Faith in Words?

My journey from selling to storytelling…

In preparation for a conference in September, I’m putting together some thoughts on the overlap of faith and writing. I’m doing this because I don’t think that having faith and writing well are mutually exclusive, even though there are several million published words that might lead you to think otherwise. The first task, in order to get towards the how-to of writing from a faith-perspective, is to jettison a few of the how-not-to’s. Why does faith-based writing so often go so badly wrong?

1. Because we mistake an art-form for a sales pitch. Writing is a craft; a beautiful, nuanced, fragile process that mines new possibilities from the raw material of language. Since language is the most fundamental human gift — a big part of what makes us human — writing is a big part of our lives. Selling, by contrast, is a more brutal and less enlightening process. It is the ‘trick’ of getting you to pay for what I have; persuading you that your life will be more complete when my product sits in the middle of it. Selling is conditional; forced; slightly false. All too often it has a lie at its heart. We write ‘you need this’ when what we mean is ‘I need you to buy this’. Unless people of faith can liberate their writing from the need to sell their system, we won’t be reading many high-quality faith-based texts anytime soon.
2. Because we mistake propositions for truth. People of faith tend to obsess over ‘truth’, much as journalists pride themselves on their ability to report ‘facts’, even though they know that all their words are tentative; mediated; half-blind stabs at possibility. We worry too much that everything we write must be ‘true’ or in some way point to ‘the truth’. The best writing doesn’t deal with what is true, but with what is real, and what is real is often more fruitfully arrived at through judicious exercises in untruth. We call these exercises storytelling. Stories — fictions and fantasies; dreams and delirium — enable us to make sense of what is real by setting aside, for a moment, the question of what is true. This is perhaps why people of faith struggle, in particular, to write fiction. We are afraid of the things we might say; of the things our characters might do, if we let the story run its course. This fear paralyses us, and robs us of the deeper truths that stories have to offer us. The world’s greatest truths have always been arrived at through the untruths of our stories. There was no Good Samaritan. The Prodigal Son isn’t ‘true’. Like Hamlet and Oliver Twist, though, there are truths in our lives we wouldn’t have without these untrue guides.
3. Because we mistake belief for experience. Your beliefs — your doctrines and dogmas — no matter how strongly you hold to them, are not actually part of your life. They are abstractions; theoretical constructs that may or may not explain anything about the water you swim in. They are like the washing instructions on your new cashmere sweater: useful information, well worth being aware of, but nothing like the feel of actually wearing it. If you want someone to appreciate your slightly guilty pleasure every time you put the sweater on; its touch on your skin; the way it makes you feel about yourself, don’t for goodness sake recite the washing rules to them. Describe for them, rather, your experience. If faith is useful to you; if it has a place in your life; if it has done you good, tell us how. Let us climb inside your skin and feel what you feel. Ditch the theory. Tell your story. Writing is an exercise in connection amongst human beings. There is no greater inspiration for it than an honest, authentic exploration of human experience.

The flip-side of the struggle people of faith have in writing well is the passion with which people who do not have faith want to exclude them. Because we have fallen foul so often of these traps, we are consigned to the literary dust-bin. You can write about anything. Except your faith. All faith-based writing, in this negative view, is a form of vanity publishing: we write to make ourselves feel good about ourselves. This is a false assessment. Faith has been a shaping influence on human culture since day one. It continues to animate the desires and decisions of the majority of our race. It can be explored in words that are subtle and intriguing; nimble; lucid.