I admit that I have been confused for a long time about this topic, though when I first started out, I thought I knew everything there was to know about it.
When I tried over two decades ago to write fiction for what I dimly understood to be “The” Christian market, I failed miserably. I was following some of the models I’d read–C.S. Lewis, Flannery O’Connor, G.K. Chesterton. One of the dictums for new writers is to find good models. I thought I had, and I actually believed that these writers made up the best of the Christian market. And they were good writers, and I wanted to do as they did and maybe even forge my own path. But this didn’t really happen.
Sure, a few editors liked my writing, even praised it. But none of them thought I had ideas or work that would sell in today’s church. So miserable was my failure (I did learn a few things, which did make it not an utter failure) that the advice I have to anyone aspiring to write for this (or these) markets is mainly cautionary advice. But I will also offer what I believe is a working definition of Christian fiction.
The first bit of cautionary advice is that there doesn’t seem to be the market that I imagined when I was reading C.S. Lewis. The market is something else, and it doesn’t really see itself as related to or having sprung from the writings of that thoroughly converted soul. The trouble may lie in the fact that he wrote his most influential books (aside from the Narnia stories) either before or during World War II. Today’s American Christian market seems far away from that old world. This became clear to me as I listened to a young editor from a major Christian publisher talk about what she saw as the origins of the market she was working to support.
So my credentials for these comments may seem slight, though I have published two books of fiction–a novel, and a collection of short stories. The publishers of both works have posted them on Amazon as “Christian Fiction.” The publisher of my novel has even tried to suggest that my novel is suspenseful (it’s actually more satire than suspense) and an example of Conspiracy Theory writing. But these attempts at categorization say less about my books and more about the publisher’s understanding of the market and their desire to fit my book in with an existing subheading in the Christian Market.
Yes, conspiracy theories and suspense are important aspects of today’s Christian market, both tied to themes of eschatology, to prophecies of the end time. There’s also Amish romance, contemporary romance, cozy mysteries, and action adventure writing.
This particular fiction market, consisting mainly of these sub-headings for fiction, is joined to a major industry of self-help books on Christian living, and these are mainly for suburban house wives, mainly because the publishers’ marketing departments have told them that about 90% of their customers are women. (It is easy to see why my early attempts of two decades ago to write science fiction in the vein of Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet would have been the wrong direction to take.)
Today, I don’t have a word to write in any of these subheadings or for the larger self-help industry. I’ve told myself that instead of writing for a market, I write for readers. I’m looking for thoughtful Christian readers. This doesn’t generally sit well with editors or agents when I talk to them at conferences. They mostly simply ask, “Who might that be?”
With so much social media filling the lives of everyone, I’m not sure but that the term thoughtful reader is now an anachronism.
The above summary is not meant to simplify things. There isn’t really just one market, as many would say. But for writers, there is a conglomerate of Christian editors and agents out there who teach at writers conferences and represent a small publishing industry that could be called “Christian,” or Evangelical. And most of it, most of the money and promotion, is put into the nonfiction being published–self-help or Christian living books.
Even so, I would like to offer an attempt to explain what I think is a central feature of what I think of as successful Christian fiction–for anyone still interested in being a “thoughtful reader.” And as I think about it now, this feature would mean the rejection of my earliest attempts to write it. The feature is present in Lewis’s writing where it wasn’t in my writing. His attempt was to place myth or other language of myth in his stories that we could easily enough recognize as Christian cosmology, and I never did that. I don’t know how any of my attempts at science fiction could be Christian in the sense that I loved in reading the Peralandra Trilogy.
And then there was Flannery O’Connor. Most of the writers I meet at the current day writers conferences where we learn to write self-help books and books on Christian living have never heard of her, or they think she was a male, or they have some vague sense that she once existed. They won’t have read her.
But her work looks for grace in the hardest of places–as she put it, a moment of grace in territory held by the devil. Her stories are meant to move us toward this, toward moments of grace.
There is something that is deeply mysterious here, but I would say that both of these writers, Lewis and O’Connor, are working with the presence of God in some way in their fiction. They are not working so much with a dogma or a stated set of doctrines, but with a mysterious understanding of a presence, and this makes them Christian.
I know there is a place for the other, the contemporary market, but this has never interested me as much as trying to understand how God may actually work in the universe.
It seems lowdown to mention it here, but my short story collection, Subtle Man Loses His Day Job and Other Stories, which just came out from Wipf & Stock, is perhaps an example of me trying to follow this pattern in fiction. For me, the best fiction is character driven. My stories consist mostly of a collection of interrelated stories of very ordinary people who have intimations of something better for their lives. How they interpret that intimation and where they go with it is up to them. The opening story concerns a narrator who is a lapsed Christian, and when a Christian walks into his bar, he is offended. He is offended by the Gospel. The other stories go in other directions, but there are images that suggest the love of God or the suffering of God and of people. These are stories thrown out to be read by everyone, not just Christian husbands and wives trying to make better marriages (not that there is anything wrong with that). But I am hoping to write in such a way that the presence of something Other, someone beyond, comes through.
The last story ends with a send up of the tense questioning at the end of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Only other readers might see this, and see that the main character of my story has discovered that faith is, if not a way of certainty, then at least a way of knowing.
Interesting timing on your post Tom! I’m doing some genealogy research, and I’m considering doing a fictional memoir, similar to Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It.” A solid faith runs through many, including 4 pastors in 2 generations suggests the market of Christian fiction, but after considering the depths of depravity I’ve discovered, to halfway describe the darkness, even if not graphically would exclude it from the “Christian fiction market.” I’ve found general market fiction has a lot of room for spiritual issues, like ARRTI. Are you aware of Patrick Craig’s Literary Fiction group? Interested? He and Murray Pura did a fine WW 2 novel, On the Far Ringing Plains, that transcends “Christian fiction,” to its credit.
Tom, I so appreciate what you wrote. I, too, feel torn between labels in my fiction writing. In the long run, I am writing, I hope, from a Christian world view for readers who may, or may not, be Christian. In fact, I feel comfortable connecting to a secular audience, too. I’m just trying to tell a story, in my unique way, that will get readers to consider their lives and, perhaps, look to God for guidance.