Lyssa Henry

James Fenimore Cooper was a phenomenal writer. He took readers to places they had never been to feel things they had never felt, which is a big goal for most writers. How does a writer do this, though? A lot of the time, people write believable stories about places they have never been themselves and experiences they have never had.

James Fenimore Cooper did not live on a Prairie. He was not traveling west with an old stranger and his dog. He had never been on the adventures he so believably wrote about, so how did he write them so well?

One of the very coolest things about writing, to me, is the reflection of God that writers can show through their work. Writers are capable of creativity, because they, as all humans, were made in the image of God. This doesn’t mean that they can make up a new color and put it in the world or come up with a new animal that wasn’t at least based on one of the many, many animals they have already seen, but writers can create. Throughout history, people have written about just about everything anyone could think of. That takes creativity! The cool part about the whole experience of writing is that it can take you away to somewhere wild in your imagination. I know that J.R.R. Tolkien had never seen a Hobbit or a Troll or a Wizard, but he wrote about them as if they were real. J.K. Rowling has never met a witch or a house elf, but with the accounts she gives in her books, you would think she lived with one.

I have written stories about some strange things. Once, for the fun of it, I wrote a story about a cucumber going through the process of becoming a jar of pickles. It was actually pretty frightening, but I have never actually spoken to a pickle about the trauma it had to go through to end up in the store. I wrote about a creature, dog-like and menacing, about 7 feet tall with blood red eyes, but I have certainly never seen anything like that.

God has given us the ability to create because it lets us come closer to understanding how He feels about the things that He has created. When He looked at creation and said it was good, that was a big deal. It takes an artist forever to finally be satisfied with a drawing, and a writer forever to be satisfied with a story, but once it is finished, the creator loves what they have made.

James Fenimore Cooper, even if he didn’t know, was reflecting God when he wrote his tales. He was able to invent situations that hadn’t occurred. He wrote about people that didn’t exist in real life. This wasn’t because he was some powerful genius, capable of creating life out of nothing, but it is awesome that he created because he is made in the image of someone who really is that powerful genius.

So how do you write about something that you haven’t experienced?

All you have to do is think. Think about it for a second, and write a word down. From that word comes a sentence, then another. Before you know it you have paragraphs, pages, chapters, and maybe even an entire book. This is not a skill that we deserve to have, so we should all take advantage of it as long as we possibly can. It is an honor to be crafted in the image of such a Great Creator, so the least we can do is try to do things that glorify Him who gave us the ability to do them.