What I Learned about Writing Christian Fiction (Plus The White Door TEASER!)

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What I’ve Learned about Writing Christian Fiction

Writing The White Door has taught me so much as a writer (scroll down for a teaser). Prior to this, I had focused my efforts on non-fiction and poetry. But as a dad, I was always telling stories to my kids (6, 9, and almost 11). I was also reading them fiction, especially fantasy, but plenty of classic literature as well. Let me spell out one thing I’ve learned about writing Christian fiction—something I find especially fascinating: a Christian fiction writer must balance a portrayal of two things: what the world is and what the world should be.

This seems obvious when you think about it. Christians see brokenness in the world around them because of sin and its vile and corrupting influences. That’s the world as it is. It’s full of people who break the Ten Commandments in the most creative ways—not just occasionally but every second by second. And yet Christians also believe there is a way the world should be—a world in beautiful and God-honoring submission to the self-giving, tripersonal Lord. Good Christian fiction finds new and insightful ways of balancing the portrayal of these realities.

But it gets complicated. And one little question reveals why. How much of the world as it is should we portray? This came up when a few very careful and kind early readers of The White Door showed concern about certain characters taking the Lord’s name in vain (violating the 3rd commandment). Is it wrong to portray something like this? What about all the other violations of the Ten Commandments: idolatry, breaking the sabbath, dishonoring father and mother, murder, adultery, theft, lying, covetousness? Can we portray those in a fictional story?

Of course, if our answer is that we can’t portray any violations of the Ten Commandments, our stories would end up . . . well, terrible. To illustrate, let me tell you the worst fictional short story in the history of literature.

Once upon a time, there was a man named Tom. Tom walked past a statue that was in front of a church. He went into the church, and his father was there. His father said something bad to Tom. It made Tom feel a certain way. Tom then thought something bad. Then Tom said something bad. His father said something bad again, and then Tom did something bad.

What about the details? Well, if the statue is a statue of Jesus Christ, then many protestants would consider that a second commandment violation. If it’s Sunday, and Tom was going to church to discuss something work-related, that’s a fourth commandment violation. If Tom said something disrespectful to his father, that’s a fifth commandment violation. If Tom’s father was jealous of something in Tom’s life, that’s a tenth commandment violation. Do you see where I’m going? The details we add to a story inevitably portray the sin we find in the world all around us.

Certainly, there’s the question of propriety. How much sinful detail is it appropriate to include? After all, we don’t want to scar the conscience of readers or tempt them to sin. There’s a difference, for instance, between describing a character as someone who “curses like a sailor” and dropping ten f-bombs in that character’s dialogue. But in between those two options is a range of choices that authors make.

Yet, for Christian writers, portraying the world as it is should never eclipse or overshadow portraying the world as it should be. In The White Door, I put more emphasis on what the redeemed life looks like—how people think, speak, and act toward one another. That was intentional. I want readers to focus on the beauty and mystery of redemption, not on the darkness and depravity of fallenness. The latter is often the sole focus of great works of literature in the secular sphere.

I’ve learned that, in the end, how readers respond to a writer’s decisions in this game of portrayal-balance is a matter of conscience. And a sensitive conscience is a gift from God. As Christians write fiction and attempt to balance what is with what should be, they should not be offended by those who feel that the is of the storytelling discomforts them. For such readers, the wise and godly choice may simply be to stop reading.

Reading fiction, just as studying oil painting or music or any of the arts, is an exercise in both seeing the world as it is and measuring our response to it. Part of the job of the Christian fiction writer is marking a narrative pathway that shows in concrete form what lostness looks, sounds, tastes, smells, and feels like. And yet portraying the same for the opposite state (being found) is all the more challenging because we may have fewer concrete examples at our disposal. I can rattle off a hundred lies I’ve been told over the years. But giving examples of truth boldly spoken into my life? That would be a shorter list.

As you continue to read (or perhaps even write) fiction, keep in mind this dynamic—the is versus the should be. And follow your conscience when it comes to the details.

Keep reading to see how I address this dynamic in a teaser excerpt from The White Door!

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The White Door Teaser Excerpt

Before Seth Logan died, he knew he would have to choose between the two marbles he carried in his right pocket: one of transparent blue glass and the other woven throughout with smoke-curl wisps of orange and red—a fire in a teardrop. One was a world you could see through; the other, a world you must see around.

Our part in Seth's story begins with a man named Cleft Warrington.

***

Cleft didn’t hear the tires crushing gravel in the driveway, or the whining steps outside the bedroom door, or the padding of feet on the hallway carpet. He hadn’t heard anything. It was the lights—the pulsing red lights punching the walls in the hallway next to his bedroom, splashing the eggshell white with mocking red.

