Christ in our Writing

Today’s Blog is Guest-written by Kate C. Weise. To read this month’s series from the beginning, click here.

When I tell people I write, I get one response:

*crickets chirping*

Which I think is very strange. After all, we live in a world saturated with story. Turn on the TV. Story, story, story (yes, even commercial breaks use Aristotle’s 3-part story structure). Humans love stories. We all tell them. We all experience them. And we all need them.

Ask yourself: what would my life be without story?

I’ll tell you: Nothing.

You’re a character in one of the greatest stories ever told in a crazy imaginative world. And God is telling this story for the heck of it.

Let me tell you about the world you live in. In this world, people fly to the moon, stars shoot across the sky, snakes wriggle out of their skins, and babies live inside other people until they pop out, fully formed. It’s a crazy world.

 As a writer, I take my cues from that world. The one God made.

It’s a world where children are raped. Cancer rages. Affairs happen. People are perverted and nasty and wretched. People are imaginative and generous and loving. My stories live in that reality. Sometimes there are no happy endings. Sometimes sin cuts deep and hard. Sometimes one tiny act of love changes the course of the plot.

As a writer, I believe humans want stories about people like us. People looking for hope. People in need of redemption. People searching for the meaning behind the madness of day-to-day existence.  When I write, I examine human experience and I think about the Big Picture.

In the Big Picture, the bad guy has been defeated (no nihilism in my stories). Humans are waiting for the good guy to fix all the problems (no delusional happy-all-the-time stories).

As a Christian writer who knows the end, I want to write stories that overflow with longing for a place we haven’t been. I hope you hear hints of hope in the plot and echoes of an ethereal music that sounds familiar.

Because I believe the way of grace and love is the smarter way to live, that belief comes through in my writing. I almost never deal with explicit Christian themes. Emily Dickinson famously said: “tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” She understood that fiction communicates through subtlety and the imagination; it touches the innermost parts of the human soul.

And I find this amazing: when God speaks to man, he does so in story form. He sent The Word (Christ) to live a story that would (finally!) illuminate the previous Biblical Narrative.

Face the facts: the Old Testament is full of strange stories. Stories about superheroes, villains, giants, sorcerers, good kings, bad kings, true love, adultery, treason, rebellion, imprisonment, rescue, and escape. These stories flesh out the skeletal propositional truths given in other parts of scripture. They give legs and arms and feet to the descriptions about God and the commands he’s given.

As a writer I am called to write stories (not sermons) and to write them well. I face more opposition from within evangelical Christianity than from colleagues in the writing world. Christians ask: “Where is Jesus in your story?” and “What about sharing the gospel?”

To them I say this: writing the best stories I can fulfills my calling as a writer and brings glory to God.

Someone once asked Flannery O’Connor why she wrote stories. She said: “Because I’m good at it.” O’Connor went on to publish brilliantly Christian short stories that were widely read by a non-Christian audience. Stories like the one you’re living in: bad guys versus good guys and the hope of redemption in the end.

 To read the next blog in the series, Christ in our Coffee Shops, click here.

Kate C. Weise is working on her M.F.A. in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She writes short creative nonfiction and novel-length fiction for middle grade children and young adults. She lives with her husband in Houston, Texas.