One of the brightest joys of my life has been a 35-year career that involved teaching creative writing to Christian college and university students.

When I retired twenty years ago with an MFA from Iowa and having published two novels and two books of short stories with a small literary publisher, I felt an interesting next step would be to offer freelance editing of writers’ manuscripts. I have a standing ad in Poets and Writers magazine in New York, and receive letters from writers across the US and Canada asking me to edit their fiction and nonfiction manuscripts.

I received a letter recently from a writer who told me she’s a Christian, is writing her first novel, and wanted to know how I “convey a Christian message” in my fiction.

Her request is a serious one. How do I approach my writing as a Christian? Does my faith shape my writing? If so, how? And should I be concerned about conveying a Christian “message” in my fiction?  The answer I gave the letter writer is the thrust of what follows here.

I believe it’s important at the outset to recognize that how a writer works out his or her vocation as a Christian will vary from writer to writer. J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novels are different from those by C.S. Lewis. Marilynne Robinson’s novels are different from Anne Lamott’s. Wendell Berry’s fiction bears little resemblance to Rudy Wiebe’s. Yet all these writers are Christians. How their faith informs their fiction in both content and style is an issue writers work out in the sanctity of their writing room.

I want to state a principle at the outset which stems from my Reformed worldview and which is foundational to my writing: that is to affirm that fiction is a part of God’s good creation, and that writing novels is therefore an honorable vocation for a Christian.

Fiction does not belong to some enemy terrain that we enter warily and need to safeguard by making sure it conveys a Christian “message.” About this, film producer Samuel Goldwyn is reputed to have said, sardonically, “If you’ve got a message, send a telegram.”

A story is not a sermon. I speak quite often at Christian writing conferences, and a piece of advice I frequently offer there is that a sermon is invariably made better by telling stories, but a story is never made better when it sermonizes.

Using fiction as a pulpit, for one thing, often leads to wooden, stilted characters. Philip Yancey, a widely loved and respected Christian writer, has said, “Sometimes when I read Christian fiction, I have a suspicion that characters have been strangely lobotomized. It’s as if an invasion of body snatchers has sucked out the humanity I know and replaced it with a sterilized imitation.” Ouch.

The Christian market tends to have a very restrictive definition of what constitutes Christian fiction— too restrictive, I believe, for how good fiction works. As a result, I don’t visit Christian bookstores to look for a novel anymore, because when I step into one and see shelves of Amish romances and dystopian novels about the Rapture I get the heebie-jeebies, and feel an irresistible urge to head outside for fresh air. 

I believe that how novelists view the world will be revealed, eventually, inevitably, in their fiction; if they have a significant body of work, their worldview will show. It often determines the very subject they choose to write about in the first place, and also what their writing conveys about the subject. So, if I’ve developed a Christian worldview, it will also, I believe, come to light in my fiction—subtly, and winsomely, I hope, rather than through a preachy “message.”

I want to give writers the freedom to work as they’re inclined, so there’s fiction we describe either as “character-driven” or “plot-driven,” but some novels appear more to me as “theme-driven,” if I can put it that way—think of novels like Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, say, or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Both are brilliant enough writers to avoid becoming didactic, but personally, I never start a story or a novel with a theme I want to convey. Instead, I begin with character, with incident, with an image—anything that I think will make an interesting story, and what happens often, when I’m well into the story or novel, is that I discover what it’s “about” as I’m writing it.

It’s as Flannery O’Connor said once in a letter: “I must tell you how I work. . .I have to write to discover what I am doing. I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say.” In short, any meaning or theme contained in the story has to arise organically, I believe, from the story’s materials, rather than be imposed on the story from outside. At least, that’s how it works for me.

When I finished writing my first book, a book of short stories, I made a decision to try to place the manuscript with a publisher in the general rather than the Christian market. I wanted to be published despite being a Christian. I wanted my fiction to be read by a wider audience than just Christian readers, trusting that my fiction would be read by a Christian audience as well.

I’m fortunate to have reached both audiences. It will be clear to any reader that I write as a Christian, and that Christian themes and images pervade my fiction. Heron River, my last novel, received a number of reviews online, in newspapers, and in journals; one online reviewer, who wrote as positive a review as any writer would want, didn’t care for the “religious overtones” in the novel, but she’s been the only one.

Thinking about my letter writer now, I’m curious to see how her novel will turn out when it’s published.

If it’s published. Anne Lamott offers good advice on this in her book Bird by Bird: “I try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be, but writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. The actual act of writing turns out to be the best part.”

My wish for my letter writer is that she will be published. What I wish for her even more strongly is that she experiences the joy of that “best part.