I am currently working through some things regarding another novel. At one point last week, I thought I had come up with an amazing way of combining two novels that I had already partly written, and spent a day working through that and thinking it was brilliant, to follow that the next day with a deafening, "What was I thinking?"

I’m not really sure.

Anyway, I’ve been slowly creeping back into reading fiction – in between some historical and Scriptural stuff – and just a couple of notes.

I read a mystery novel a few months ago. Mystery used to be my genre. When I transitioned into adult reading as a teen, that was my path: Rex Stout, Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen were my favorites.  Especially Rex Stout. I think I was in love with Archie Goodwin, but we won’t get into that.

But I’ve not read too many mysteries in recent years. This one I picked up circuitously, as usual. I read something online about the author via another website, and discovered that he lived somewhere I used to live and wrote this mystery set in another town, not the same as the first place, but another place with which I am very familiar. So I thought, "Well, that would be interesting to read a novel set in such a familiar setting. Let’s try it out."

So I did, and I didn’t think much of the novel (and I’m not naming it or the author) for a number of reasons – the dialogue was endless and unnecessary, full of "what’s?" and "huh’s." Pages of unilluminating conversations. What was most interesting to me was his treatment of the locale, and it was a good lesson for me.

For he didn’t describe the places – he just named them. Which was kind of fun at first, seeing the names of these places I knew in print, being traversed by fictional characters, but then I realized that any real sense of place was being supplied, not by the writer, but by me, and the net effect was that the novel ended up being pages of meaningless dialogue interspersed with familiar place names, but I was never really taken there because, it seems, the act of simply naming places without really describing them – not for the sake of description, but for the sake of situating the story – is entertaining for those in the know, but ultimately flat.

For some odd reason, it reminded me of a math teacher I once knew. She was a math whiz, and it all came very naturally to her, but she simply wasn’t a very good teacher. My son had her for algebra, and it turned out that I could explain things better to him than she could because, I figured out, I was definitely not a math whiz, had had to really claw my way to that A I got in Algebra in 8th grade. For that reason, I, a person who’d had to work to understand the concepts, was better at explaining things to another person who was having to work to understand the concepts than a person who just intuited it all could.

Which led to one of my grand theories of education in which I declared (to myself) that the best teachers were probably not those who were naturally gifted in their subjects. I am not sure if that theory still holds, but it worked for a few minutes.

The short version of this is that familiarity not only breeds contempt, it breeds a barrier to explaining that with which you are familiar to others. Approach things as a stranger, and explain things as if you are trying to help other strangers understand. Does that apply? To anything? I’m not sure.

The second so-called insight came after a conversation with my writer son. I can’t remember what we were talking about. Anyway, it occurred to me in terms of what both he and I are writing that perhaps a helpful way to see a classic story arc is that the crisis is reached when the protagonist must finally answer, in some way, a question he has been avoiding up to that point. That has probably been said by others, and perhaps it simply expresses some hero’s journey motif in another way, but it helped some things click in my head.

But now I have to go write some pamphlets…familiar territory, well-answered questions…avoided by me for long enough!

And…well a religion angle. A good reminder for those involved in evangelization of one sort or another, which is all of us. Should be. What makes perfect sense to you might seem foreign and strange to another. What brings you close to Christ might be perceived by an outsider as being an obstacle. We can just throw out place names and expect people to see. We can’t just expect that the way our particular intuitions have been met in and fed by our faith will immediately resonate with someone looking at it all cold. If you can’t get that, if you can’t empathize…good luck.