A boy stood in front of him asking for his name, but Cleft could utter only one word. And so he said it over and over again, muttering like a madman: “You, you, you, you.”

“What’s he doing?” the boy asked. A woman in the corner crouched over a body. She let the boy's question hang in the room like the stone-still pull cords of the overhead fan. A moth pinged itself against the tired gold dome of the light, trying to get inside something beautiful that only had the power to kill it.

The boy’s Adam’s apple rose and fell with labored swallows. He bunched his pale fingers into a fist and then released them. Cleft stared at the boy’s hand, watching it expand and contract, expand and contract, like a heart. He knew the boy was anxious. And on any other occasion, he would have been the first to console and reassure, following his pastoral instincts. But not now. This was his time. And so he sat like a sculpture in the corner of the room, white-knuckled, clutching his knees and sputtering his almost voiceless “you.”

“He’s just saying ‘you.’ Should I ask him anything else?”

“No,” said the woman. Another paramedic peeked into the doorway and met eyes with her.

“Anything, Janet?”

She shook her head. “Bring the gurney up. Let’s get her downstairs. I’m going to stay up here with Ben for a minute.” Janet was focused and calculating. But weariness weighed down the corners of her eyes as she pieced together the next steps. The last thing she felt like doing was making this a training session for Ben. But she stood and turned her body towards him, her nostrils flaring as she settled into the situation.

“Ben, ask him for his name again. If he can’t say it, then find a piece of paper and a pen, and see if he can write it down.”

Ben knelt a few feet from Cleft and listened again. With his right hand, he was still bunching up his fingers and releasing them—a nervous reaction that began in pre-school whenever he did something wrong in the presence of strangers. Cleft’s eyes only left Ben’s hand when the medics went to lift the body.

“One, two, three”—then a chorus of grunts as they heaved the woman up onto the gurney. Her frame was limp but heavy, as if her bones were full of lead. The metal gurney squeaked at the joints as she settled into place, leathery and lifeless, her lips sealed like an envelope.

Cleft stared at her motionless chest—that still and steady horizon of her sternum no longer rising and falling with the tides of moments. Time was gone with her. But Cleft still stared, wishing beyond hope to see her heart chamber expand and contract once more, to move like the boy's hand, to pump with vitality, lifting and settling with the gift of life. But there was only stillness. Halt. Absence. The woman he had loved for forty-five years was not there. She was somewhere else—in another place. Where? That was all he wanted to know in the moment—not in his head (he had an answer for that) but in his heart. Where did she go? He asked the question despite all he knew and believed. This was the deepest test of his resolute faith, staring up at him like a black abyss, daring him to jump. It would be so easy. A baby's breath could push him over the edge.

The moth rested on the face of the ceiling light now, its thread-thin arms and legs praying for entrance but sentenced by the hot glass to remain an outsider. At best, it could only find a way in and then die in the presence of a false sun, a dead god. There its papery frame would lie with the others: a testament to deception.

Cleft looked at the metal frame of the gurney. It was painted bright yellow, but some of the paint was chipping off, revealing the cold gray steel underneath. Yellow, he thought. She hated yellow . . . except forsythia.

His eyes, like weary travelers on a mountainside, climbed down her body—from her chest, to her stomach, to her legs, and then to her feet: her tan socks. That's where his gaze rested. The socks were thin and nearly worn through on the heels, a quarter-sized hole calling his attention to her left foot. A nail had been sticking up in the oak threshold of their front door, and he’d hammered it back in two days ago, after his wife had gotten her sock caught on it when letting the dog back inside. She liked to wear the same pair of socks for a few days. “My feet need to get used to the fabric,” she would say. But she hadn’t said that for a long time, not since the Alzheimer's had advanced.

A lump lodged in Cleft's throat. He wanted to take the sock from her foot now. That hole in the heel—it was precious, a mark of what's missing, a portrait of his life at this very moment. He knew that as soon as they left the room with her, he would regret not taking it. He would long for that sock, like a black and white picture from another era. But embarrassment froze him. Regret ached beneath the lump in his throat. He couldn't bring himself to move.

“Sir?” Ben asked again, snapping Cleft out of his reverie. No response. “Sir, who’s ‘you’? Are you talking about your wife?”

“Ben—the name. We just need the name right now,” said Janet, irritation bleeding through her voice. “Do you have a piece of paper and a pen yet?”

Ben turned back to Cleft. “Sir, my name is Ben. Can you tell me your name?”

“You, you, you, you, you, you, you,” Cleft whispered as he looked at his wife on the gurney. Forty-five years. Forty-five years of words, of stares, of touching skin and making love, of listening and looking and sleeping and waking, of her gloriously simple presence, his Jane. And now the silence reigned, a cruel king who refused to speak to any subject, bold or meek.

