A Story For All Times

A Christmas Carol, Disney 2009.

It took a while to accept the arrival of Christmas after a year filled with so little goodwill, but thank goodness it’s here. Holiday traditions ground us and give us feasts for the mind as well as the table, and there’s another ancient tradition that comes to the fore at this time of year, too; a tradition that also feeds the mind, though the feasts for the table may be harder to achieve. Yes, I’m talking about writing.

I read a wonderful article about Charles Dickens in the Washington Post today, and would like to share an excerpt with you:

“One hundred and sixty-six Christmases ago, the prodigious Charles Dickens gave the world a gift of a little book, bound in salmon brown and gilt, and with eight illustrations. A Christmas Carol, for a modest five shillings, became an instant hit. Today, we can’t imagine Christmas without it.

Within the embroidered prose style of his day, Dickens delivered a fairy tale that on one level scared us silly and on another touched something deep in our souls to do better for each other.

Indeed, one observer said the story “prompted more acts of benificence… than can be traced to all the pulpits of Christendom.” Another called it “a new gospel.”

Dickens is referred to as the man who invented Christmas but he didn’t exactly do that,” said Michael Slater, who has written a new, acclaimed biography of the novelist. “It’s the same year, 1843, that the first Christmas card is recorded. There was definitely a revival of Christmas, and Dickens with his little story incorporates so many different aspects of the festive season. He stamped his image on it.”

“What he did,” said actor, author and Dickensian Simon Callow, “was to make Christmas about now.”

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol from a pragmatic need to make money, whilst fired up with anger at a society that ignored the poor and over-worked. His characters were flawed and lovable and real, struggling to survive in a world rife with conflict, uncertainty, unfairness and, all too often, a grimness that still makes us shudder today.

But with his pen he could set the world right. With his pen he could haunt a wealthy miser with ghosts from Christmases past, present and future until he woke transformed.

What a gift and an opportunity we have, as writers!

As you inhale your way through a feast of Dickensian proportions tomorrow and perhaps bring a smile of joy to the face of your very own Tiny Tim, consider what you could write in 2010 that will endure and satisfy. Write it with your eyes flared wide open, get fired up about something in the world we live and write it right.

And save me some leftovers.

Popularity: unranked [?]