Charles Dickens never wrote a single novel, by Ben Jeapes

Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash.

Charles Dickens never wrote a single novel … until he wrote a novel. Shakespeare never wrote a single play … until he wrote a play. No one ever rose from the dead … until someone rose from the dead. Anything that happens must happen for the first time.

But it must also be prepared for. Groundwork must be laid. In the case of Dickens and Shakespeare (and many people reading this list) that groundwork was a lot of hard work. In the case of God’s anointed it was an Old Testament’s worth of history.

As we approach the first anniversary of the first lockdown, think how unlikely the last year would be if someone, say, ten years earlier wrote it down as a novel. Within one year, starting from scratch, not one, not two but three or four vaccines are created? Amazing video conferencing technologies such as Zoom and Skype just happen to be widely available? Pull the other one! It doesn’t work.

Except, of course, that none of these things came out of nowhere. They were all there in one form or another already, just requiring tweaking (in the case of the vaccines, quite a bit of tweaking) to apply to the new situation..

I have no especial insight into the workings of God’s mind so I’m not going to say how much is down to chance and how much to divine grace; but I do thank him daily that if it had to happen, it happened now.

In fact, God is pretty good at laying groundwork, which shouldn’t actually be much of a surprise. His chosen people were yearning for their messiah for a long time before he actually came along. Why not earlier? I would put good money on it being something to do with being born into an empire that spanned most of the known world, in which people could move about with relative ease, more or less safely. The exiles in Babylon would have loved to have the messiah appear in their midst, but the time wasn’t right. The message that he brought wouldn’t have got very far. As it was, Christ came along at just the right time.

We can be encouraged, and we can learn. And the groundwork must be laid in the story itself. It’s bad storytelling to pull a resolution out of thin air. The principle of Chekov’s gun, paraphrased, is that if a gun goes off in Act 3 then it should have been seen hanging on the wall in Act 1. I know we’re all dying to leap straight to the fantastic resolution we’ve thought up, the cunning pilot twist, the daring pulling together of all those disparate threads … But groundwork first, please. Always, groundwork.

Ben Jeapes took up writing in the mistaken belief that it would be easier than a real job (it isn’t). Hence, as well as being the author of eight novels and co-author of many more, he has also been a journal editor, book publisher, and technical writer. www.benjeapes.com