These are quotes I found helpful in one way or another from The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy Sayers.
Idea, Energy, Power:
For every work of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.First, there is the Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning: and this is the image of the Father.
Second, there is the Creative Energy begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter: and this is the image of the Word.
Third, there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul: and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit (pp. 37-38).
Energy and Incarnation:
When making a character he in a manner separates and incarnates a part of his own mind. He recognizes in himself a powerful emotion – let us say, jealousy. His activity then takes this form: Supposing this emotion were to become so strong as to dominate my whole personality, how should I feel and how should I behave? In imagination he becomes the jealous person and thinks and feels without that frame of experience, so that the jealousy of Othello is the true creative expression of Shakespeare. He follows out, in fact, the detective system employed by Chesterton’s ‘Father Brown’: ‘I mean that I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murders…I mean that I thought and thought about how a man might come to be like that, until I realized that I really was like that, in everything except actual final consent to the action’ (pp. 51-52).
…The writer has ‘favorite’ characters, which seem to embody more of or more important parts of his personality than the rest. These are, as it were, the saints and prophets of his art, who speak by inspiration (p. 52).
…If a character becomes merely a mouthpiece of the author, he ceases to be a character, and is no longer a living creation. Still more, if all the characters speak with their author’s voice, the whole work loses its reality, and with it, its power (p. 52).
Diversity and Freedom of Characters:
The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity, the more massive the unity. Incidentally, this is the weakness of most ‘edifying’ or ‘propaganda’ literature. There is no diversity (p. 53).
But all possess this measure of freedom, namely, that unless the author permits them to develop in conformity with their proper nature, they will cease to be true and living creatures (p. 67).
Of the ‘Character’ in an Autobiography:
It appears with a double nature, ‘divine and human’; the whole story is contained within the mind of its maker, but the mind of the maker is also imprisoned within the story and cannot escape from it. It is ‘altogether God,’ in that it is the sole arbiter of the form the story is to take, and yet ‘altogether man,’ in that, having created the form, it is bound to display itself in conformity with the nature of the form ( pp. 88-89).
…The autobiography is at one and the same time a single element in the series of the writer’s created works and an interpretation of the whole series. If we want…to find out what the writer ‘means’ by his writings, we shall undoubtedly get some light on the matter by reading his personal revelation of himself (p. 89).
It was said, sneeringly, by someone that if a clam could conceive of God, it would conceive of him in the shape of a great, big clam. Naturally. And if God has revealed Himself to clams, it could be only under conditions of perfect clamhood, since any other manifestation would be wholly irrelevant to clam nature. By incarnation, the creator says in effect: ‘See! this is what my eternal Idea looks like in terms of my own creation; this is my manhood, this is my clamhood, this is my characterhood in a volume of created characters’ (p. 90).
Right vs. Wrong Not Necessarily Good vs. Evil
In the choice of words, for example, the ‘right’ word will not be the morally edifying word, but the word which ‘rightly’ embodies his Idea, whether the Idea itself is morally good, evil, or ‘beyond good and evil.’ For him, engaged in his creative act, ‘good’ is good craftsmanship, ‘beauty’ is artistic beauty, and ‘truth’ is structural truth (p. 97).