Cleft shifted his eyes to Ben’s contracting right hand. His head felt as if a brick were tied to the top. But he tilted it up to mirror Ben’s face, making the boy lean back in discomfort. Ben stared for a few seconds, soaking in Cleft's countenance. To him, Cleft looked like an old, tired bird: his long, straight nose; his pleading but somehow blank stare; the set of wrinkles next to each eye, leading away from the outer corners like tiny roads that disappeared in the smooth field of each freshly shaven cheek. Ben reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a chewing gum wrapper. Then he took a pen out of his other pocket and offered it to Cleft.

“Here. You can write down your name on this.”

Cleft stared at the gum wrapper and pen. Then he released his knees, letting the blood return to his knuckles and fingers, his calves and feet—a warm, rolling liquid stretching back into his extremities. Both hands were shaking like leaves on an aspen tree.

He took the pen, set the wrapper on his knee, and scribbled something before handing it back. Ben felt relieved as he received the gum wrapper. It gave him an excuse to look away from Cleft. But his relief turned to puzzlement when he saw the inscription.

Ben was about to say something to Cleft but then turned back towards Janet instead. “His name’s Cleft,” he said, slipping the wrapper back into his pocket.

“Last name?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s Warrington.” Ben didn’t tell Janet what was written on the gum wrapper. In jagged print, he could make out the words “Job 1:20.”

“He wrote that down?” She obviously doubted Ben, and her frustration was building like a storm cloud.

“No . . . I just know. He’s the pastor of the church in town. My mom goes there.”

Janet glared at Ben, then shook her head. There was the judgment. Ben was suddenly back in pre-school, clutching an empty bottle of Elmer's glue as his teacher wagged her head at him. His hands contracted again.

“Please just do what I’m asking you to do, Ben. I’m trying to train you.” Ben nodded as he walked over to the bedroom window overlooking the backyard.

And then he froze. The hair on his neck stood up, and the lump that had been lodged in Cleft's throat a moment ago now found its way to his.

“Janet?” He said her name as a child, as if asking his mother about something in the stars. Janet didn’t respond. She was busy writing on her clipboard.

“Janet.” Ben’s voice came louder and more defined.

“What, Ben?”

“Can you come here?”

She let out an audible sigh as she walked across the room, still reading something on her clipboard. At the window, she picked her head up and met Ben’s face. And then she realized he was staring not at her, but outside.

“What is that . . . that thing?” Ben asked.

Janet nudged him aside with her shoulder and looked down at the backyard. Her eyes squinted. Her head tilted. And as if a tiny wave of water were washing over her profile, her tension melted. Her furrowed brow went smooth. The exhaustion evaporated from her eyes, and the irritation disappeared from her voice. The corners of her lips even turned up. “What in the world.”

They both stood gazing, mesmerized. Just beneath the surface of the grass, in a large puddle shape, was a moving light. It was gold—the hue that paints the underbellies of clouds with the last light of the setting sun. But the gold grew brighter and whiter in some places, nearly breaking through the thin hair of the grass. And it was always moving, forming and then shifting like water, ebbing away from the tree line at the edge of Cleft’s property as if rolling back from an incline.

Neither of them said anything for several moments. They couldn't tell how long they stared. Once Janet took in a breath as if to speak, but then she let it out. Silence was all they could say. Behind them, Cleft had picked up his head. His lips offered a knowing smile.

***

A voice from downstairs fractured the moment.

“Janet! We’re all set. Need anything else?”

Janet broke from her spell-bound gaze and looked at Ben, first with hesitancy and then with resolve. “We need to deal with this right now.” She nodded at Cleft sitting on the floor.

She didn’t want to stop looking. Even as she spoke, she was pulled back to the window, like a magnet drawn to its opposite pole. Seeing those lights had pulled out and evaporated her tiredness, her looming concerns about a thousand unnamed things. At that moment, her whole life seemed to grow warmer, lighter, like a wet bathing suit set on a summertime fence, heated and dried in the grinning sun, everything cold and heavy soaked up by serenity. She wanted desperately to look again. The looking was lovely, but more important than that: it seemed to make her lovely. Everything inside her felt charged towards it. But she fought the urge—an urge more powerful than any she’d ever had—and tried to help Cleft to his feet.

“Do you . . . like them?” Cleft said as he struggled to stand. It took Janet a second to realize that Cleft knew what they were staring at, and yet he spoke as if the light under the grass was part of his landscaping. Janet and Cleft looked into each other’s eyes, she with wonder and he with patient assurance. “If you could just see under them,” he said, “from the inside, from the inside is . . . is . . .” He trailed off, lost in exhaustion.

