I write picture books about supply chain management. They’re called the Supply Jane & Fifo Adventures, and they teach kids supply chain, logistics, and inventory management principles through fun little stories about dragons. Like most writers, I’m also a reader; my bookshelves are full of historical fiction, mystery novels, and mid-twentieth-century Anglican lay theology. So you can imagine how excited I was to hear about Dorothy L. Sayers.

I read the Mind of the Maker around the same time as I read God for Us by Catherine Mowry LaCugna, and my mind started swirling with vague ideas about creativity and the Holy Trinity, which I’ve tried to articulate here.1 2 However, as LaCugna says, “Only a fool would be so bold as to presume to speak authoritatively about God’s ineffable mystery,” and I’m no fool.3 I am not claiming to be an authority on the Trinity, or even creativity, for that matter. I have neither an M.Div. nor an MFA, and this is a bit out of scope for my MBA . . . but Sayers’s Trinitarian framework for creativity has impacted my work, my faith, and the integration of the two, and I hope it can have a similar effect on you.

The Framework

In art, the Trinity is expressed in the Creative Idea, the Creative Energy, and the Creative Power — the first imagining of the work, then the making incarnate of the work, and third the meaning of the work.
— Madeleine L’Engle, introduction to The Mind of the Maker4

This is the framework. Sayers makes it more concrete by illustrating it as Book-as-Thought, Book-as-Written, and Book-as-Read. When I was going through this framework, I realized that I was calling these concepts by different names: Source, Articulation, Effect. Regardless of the terms used, they are, of course, analogous to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

The easiest way to explain this framework is by fitting an example to it. Since there are no universal references that we can be assured that everyone is familiar with, we’ll use one that no one is familiar with: the process through which my first book, Fifo Saves the Day, came into being.5

Creative Idea

The Creative Idea is partly an idea, but it’s also much more; it’s the Source of your creation.

The idea (lowercase) for Fifo Saves the Day sprang up one day when my husband and I were hiking in the Swiss alps, exchanging supply chain puns; I decided that “FIFO” — an acronym for First-In-First-Out — sounded like “Fido,” the canonical storybook dog’s name. Then, somehow, the name “Supply Jane” emerged, and it was obvious that they needed an adventure, which, I decided, was rescuing a hapless grocery store owner when the dragon eggs that he had failed to properly rotate using the principle of First-In-First-Out started to hatch into baby dragons.

But I knew much more than the idea for this specific story. I knew that Supply Jane and Fifo live in a place called Logisticsville, and that there are dragons there, and that dragons are not livestock, but coexist with humans (although you can eat dragon eggs), and that there is an entire industry set up around producing dragon food, which is like breakfast cereal. I knew all of the backstories, like who Fifo truly is as a dog, and who Supply Jane is, and why.

If you’ve heard the term “world-building” in sci-fi/fantasy, or a “universe” like the Marvel universe, that’s closer to what this Creative Idea is, instead of just a little bullet-point outline for a story. But it’s also not exactly that, because it’s also all of my knowledge and experience and motivation for writing Fifo Saves the Day. And, technically, the fact that I’m articulating some of it here is already moving it into the realm of Creative Energy, because the Idea is also everything outside of what I’ve articulated, that I still don’t know — all that exists, but hasn’t yet been revealed.

In short, the Creative Idea is sort of everythingthat allows us to create . . . like God the Father, the Source of Creation.

Creative Energy

We can’t ever really know the Source, so we need the Articulation — the Creative Energy — to point to it. This is what we think of as “work” — something tangible, something real, something that exists in the world . . . like God the Son.

I had started to articulate the story of Fifo Saves the Day, but at first, all I had were bullet points. They were something, but they weren’t fully incarnated. They needed to be, quite literally, fleshed out.

There had to be pictures, but I couldn’t bring them to life in a way that did them justice, so I found an illustrator to help me actually “embody” Supply Jane and Fifo. We got started trying to refine the characters, and I could tell that the first round wasn’t quite right.

This is a good thing to remember about our creativity: We will never be able to perfectly incarnate the Source, or perfectly articulate the Idea, because we’re not God. That happened once, and we can (and should) strive for quality, but we need to remind ourselves that we won’t ever reach perfection.

But we got closer, and Supply Jane got her purple hair, and we had sketches of scenes and then full-color spreads, and eventually, there was a book (or at least a print-ready PDF on a computer). Then, finally, the file went to the printer and became tangible. The “book” became real.

It had been all along, technically. Everything from the first putting-into-words of the idea for the story, to the sketches, to the PDF, to the bright orange, glossy book-books . . . . It’s all Creative Energy, just to different degrees. Articulation is a spectrum.

Creative Power

The Creative Power — the meaning — is the effect that your work has. It’s the beauty in the eye of the beholder; it’s how your work is perceived. This is the point at which, for most of us, the creative process starts to be more relational.

For books, it comes in the form of reviews and ratings. A lot of people really liked Fifo Saves the Day, and one person, judging by the one-star review, really didn’t. That’s part of it. Our work exists in relation to others — it’s for others — and thus we have to give up control.

Reviews and ratings are still quite transactional; where the relational aspect really started to sink in for me was seeing kids actually read the book — and not only reading, but inwardly digesting. One aunt told me that her nephew now looks forward to eating leftovers before they “hatch.” Other kids moved the message out of the context of food completely and started using FIFO to determine who got out of the bathtub first, based on the order that they had gotten in.

Another major function of Creative Power — of Effect, of the Holy Spirit — is revelation. This works on the audience, but also on the creator. When Fifo Saves the Day came into being, its Power revealed more about the Source. These additional glimpses into Supply Jane, Fifo, and Logisticsville inspired a second book, and a third, and maybe a fourth . . . as well as conference talks, articles, and this essay.

In Conclusion

This was my example. What’s yours? I encourage you to spend a few minutes with a paper and pen. Think of an instance of creativity that you’re intimately familiar with: your own work, ideally, or else something that has profoundly impacted you. What is the Idea or Source, and what does it say to you about God the Father? What is the Energy or Articulation, and what does it reveal about the Son? What is the Effect or Energy, and what does it show you about the Holy Spirit?

Whether it’s your third novel or your dissertation, the Lord Peter Wimsey series or Harry Potter, The Starry Night or the Marvel universe, bring Sayers’s trinitarian framework into your own context . . . and see what will be revealed.

Notes:

1 Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (New York: HarperOne, 1987).

2 Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God For Us: The Trinity & Christian Life (New York: HarperOne, 1991).

3 Ibid., 324.

4 Sayers, Mind of the Maker, xvii.

5 Megan Preston Meyer, Fifo Saves the Day (Urbandale: Preston Meyer Publishing, 2020).