Writing faith for teens

How do you go about writing about faith in a way that isn’t off-putting to contemporary teens, but feels like it’s part of normal life?

My approach begins from understanding that a life of faith isn’t lived across a line in the sand, that this spot over here is where I have a spiritual life, and on the other side is where the rest of the world goes about its business. Real faith doesn’t need a sanitized bubble in order to exist. It walks with courage into dark places through the power of the Holy Spirit, and tries to act as Jesus did. He reached out to those who were at the margins, who were hurting. I write what I hope is an invitation to teens of faith to see their purpose in this way.

In my Christian YA series, faith is a piece of the heroine Dani’s framework for understanding the world, just like her artistic ability is. The imagery and stories of her faith weave through her thought world as much as the language of painting and drawing. Like any teen raised in a Christian home, she goes through a coming-of-age process in which she has to decide if she truly believes for herself, rather than believing in a parent’s belief.

Infusing lots of humor into the story where possible is also important. People of faith are often stereotyped as dour, fault-finding folk who take themselves way too seriously. So my heroine has a bit of a sarcastic streak and finds the funny in things, quite often the funny in her own foibles—a self-deprecating kind of humor that makes her approachable.

Most centrally, I wrote my novels as dramatic stories, not handbooks or manuals on “how to grieve well/how to handle a family crisis well.” Readers walk with Dani through sadness, longing, first love, turmoil, broken relationships, confusion, and doubt. The adults in her world sometimes help, sometimes fail her badly. She has to come to grips with what is really real, with who God is, and with how she must grow and change in order to become her best self.

Preachiness in literature comes when characters aren’t given this space to “come to their senses” on their own. Jesus’ example of how to show a transformation well is the prodigal son story. Did someone come and preach at the younger brother, and tell him he had been a selfish jerk and he should just go home and apologize to his family? No, the story events led him to that conclusion. So it is with my characters. They make their mistakes and gradually learn from them. When epiphanies come, they act on them, and test their new understanding. They move from blindness to insight to realized truth.

I don’t think you have to be a Christian to read stories like mine and get something positive out of them. I’m not Jewish, but I really love Chaim Potok’s stories, which give me a glimpse into Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish communities. One of the most lovely things about literature is how it opens a window into other worlds, gives us a chance to understand other perspectives by living inside them for just a little while.

About the books

Never Gone

Sunday school never prepared her for this kind of life after death.

Teen artist Dani Deane feels like the universe has imploded when her photographer father is killed. Days after his death, she sees him leafing through sketches in her room, roaming the halls at church, wandering his own wake. Is grief making her crazy? Or is her dad truly adrift between this world and the next, trying to contact her?

Dani longs for his help as she tries and fails to connect with her workaholic mother. Her pain only deepens when astonishing secrets about her family history come to light. But Dani finds a surprising ally in Theo, the quiet guy lingering in the backstage of her life. He persistently reaches out as Dani’s faith falters, her family relationships unravel, and she withdraws into a dangerous obsession with her father’s ghostly appearances. Will she let her broken, prodigal heart find reason to hope again?

Read an excerpt.
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With sneak peek chapters from the sequel, Almost There 

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Almost There

How do you find hope when a family crisis threatens everything you love?

Paris, the City of Lights. To seventeen-year-old Dani Deane, it’s the Promised Land. There, her widowed mother’s depression will vanish and she will no longer fear losing her only parent, her arty New York life, or her devoted boyfriend.

But shortly before their Paris getaway, Dani’s tyrannical grandfather falls ill, pulling them to rural Pennsylvania to deal with his hoarder horror of a house. Among the piles, Dani finds disturbing truths that could make Mum completely unravel. Desperate to protect her from pain and escape to Paris, Dani hatches a plan with the flirtatious neighbor boy that only threatens the relationships she most wants to save.

Why would God block all paths to Paris? Could real hope for healing be as close as a box tucked in the rafters?

Add it on Goodreads
Read sneak peek scenes for FREE on Wattpad
Purchase the ebook on Amazon (US) / Amazon (UK) / Amazon (Aus) / Amazon (Can)
Barnes and Noble / Smashwords / Kobo / Apple iTunes

Purchase the paperback from Createspace / Amazon (US) / Amazon (Can) / Amazon (UK) /
Barnes and Noble / Book Depository (free shipping)


Do you find characters of faith compelling or off-putting? Why?

Thanks to Cecelia Earl for inviting me to write about this topic for her launch party. I repost it for broader sharing here with her blessing.

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Building great characters through research

Research often gets a bad rap in fiction-writing circles. Everyone seems to know at least one aspiring author who got lost on the Planet Library, having followed one interesting tidbit after another deep into the stacks, never to return. Never to actually turn the acquired knowledge into a story.

No one wants to become that guy.

