Justifying God’s Ways to Man

The easiest idyll you can write is childhood in or school. Maybe young love too. Some stage of life the reader had already grown being.

It allows you to write in worries or conflict for a bit of plot — will Santa make it though the creeks are swollen with rain? Who will win the house cup? — but the reader is too adult to fear them, all is well, all will be well, the hiccups in the character’s life if anything only add to the sense of deep peace.

And here, for those who will hear it, is my theodicy.