One thing that distinguishes Christian fiction from general market is the role of faith in our characters’ lives and the realistic spiritual arcs in their story.
Some know what they believe and why, and they try to live accordingly. Others were raised in Christian homes so they’ve heard the Gospel. They might call themselves Christians, but they haven’t yet moved from the second-hand faith of a child to the mature faith of an adult who has pondered what they’ve been taught and decided it really is true.
Some are the prodigal sons and daughters who have walked away, only to face situations that can help them decide to return. Others never learned about God before and are starting from indifference or even hostility to the Christian characters’ faith in Jesus.
Any of these characters can travel a spiritual arc in our stories. Some will change a little; others might make a full 180-degree turn by the story’s end. But whatever that arc might be, it needs to feel like a natural part of the flow of events to be believable.
Scenes with deep spiritual content need to feel real so they’re read, not skimmed or skipped.
So, we ask ourselves as writers what would lead a person we know in real life to change their understanding of God and themselves like our story portrays.
Of course, how that could happen depends on the time and place of the story and the personalities and relationships of our characters. It also depends on our target audience and what our publishing house is comfortable with. With so many variables, it would take a book, not a blog post, to consider more than one case.
I’m going to share the approach I take in my Early Church novels of the stand-alone Light in the Empire series. In each of these, someone who starts out knowing little to nothing about Jesus will consider the faith, weigh the risks, and make a decision. These are 180-degree arcs, but most of what I’m going to share will work for smaller changes as well.
I use the following steps for writing spiritual scenes that feel like real people in genuine conversations about God.
- Consider the dominant culture in the place and time of the story so you can frame a conflict where your nonbeliever will face a choice.
I’m writing about a place and time where this is easy. In the Roman empire shortly after AD 100, being a Christian was illegal. Believers could be arrested, tried, and killed if they didn’t renounce their faith and sacrifice to the Roman gods. But the provincial governor decided whether he would pursue Christians or ignore them. With each change of governor, the danger of following Jesus could change.
The main characters who are pagans take part in rituals that honor the Roman gods, but they don’t always believe in those gods. They might have heard of Christians, but they wouldn’t know what Christians actually believed. They might have heard Christians were at best undesirables and at worst a threat to the empire because they refused to take part in the rites of the state religion that were supposed to earn the gods’ favor toward Rome.
But if you’re writing a contemporary story set on a college campus or in a large liberal city, there will also be people who don’t know what Christians actually believe. Attitudes might be set by those around them who have low opinions of Christians and are happy to share what they think. Your nonbeliever could be condescending, indifferent, or hostile toward Christians―not so different from ancient Romans.
For a story set in a small Southern US town, the dominant culture could be Christian, so the nonbeliever is the counterculture character who might start out feeling defensive or hostile.
- Choose some points of conflict resulting from the nonbeliever’s view of the world and of Christians.
This is easy for several of my stories. Since the job of policing the Roman Empire fell to its military, several of my leading men have been from the noble orders (senatorial and equestrian) who helped rule the Empire. The first step in a political career was being a military tribune, an officer who might be tasked with enforcing the law against Christians. I’ve enjoyed taking men who start as mortal enemies of the Christians and putting them in situations where they come to see the truth and become believers themselves.
- Think about the questions your nonbelieving character might have.
Our own witness to our faith isn’t just through our words. Our actions speak much louder for making a nonbeliever curious about why we’ve chosen to follow Jesus. It’s how our Christian characters react to their circumstances that will get others wondering what makes them different. Some questions will flow naturally from how our characters live their faith, not just talk about it.
- Figure out how to answer those questions in a way that your nonbeliever will understand.
Your Christian needs to explain what Jesus did and what it means to live a Christian life, but it probably won’t be a formulaic response like you may have learned in Sunday school. If you’ve ever tried to talk with a friend who isn’t a Christian, you already know that they won’t accept something you quote or read from the Bible as proof that something is true. For the nonbeliever, the Bible is only an ancient book written by men ignorant of modern understandings, not the word of God.
But there are often ways to get someone to see the truth in the words of Scripture by starting with what they’ve seen of life themselves. Understanding what sin is, why it separates us from God, and what God’s solution to our problem is―these will form the heart of the conversations. Love and forgiveness are two powerful themes the believer should display in both words and actions. I find this requires a lot of prayer, and I have a team of prayer partners whom I ask to be praying as I figure out this step for each novel.
- Spread the faith conversations over several scenes.
The quickest way to get a reader to skim instead of read is to turn what should be a give-and-take conversation into a sermon-like monologue. One good way to avoid this is by sharing part of the information in a conversation that gets interrupted.
That interruption might be the nonbeliever saying they need time to think about what they’ve heard before going further. It might be another person or some action that halts the conversation for the moment.
Prayer will guide you in sensing when and how to break the conversation into attention-holding chunks.
So, how does this work in practice?
It’s different in every one of my novels because the personalities and relationships are different. Sometimes the believer is a woman, sometimes a man. They might be sharing with a friend, a relative, or the person they love but can’t marry because they don’t share their faith.
Perhaps some examples from my novels would be helpful. In Hope Unchained, a man who killed to live was led to faith by conversations with a female friend. He became curious about her faith because of the kindness she showed her enemy. In Hope’s Reward, he shares first with a crippled youth and later with the woman he loves. Honor Bound has conversations between male friends. In Blind Ambition, an officer who often arrested and killed Christians is reached through the way a Christian family treats their wounded enemy and a conversation with a man waiting to be executed for his faith.
All these arcs use several conversations to bring the nonbeliever to the point of faith. How that’s done can be readily adapted to other stories.
Sometimes readers tell me how one of the books encouraged their faith. One young man let me know how the books helped him decide to believe and be baptized. As a Christian author, I can’t imagine any greater reward. May we all know the joy of sharing the faith through the spiritual arcs in our novels!
Such an encouraging post. I will share this one.
You do an excellent job in your books and I love the context and the naturalness of most of the conversations or the non-natural because they haven’t yet learned how to be natural.
Coming from the author who writes such great spiritual moments into your own Grace series, that’s a great compliment. I love how you handle the deep conversations in your contemporary stories.
One of the ways I try to keep authenticity is by basing the spiritual content on something I’ve experienced. I still have to be careful because people’s thoughts (or at least mine) aren’t always logical and people wonder, ‘How did you get there from here?’
But if I remember how I felt, what I said, and thought then try to make sure it follows logically, that can really help bring authenticity and richness to the scene.
That’s a great way to do it. I do that, too, as much as I can.