Janet was speechless as her eyes locked on his, but her rationality slowly shook the awe away, like a cloud cutting in front of the sun. This is grief-stricken delirium, she thought to herself.

“You feeling okay to walk?” she said. Cleft reached out his left hand and grabbed onto her arm, struggling to pull himself forward. He wobbled like a buoy in the ocean. Ben went to his other side to steady him. They brought him slowly down the steps to the landing by the front door. The red lights of the ambulance were no longer flashing on the walls. Janet and Ben turned his body like an old boat, leading his drifting legs down the hallway to the dock of his kitchen table.

By the time the ambulance was out of the driveway, Cleft was calm, sitting at the table next to his best friend: a white-faced golden retriever with deep brown eyes—Roland. The dog's muzzle rested on Cleft's leg, both of them mourning the silence with silence. Cleft felt almost weightless, as if his bones were hollow. He could now do the one thing he had left to do. He just didn't know how, or for whom to do it.

Cleft’s father, a furniture maker, had built the kitchen table for him and Jane as a wedding present nearly forty-six years ago. It was pine—an odd choice of wood for a kitchen table. The soft wood was a map of human movement, aged with a thousand gouges and scrapes from forks and bottles and teeth, a scrawling and scratched story sitting in the room like an ancient book. The surface was plain but for the center of the table, where initials had been carved and inlaid with ivory, which had faded into a smoky white: CJW. Cleft took his index finger and ran it up and down the curve of the “J.”

“You,” he said quietly. “Just you.”

***

Janet closed the front door quietly until the latch locked into place. As soon as she heard the click, and she and Ben were on the front porch alone, Ben broke the silence.

“Can we go back there . . . in the backyard?!” he asked in a whispered scream.

“No, Ben. We can’t," she said sharply. "That man just lost his wife. We’re not going to tramp through his backyard to look at some lights.”

“Oh, come on! ‘Some lights’? Were you even looking at the same thing? . . . I mean,” Ben said, fidgeting with a toddler's enthusiasm, “can we come back tomorrow, then? I can ask him.” Ben was pleading like a child for a trip to the park.

“No, Ben!” Janet, broken out of her previous serenity, was baffled by the impropriety. Her mother had always taught her formality. “Let people be until they ask to be bothered,” she'd say. Janet would never act as Ben was acting right now, not even for this. That was the source of her irritation: his juvenility, his lack of awareness of life's clear rules.

“But you felt something, didn’t you?” Ben said, begging her to look at him. Janet lifted her head and met his eyes despite herself. The hair on the back of her neck raised, and her throat felt tight. But she said nothing.

“I felt it, too,” Ben said. “It was, it was . . . I don’t know. It was different . . . but good, like it was calling us to itself.”

“Let’s get through tonight, first. Then we can talk about it. But you know we can’t just wander back onto someone’s property like that. When you’re in that uniform, you have a character to maintain. You’re not just ‘Ben.’ You’re an EMT.”

“I know, I know. But . . . did Cleft say anything about it, about the light?”

Janet paused. And even later she couldn’t explain why she lied.

“No . . . He didn’t say anything.”

***

Skulking in the woods at the tree line on the edge of Cleft’s property, watching the ambulance drive away, stood a man dressed all in black. His face was pale and thin, his dark hair shoulder length and stringy, as if every follicle had begun to die the moment it left his skin and met the open air. He looked more like a standing corpse than a human. His skin was wrapped too tightly around his bones, making all his movements tense and forced. Something in his eyes betrayed a wandering, listless vagrancy, as if all he did was walk up and down the earth, pole to equator, equator to pole—traipsing over the terrain looking for something he could never name. On the top of his right hand was a green tattoo of a simple, unadorned circle.

The man stared menacingly through the downstairs window at Cleft, still sitting at his dining room table.

“At last I get you. Now we’ll see just who you are, preacher man.”

Then he mumbled a song to a dull tune, all while staring at Cleft, his eyes burning through glass and skin. But his throat constricted, as if he sang unwillingly, nearly choking on the sounds that dribbled off his lips.

Yours is the light.
Mine is the smoke.
I cannot get back. I cannot get back.
Yours is the day.
Mine is the night.
Mind the shadow.
Mind the shadow.
Mind the shadow.
Sleep.

He smiled for the last four lines, at home in his purpose. But then he fell on his knees and threw up a thick black liquid, gurgling it out onto the dead leaves. He spit out the remainder and wiped his lips. His arms were shaking, but he grabbed a hemlock branch and stood back up—still staring at Cleft through the window. The man closed his pale eyelids as if to concentrate. A faint aura seemed to glow from him in the night. He opened his eyes again, turned, and disappeared into the dark woods.

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