Compelling Fiction You’ll Love to Read
Writing Christian Fiction
Writing Christian fiction is different from being a Christian writer writing fiction. Writing compelling fiction is about story, about entertaining the reader, and yet about much more. Many Christian fiction writers write what I would classify as pseudo-Christian fiction, fiction with values of decency, but not necessarily with a Christian takeaway, because their desire is to appeal to a crossover market. As I have commented in other blog posts I have had a Christian writer tell me that a story should not have a message. But a story without a takeaway robs the reader.
Writing Compelling Fiction Informed by Biblical Truth
In another blog post, quite some time back, I mentioned a story of mine being critiqued by the members of the writer’s group I was a part of and being told it was a quaint story, but there was no takeaway, i.e. not worth reading. I had to rewrite the story to give it value. My stories focus on being engaging stories with underlying and/or somewhat overt messaging, but messaging that is natural to the story, not contrived or superimposed. They are in one way or another grounded in biblical truth. Rather than simply being written from a Christian worldview, they are written from a biblical worldview.
A biblical worldview does not gloss over the realities and ugly details of our sin-sick world, because the Bible does not gloss over such things: David and Bathsheba, Samson and Delilah, Judah and his daughter-in-law, and on and on. A biblical worldview is simply the foundation on which a story is built, as opposed to a secular godless worldview. Evil is evil and good is good. Wrong is wrong and right is right. However characters struggles with understanding and living out those realities is itself still a reality, even as it is with this writer and each reader.
Some of my stories are moral tales; some are allegorical while others simply integrate symbolism; and then there are those that illustrate some major biblical truth, such as: Choices have consequences, Baruch—God figure—can be trusted to keep his word in spite of catastrophic consequences that result in the advances of evil forces (Seed of the Defiled); or a simple truth like, people’s lives have value (The Myth).