Of Evil as Privation of Good:
Shakespeare writes Hamlet. That act of creation enriches the world with a new category of Being, namely: Hamlet. But simultaneously it enriches the world with a new category of Not-Being, namely: Not-Hamlet. Everything other than Hamlet…acquires in addition to its former characteristics, the characteristic of being Not-Hamlet; the whole of the past immediately and automatically becomes Not-Hamlet…Arguing along these lines, we may make an attempt to tackle the definition of Evil as the deprivation or negation of the Good. If Evil belongs to the category of Not-Being, then two things follow. First: the reality of Evil is contingent upon the reality of Good; and secondly: the Good, by merely occurring, automatically and inevitably creates its corresponding Evil. In this sense, therefore, God, Creator of all things, creates Evil as well as Good, because the creation fo a category of Good necessarily creates a category of Not-Good. From this point of view, those who say that God is ‘beyond Good and Evil’ are perfectly right: He transcends both, because both are included within His Being. But the Evil has no reality except in relation to His Good; and this is what is meant by saying that Evil is the negation or deprivation of Good…But…So long as Not-Being remains negative and inactive, it produces no particular effects, harmful or otherwise. But if Not-Hamlet becomes associated with consciousness and will, we get something which is not merely Not-Hamlet: we get Anti-Hamlet…This, according to the ancient myth of the Fall, is what happened to Men. They desired to be ‘as gods, knowing good and evil.’ God, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, knows Evil ‘by simple intelligence’ – that is, in the category of Not-Being. But men, not being pure intelligences, but created within a space-time framework, could not ‘know’ Evil as Not-Being – they could ‘know’ it only by experience; that is, by associating their wills with it and so calling it into active Being. Thus the Fall has been described as the ‘fall into self-consciousness,’ and also as the ‘fall into self-will’ (pp. 101-103).
Word by Nature has a Propensity to Reveal Itself:
It is the nature of the word to reveal itself and to incarnate itself- to assume material form (p. 111).
Wait on the Spirit:
It is the business of education to wait upon Pentecost. Unhappily, there is something about educational syllabuses, and especially about examination papers, which seems to be rather out of harmony with Pentecostal manifestations (p. 112).
Once it’s written, it’s written:
Herod showed himself much more competent and realistic than Pilate or Caiaphas. he grasped the principle that if you are to destroy the Word, you must do so before it has time to communicate itself. Crucifixion gets there too late (p. 114).
We Can’t Really See the Work of the Spirit in the Present:
We cannot really look at the movement of the Spirit, just because It is the Power by which we do the looking (p. 115).
On Originality:
The demand for ‘originality’ – with its implication that the reminiscence of other writers is a sin against originality and a defect in the work – is a recent one…The traditional view is that each new work should be a fresh focus of power through which the former streams of beauty, emotion, and reflection are directed (p. 121).
Think about the Trinity, but don’t expect everything to be in human terms:
There is nothing mythological about Christian Trinitarian doctrine: it is analogical. It offers itself freely for meditation and discussion; but it is desirable that we should avoid the bewildered frame of mind of the apocryphal Japanese gentleman who complained:
‘Honourable Father, very good; Honourable Son, very good; but Honourable Bird I do not understand at all’ (p. 123).
Creation as a Story:
This is as though a book were written to be read by the characters within it. And further: the universe is not a finished work. Every mind within it is in the position of the audience sitting in the theater and seeing the play for the first time. Or rather, every one of us in on the state, performing a part in a play, of which we have not seen either the script or any synopsis of the ensuing acts…This, it may be remarked, is no unusual situation even among human actors…The actor on the state of the universe cannot even go to the nearest cinema and see the result of his work when the sequences have been fitted together, for the film is still in the making. At the most, perhaps, towards the end of his life, he may see a few episode in which he figured run through the pages of contemporary history. And from the completed episodes of the past he may gather, if he is intelligent and attentive, some indication of the author’s purpose (pp. 128-129).
There is one episode in particular to which Christianity draws his attention. The leading part in this was played, it is alleged, by the Author, who presents it as a brief epitome of the plan of the whole world…And examining the plot of it, we observe at once that if anybody in this play has he feelings spared, it is certainly not the Author (p. 129).
The Character’s Dependence on the Author:
…For the satisfaction of its will to life it depends utterly upon the sustained and perpetually renewed will to creation of its maker. The work can live and grow on the sole condition of the maker’s untiring energy; to satisfy it will is to die, he has only to stop working. In him it lives and moves and has its being…(p. 141).
A perfect identity of the creature with its creator’s will is possible only when the creature is unselfconscious: that is, when it is an externalization of something that is wholly controlled by the maker’s mind (p. 143).
Of a Story that is not controlled by the Idea:
The Idea was not sufficiently powerful int he writer’s mind to control the Energy; so that the son, instead of ‘doing the will of the father’ was doing his own will and that of the characters. Patripassianism must, in any case, imply a certain weakness in the father, since it is a heresy that denies and confounds the father’s persona (p. 175).
