Hello my
dear friends and readers!
Today I’m
going to take to trying coming back from my hiatus due to my surgeries. And I’m going to by following a line of
thought which caught my eye today when I read an article online about telling
stories from the Judeo-Christian point of view.
I’ll link the article at the end and you might well want to go ahead and
look at it before continuing. Now, don’t
get me wrong with my werewolf story, I am a Christian and it was very shortly
after I wrote that story that I came to realize that I needed to change the way
I write, but how? The author of the opinion
piece in BreakPoint kind of nailed it
and validated what I really want to do.
He mentions
how people think that C.S. Lewis’ Narnia stories were meant to push the
Christian message, they weren’t. The
stories simply flowed out of him from the viewpoint he held dear. Yet, it is amazing, isn’t it, that he would
use fantasy and an alternate world with witchcraft and magic involved to
impress the wonderful Christian narrative of Christ’s sacrifice upon readers
for generations. And those stories are
still well received and beloved by millions of people today.
The same
could be said for J.K. Rawlings, whether she likes it or not. Ms. Rawlings is a student of the classics,
which means she was steeped in narratives which in some way or another
celebrated the mainstream Christian theme.
So when she wrote what flowed out was a series of books in the fantasy
genre which held Christian themes throughout however little she may admit it. That’s one of the things I often pointed out
to Christians and conservatives who
liked to bash her books online for years.
The fact is they hold both Christian themes and conservative ones as
well.
And therein lays
the key for us. Take C.S. Lewis; look at
how he weaves the Judeo-Christian worldview through his story telling. He doesn’t sermonize like many do. He isn’t in your face with his Christianity,
though his views were well known by the world of the time because of some of
his other works, the Christian apologetics where he did sermonize. He just tells a story which came into his
fertile imagination and told said story well.
But how do
we do this? The first step should be
obvious. The best writers of all time all
immerse themselves in their core worldviews and tell their stories from those
views without the in-your-face sermonizing.
They let their hearts tell their stories and concentrate on telling
those stories well.
And don’t
worry too much about how you’ll market those stories. The internet is a wonderful way to get around
the usual gatekeepers, some of whom do have an agenda or a slightly warped idea
of what people want. One still has to
invest some money and effort into the promotional side of marketing, but we’re
already seeing unbelievable success stories from folks who couldn’t get past
the traditional gatekeepers in publishing but are successful because once folks
saw the quality of their stories they caught on.
