Category Archives: Writing

And So I Begin. Again.

It’s been four months since I turned in the galleys for The Enclave and really it is time to get cracking on The Next Book. Except… I woke up Monday morning realizing I was feeling very resistant to working on it. Was it because things haven’t been going as well as I’d like with Enclave’s release? Was it because my life has been so chaotic and full of distractions that I’ve been unable to really buckle down? Or is it because I’m not really supposed to be doing that book?

My plan for The Other Side of the Sky was to analogize Revelation’s seven churches in an action adventure story with an underground civilization, a floating city on the surface with shafts of light that reached into the darkness through a series of shafts and pulled people up to the planet’s barren surface, often to their deaths.There were terrorists and aliens, governmental repression and the rescue of political prisoners… I had secret identities, secret pasts, at least three viewpoint characters and possibly more and four distinct people-groups. To say nothing of the whole underground civilization that I wanted to construct.

It was beginning to seem way too complicated for the length I know Bethany House wants. And it would take much longer to write than they want, too. If I started a different book, I could do so with the intention of keeping it within the bounds of what everyone seems to want. I might even be able to write it in the time span they want me to write in.

To keep it short I would have to minimize the points of view. One would be best if I truly want brevity, but two could work. I would also have to keep a tight rein on the story’s complexity, but this is helped if you give yourself only one or two POV’s to work with. (Although The Light of Eidon had only two viewpoints and it was still long…)

Still, if I set the new story in our present world, I wouldn’t have to develop — and describe/explain — an alien world/culture, which also helps keep word count and time expenditure down… Not to say there wouldn’t be complexity and weird things… I know that because I spent a year trying to write short stories and the shortest I came up with was about 7000 words (which is a very LOOOONG short story). Complexity is something I have to fight off, not search for. Ditto weird twists.

But what would this new story be about? Hmm… could I use one of those short stories I’d started that had gotten out of hand?

I was pulling books off the shelf Monday and thought I’d get rid of Mary O’Hara’s Novel in the Making. Instead I cracked it open at random and started to read and she said…

“Two of the important decisions had now been made. The locale and the point of view… Next I had to decide what my new book would be about. That is what they ask you, “What’s it about? What is the subject?”

The Flicka books had been about horses.

Anyone might choose such a subject as horses to write about just because horses are beautiful; because they are universally beloved. But aside from liking them you have to know a great deal about them. You have to have what I called “a body of thought” about them.

This body of thought is likely to be the result of years of study or closer observation. Worthwhile thoughts do not originate in a typewriter or pour off the point of a pen, or spring into being just because someone… has the ambition to be a writer. They are accumulated during years of living, thinking, reflecting and, often, taking notes.

Unless an author happens to have had vastly wide and differentiated experiences, or is a walking encyclopedia of knowledge, there are not going to be many fields in which he has a body of thought ready and waiting. So we find young mothers writing about children; psychiatrists about mental cases; lawyers, stories with a legal slant, etc.

I had had a sufficient body of thought about horses to write about them successfully. Did I have it about anything else? Yes, I thought I did. About religion…”

That leapt last phrase off the page at me. Well, yeah, I sure have a body of thought about religion. Also faith, and I do delineate between the two. In fact, all of my books to date have been about the conflict between religion and faith.

Or maybe I should say, between religion and Christianity. Between slavery and freedom, tyranny and just, righteous authority.

The bondage of sin, legalism and cosmic thinking vs the freedom of grace.

Yeah, those elements could be there. That’s still not really a story, but it got the ball rolling…

Christian Worldview in my Fiction

In the process of moving to WordPress and trying to figure out how everything works, I’ve not only visited Amazon, I’ve also been making brief forays out to read other peoples’ blogs, a practice I gave up after the chaos of trying to get Return of the Guardian-King written, and maintained throughout the chaos of writing The Enclave.

When Becky Miller commented here last week, she drew me over to her blog, A Christian Worldview of Fiction where she was once again discussing… well, a Christian worldview of fiction. Given the title of her blog, this is hardly surprising, nor the first time she has posted on this subject. But while I’ve read her past posts with interest, and thought I  should have something to say on the matter, I could never seem to put my thoughts on the subject into any kind of coherent discourse.

This time however, she revealed that the whole discussion of a Christian worldview began when World magazine ran a contest asking for stories from a Christian worldview and the email group she was on at the time began discussing what exactly the editors meant by “a Christian worldview.” A discussion, she said,  that was essentially an exploration of “how our Christianity plays out in our fiction.”

And, upon reading that phrase, I suddenly found myself with something to say. I don’t know that I would want to define what specific qualities might be included in a book for it to be considered written from a Christian worldview, but I do know how my Christianity plays out in my fiction.

Anyone who does much reading at all about how to write will soon encounter the oft-given advice to write what you know, write what you care deeply about, what you enjoy, and what you struggle with. Don’t be afraid to be honest in your portrayals, to lay out what you know and believe whether you think readers will like it or not.

So what I know, what I care deeply about, what I enjoy and struggle with is my Christianity. God, the truths of God’s word, the application of it. The failure in it. The recovery and continuing onward. My relationship with Him; with His Son… Those are what I write about.

Growing up as an unbeliever I always had the idea that going to church was about going to some special building, singing special songs, listening to someone in a robe drone on about things that had no relevance, and following a bunch of rules. There was never a personal relationship with God involved. There were rules to follow (which I’m discovering has been a much greater part of my life than I ever imagined, even as an unbeliever). People felt good about themselves, felt they were pleasing to God when they followed the rules. In fact, if you followed the rules you went to heaven; if you didn’t, you went to hell.

I didn’t buy it. I remember as a teenager commenting in a discussion about religion that no one was perfect. I didn’t see how anyone could be bad enough to deserve eternal hell, but I also didn’t see how anyone could be good enough to go to heaven. So I opted for reincarnation.  The perfect solution. (Well, I was only 15 and this is what my mother had come to believe at the time.) 

When I actually believed in Christ and began to learn what the Bible had to say and what the Christian way of life was really all about,  it was so rich, so alive, so full that I was bursting with enthusiasm to show the world what it really was, not the stale, dead thing I’d thought. I was so jazzed. It was  cooler than the coolest transformation to hero story you could come up with. And still is.

That desire’s never really changed. I want to depict in my fiction the wonderful ways of God, His character, His amazing plan, the incredible relationship we can have with Him, how it all makes sense now, when previously it really didn’t. How much more marvelous it is than the dreary unending toil of being reborn again and again as in each lifetime you struggle to make yourself better and better until finally you can be absorbed into some impersonal cosmic consciousness!  Or something. I’m not sure I ever get beyond the endless rebirths when I was 15.

 We live in a time when it’s not “cool” to act like you have answers. Postmodernism says there aren’t any answers. Or that each person’s answers are specific to them and no one dare intimate there might be a set of universal truths that apply to everyone. But I feel like I do have answers. So many of the most important, most disturbing questions I’d had in my 21 years as an unbeliever have been answered in God’s word. So many of the conundrums other people shake their heads over, are answered in the pages of Scripture. If only they could see it.

The Bible isn’t a bunch of contradictions or moldy myths, set down for us to pick and choose from like the offerings in a cafeteria. It’s an amazingly coherent document that’s also alive. It’s real. And so is the God who wrote it. And anyone who really wants to know Him and is willing to put in the time to seek for Him can know Him.

That’s what drives me to write. That and the fact that God’s called me to do it and put the burning for that task inside me.