Narrative Troubles

Over the last 18 months or so, I've come to realise the truth of a problem which I thought might just have been a mirage. The problem with some of the brightest young people I've met is that they don't read enough. They are a throwback to the idea that ingesting the quintessence is equivalent to ingesting the rest of the materia mundi.

So when discussing literature with one young person, I was not appalled, or even saddened, to realise that he'd not read any literature at all. He had been reading the pre-digested pap of other people's commercial notes, and using their insights and analysis to procure a grade that was a reasonable one.

Ah well. It's too early to tell, but my gut feeling is that people who can't construct and deconstruct a narrative for themselves are doomed to follow other people's narratives. It's like a sort of metaliterary Huck Finn idea; Huck follows the river 'there and back' because Samuel Clemens, or 'Mark Twain', makes him do it. Huck really has no control over his destiny.

These thoughts do bug me at times; if God is a narrator, the author and perfector of my faith, then have I no control over what I should be doing? Am I merely a character in a narrative myself? Should I just go look for some pre-digested pap that will tell me what my significance and the themes of the story are?

Then it occurred to me. At the very least, as I've found when writing, and other writers have found too, you can have characters that seem to write themselves — they are entertaining, they are easy to write about. I will try (if it is at all possible) to be an entertaining character that will give other people pleasure when they read about me, and hopefully, that will give pleasure to my Author when He deigns to mention me in the narrative.