One the other extreme, some consider doing any research a waste of time, since fiction is supposed to be "all make believe." But make believe that doesn't have some grounding in researched reality will likely be drawn from your limited experience, or worse, from cliches.

Somewhere between these extremes of no research and nothing but research is the sweet spot of doing some research. As Robert McKee says in Story, “No matter how talented, the ignorant cannot write. Talent must be stimulated by facts and ideas. Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliché, it’s the key to victory over fear and its cousin, depression.”

Today, I'd like to touch on a few areas of research that will help you build fantastic, memorable characters. When you take the time to know your characters' worlds deeply, you'll be able to develop more dynamic plots and relationships, and you'll be more equipped to develop each character's unique voice in dialogue.

Knowledge base

In order to write realistic characters and create believable plots, you need to know what your characters know—or at least a big enough slice to accurately represent their daily activities and thought patterns.

How educated are your characters? What special areas of knowledge or training do they have?
Read up as much as possible on topics that would interest your character. Educate yourself about the routines and general lifestyle of their particular vocation, whether an elementary school student or astrophysicist, a milkmaid or Baronet. Use written resources to build your general knowledge, develop questions to ask experts, and create lists of things you’d like to observe.

Cultural/historical influences 

If you’re writing a protagonist who isn’t an autobiographical stand-in for yourself, chances are this person has a different history and may be shaped by different cultural influences. She might be from another generation, another socioeconomic class, another geographical region, another subculture.

Familiarize yourself with important historic events that happened during their lifetime, as well as the lifetime of key family members (parents, siblings, grandparents). You might be surprised especially when writing younger characters: events that shaped your life may have no relevance to them at all. Characters from previous generations might have had contact with technology you’ve never heard of, and be deeply shaped by problems long forgotten in our day (are you noticing a pattern here?).

People from other cultures have different sets of stars and heroes. They value different virtues, and overlook (or punish) different vices. They have different ways of interpreting history and their own circumstances than you might looking in from the outside. So dig in. Get to know your character’s cultural world.

Your goal should be to understand your character’s surrounding influences and the choices s/he is likely to make based on those influences.

Family dynamics

No matter what genre you write, it’s helpful to do some reading in the social sciences. Because everyone is typically born or adopted into a family, research on family dynamics can be useful.

Some helpful sub-categories to explore:
• Marriage dynamics
• Birth order and personality
• Sibling dynamics
• Intergenerational influence and conflict
• Rights and responsibilities of various family roles in history

If you write about a futuristic setting, these works may become jumping-off points for world building. Consider a world in which no middle children exist, or where marital bonds are for a fixed period, say ten years. How would that affect individual families and culture at large? Speculative fiction writers might also find it helpful to read about family dynamics in ages past, such as texts from ancient Rome about family life.

Associations

Associations are “tip of the mind” thoughts that, like icebergs, show only a portion of the whole story. Most of the mass is hidden under the surface, whether it’s a mass of history or emotion. Associations can be a shorthand way of showing what kind of past experiences the character has gone through, what he values, and what forms of culture shape him. Associations show up in the way characters describe things, and especially how they make comparisons, such as similes and metaphors. Here are two examples from my novel Never Gone:

Images burst in my mind like sudden sun through stained glass.

This person is someone who frequents:
a. sport arenas
b. churches
c. suburban malls

“Crikey,” Uncle says. “We’re in Dante’s eighth circle of hell.”

This person is...
a. a man of the soil who works with his hands
b. an Irish dancer who dreams of becoming the next Michael Flatley
c. an educated bloke who has studied Classical literature

The simile and metaphor in each of these examples pours a great deal of back story into the characters without my having to tell you “Dani grew up attending church every Sunday without fail,” or “Uncle Philip took a First in Classics before attending law school.” As a reader, I’d be bored being told these rather dull facts. It’s far more interesting to see how life experiences shape the characters’ minds.

In the second example, I used a particular kind of association, a reference to other literature (or film or music) called an allusion. Allusions can be used strategically to bring themes of the other work to bear on yours. My example alludes to Dante’s Inferno. In it, the eighth circle of hell (ditch nine) is for “sowers of discord”—people who cause conflict and dissension between others—and their fate is to be cut to pieces. This is thematically important to the story, and the uncle’s role especially.

Before you begin researching associations, brainstorm to determine a few key environmental pieces for each character, whether they are career, family of origin, hobby, or other influence. Having more than one will make for an interesting, multi-layered personality, rather than a repetitive, one-note character. These elements should be important for how the character interacts with others and move the plot along, otherwise they will become tangents that muddy the story rather than enhance it.

Research the environmental factor and record key terms, images, events, allusions, etc. that can be worked into your character’s conversations and thought life.

Which of these areas of research intrigues you most? What things do you need to research to make your current project's characters more vibrant and realistic?

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