Wednesday, March 28, 2007

A few thoughts

Over at Lost Genre, Daniel Weaver posted some questions for discussion regarding being a Christian and a writer that I addressed on their site, but I thought I'd post my thoughts over here too.

It seems to me that our goal as Christian writers is to tell excellent stories. We can't worry about what people will "gain" in reading what we write, because that's not up to us--that's up to the Holy Spirit. Jesus told stories to thousands of people, and some people didn’t "gain" anything from them. Others had their hearts quickened by the Spirit and came to follow Him. Our stories have the same potential since the same Spirit at work in Christ’s ministry is at work in us. The difference is, unlike Christ, we don’t know the hearts of every man. We don’t know who will accept our words with joy and who will ridicule them. And the beauty is that we don’t have to know. Our job is to be faithful, telling the stories the Spirit stirs within us and telling them to the best of our God-given ability. Our job is to saturate our hearts and minds with God's word, allowing it to change us. "For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart" (Hebrews 4:12). As we are changed, what we produce will be changed. As the Spirit conforms us to the image of Christ, what we create will be conformed as well. Our art will become a fragrance of Christ, and the Spirit will use it as he will.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

The First Draft

I would love to say that the reason I haven't posted in such a long time is that I was feverishly working on my novel and the writing completely occupied my spare time. I would love to say it, but it wouldn't be true. However, I was able to put some solid time into it over the past couple months and have officially finished my first draft. I'll be picking up the printed draft tomorrow and will pull out the trusty red pen and write all over it! I've been looking forward to this part for a while. I'm excited to see how well the story flows (or how poorly--yikes!) and if the characters are well-developed (though I doubt they are). But hey! It's a first draft. I'm not sending this one out for publication, so it's allowed to have some bugs. I'll post again with an update on my progress and some general thoughts about the quality of the story--I'll try to be as objective as possible.

UPDATE 4.18.07: After reading about five chapters of my novel and spending some time reading the blogs of published authors like Patrick Rothfuss, I think I need to tell the whole story before I can even think about having the first volume published. That is going to require a lot more time and effort, but I really feel that it will make each volume of this story of infinitely higher quality. So . . . back to work.