As Richard Cohen, author of Writer's Mind © 1995, predicted, the Bible is full of ideas for things to write about. At first, I approached it with some trepidation, for fear that it would be difficult to generate topics from lists of proscriptions and retellings of battles, but I had forgotten most of the Bible is comprised of stories, especially the first five books, the Pentateuch.
I read Joseph Frank’s Literature from the Bible presenting selections from the old and new testaments. Here are a few of the sections that interested me and a brief description of the ideas they inspired in me:
- The fall from Eden: Rudyard Kipling’s “Man Who Would be King” about someone who had everything and then lost it all and Henry James’ “Figure in the Carpet” about a man whose obsessive search for knowledge ruined his happiness and alienated those around him.
- The earth is filled with violence; I will destroy everyone with a flood: Richard Matheson’s I am Legend, where a man takes vengeance on an evil world killing every creature he finds.
- “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth”: Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw”, or maybe the movie, Bad Seed, where children misbehave and use their imagination for evil purposes.
- Where Noah was drunk and naked and his children walked in backwards to cover him: A Tennessee Williams story where the children cover for their father’s drunkenness and there are naked family members and incest involved.
- ”Stranger in a land that is not theirs”: Robert Heinlein used almost that wording to title his book, Stranger in a Strange Land, about a man who returns to a “home” he is a stranger too. The concept seems rich with possibility for inspiring many more stories.
- Every city Lot stayed in was evil. He went to mountains to live and his daughters slept with him: This seems intriguing in a V. C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic) sort of way.
- Sarai was barren and Abram slept with their slave instead to bear him a child, Ishmael: This could make a good story describing the repercussions for the family, the child, and their relationship. Ishmael was a wild person. This, too, has interesting potential. Maybe Ishmael can be recreated at a gangster who is fathered by a rich and famous man and whose mother is cast out by friends and family.
- Absalom avenges his sister and then rises against his father: Faulkner wrote Absalom, Absalom, about just such a young man trying to save his family’s reputation.
- Books of Isaiah: The heavy descriptions of war with a supernatural component reminded me of the war scenes in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Other books of the Old Testament also spark ideas for things to write about:
- Job: “yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward” and “man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble”: Many stories are ultimately about a character being unable to avoid heartache. Aristotle considered such inevitability as essential to true tragedy; the tragic flaw can easily be our human condition.
- Psalms: “tree is known by its fruit”: I think of All About Eve, a story about people who appear good, but do bad behind the scenes and are ultimately exposed by their actions.
- Song of Soloman: “I am black but comely, look not upon me because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me”: and the use of the word ‘Beloved’ repeatedly, reminds me of Toni Morrison’s novel of the same name (though maybe not the story). Maybe there are connections with Nora Zeal Hurston’s novels or The Color Purple about finding beauty in oneself.
- Ecclesiastes: “the sun also rises … what profit from labor, generations come and go, the earth abides for ever”: Hemingway uses the beginning of this text as a title for a book recounting the meaningless wanderings of a ‘lost generation’. There is a lot of existential weight in this selection from Ecclesiastes.
- Ecclesiastes: “praised the dead, which were already dead, more than the living”: Reminds me of T. S. Eliot’s poems about cruel months, empty streets, anesthetized souls, etc.
- Ecclesiastes: “there is a just man that perish in his righteousness and there is a wicked man that prolong his life in his wickedness”: Sounds exactly like a Twilight Zone episode.
The New Testament, also, is rich in ideas. I read the Gospel of John and sections from Acts and Corinthians to pull examples from:
- “Blessed art though among women”: Describes the beauty of woman when they are pregnant (as well as this special circumstance where she is pregnant with Christ). Faulkner’s in Light in August presents a woman who is centered, contented, and glowing as she wanders about the book pregnant.
- The temptation in the wilderness: Reminds me of movies like Jacob’s Ladder or Stir of Echoes where visions and demons tempt one’s convictions and sense of reality. Our modern world could be considered the wilderness.
- "The spirit of the lord is upon me, because he heath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor and preach deliverance to the captives”: This is Flannery O’Connor meets Joseph Conrad: her short stories of traveling salesman and religious converts and his stories about godless natives and the people who would change them. Many powerful potentials here.
- "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; what is a man advantaged if he gain the whole world and lose himself”: Reminds me of the Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Corey.”
- Story of man fallen among thieves who is helped by the Samaritan: E. E. Cummings wrote a poem about this text and goes quite a ways far afield modifying the original text to alter its emotional depth:
a man who had fallen among thieves
lay by the roadside on his back
dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
wearing a round jeer for a hat
fate per a somewhat more than less
emancipated evening
had in return for consciousness
endowed him with a changeless grin
whereon a dozen staunch and Meal
citizens did graze at pause
then fired by hypercivic zeal
sought newer pastures or because
swaddled with a frozen brook
of pinkest vomit out of eyes
which noticed nobody he looked
as if he did not care to rise
one hand did nothing on the vest
its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt
while the mute trouserfly confessed
a button solemnly inert.
Brushing from whom the stiffened puke
i put him all into my arms
and staggered banged with terror through
a million billion trillion stars - "Woe unto hypocrites for ye are as graves which appear not and the men that walk over them are not aware of them": This looks very promising. Maybe it’s the stuff of a movie that Joan Crawford would star in about someone who consumes other people. Is it The Devil Wears Prada?
- "What is spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light": Reminds me of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf or William’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof where secrets that cannot stay hidden are revealed in tempestuous scene after scene.
- "What king goes to rule war against another king, sitteth not down first and consulteth whether he need ten-thousand or twenty-thousand others with him": We are infinitely interested in the machinations of kings. For instance Shakespeare’s plays and the movies A Lion in Winter and A Man for All Seasons are about the doings of, and decision made by, kings.
- Acts: where Saul Is called to preach: Joseph Frank points out that there are similarities with Cervantes' Don Quixote.
- Corinthians: Example of theological arguments and the early writings of a convert, much like Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations or Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica.
