly articulated the symbolism latent in the Narnia stories. I felt awestruck at the magic, but the feeling soon gave way to an angst, which I shaped into a question: “Lewis drew on so many sources, and wrote on so many layers. Did he plan it all out ahead of time? Or did the inspiration strike him in the process of writing?”
The question behind my question: “How am I going to write anything a fraction as resonant as a medieval cosmologist?” Guite answered with a metaphor (I rephrase):
Think of your imagination as a kind of soil. Every book you read, every film you watch, every soul-stirring song you enjoy is like a leaf from a tree that falls to the ground, decomposing over time, adding its essence to an increasingly rich and fertile topsoil, created over many seasons. There may be seasons of apparent barrenness, where not much happens besides more and more soil-making, but one day, the seed of an idea will take root, and in a few short months, it will sprout into a beautiful sapling—the creative work, ready to bear fruit. Though it might seem like an artist created something in just a few short months, this work sprouts from a soil shaped by years of patient deep-work, living, and learning.
Which brings us back to death.
I recently went to a wine & cheese night hosted by friends in their Soho apartment. At the beginning of our evening, one of our number posed a question to the table: “Have you given up on achieving greatness?” This, to a room of mostly twenty-something Christians living in New York City, an environment literally running on the drive and grind of the dream-chasing demographic—from the immigrants who left their familiar Old World for a new kind of future, to today’s gentrifying yuppies inhabiting fashionable Brooklyn neighborhoods. We debated what greatness actually means, but very few were ready to admit total defeat in the face of our host’s question.
“You can be like God,” the serpent whispered in the garden, and whispers still today. And it is to this temptation that we must die—the way we connect our identity to output, our worth to the plaudits, our value to status. The artistic call is foolhardy—to dive all-in is to take on huge risk, vulnerability, and time in pursuit of something with no clear-cut outcome, no set path or real guarantees of any kind, so we grasp for some sense of control, some way of measuring our success.
But if this calling goes deeper still; if it feels like the impulse to create is how God has wired you; if this instinct to tell stories is known at a deep level—if it fills you with ‘God’s pleasure’—then to create in the image of the Creator is a matter of obedience. We can obey in less-than-ideal ways when we let our whims and illusory aims overtake how we go about our obedience (read Jonah for a reminder), but to grow in obedience is not to abandon the whole project. It is to submit the how to the One who is in control; to loosen our possessive grip on the reigns, to lay down our strategies for success, and to empty our hands and receive what he has to give. This is not wish-fulfillment, it is the fruit of constant death-to-self. As the French Catholic philosopher and priest, A.G. Sertillanges, writes in the preface to his essential book, The Intellectual Life,
Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the work; acquire that state of soul unburdened by desire and self-will which is the state of grace of the intellectual worker. Without that you will do nothing worthwhile.
The state of grace, the gift we have in Christ, is that we can completely let go of the outcome of our work—we don’t have to fight for our worth or the need to secure our tomorrows. The death that crept into the garden of creative play is swallowed up and the creative process becomes a collaborative prayer—an intimate conversation with the person and primary source behind all imagination.
By dying to our narrow definitions of success, our perfectionism, our plans for achievement, and our timelines, we are free to bring forth the fruit he has appointed for us to bear. It comes from him, in his timing, for his glory. And when we doubt, or are still in the thick of the long, little-to-show-for-it-years of small beginnings, take heart and know: “He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.” (1 Thess. 5:24 ESV)
Raed Truett Gilliam
Writer & Filmmaker
Raed is a writer and filmmaker, and associate producer for Christianity Today Media. Thoughts on this essay? Leave a like and share in the comments! Subscribe to Ecstatic, and order your Ekstasis Print Edition today.
Ekstasis is excited about the upcoming Festival of Faith & Writing, where we will be hosting a reception with Plough, Comment & Commonweal on the Community of Small Magazines.
Thank you for this. That metaphor about the leaves and topsoil from Malcolm Guite alone is so rich!
Wow, bookmarking this for the difficult days of writing. Thank you.