Might as well come right out with it, admit I’m a preacher the way a neighbor at the block party might mention they have COVID. Seems only fair to give you a chance to get some distance, because who knows? Maybe I’ve got a word for you.
Bad news first: I do kind of have a word for you. Not about God, though, and not about doctrine or scripture. My good news—my gospel, if you will—is about how the view from the pulpit helped me as a writer of fiction.
And I don’t think a writer needs to be a preacher, or even have any attachment to organized religion, to benefit from what preaching taught me. It was in the context of my ongoing failure as a fiction writer that I wound up in the pulpit. Sometimes when people put the word “failure” and “writer” in the same sentence, they’re on their way to suggesting that the real failure lies with the literary gatekeepers who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, appreciate the writer’s genius.
I assure you the literary world made no such mistake about me. My novel wasn’t getting traction because it didn’t have any treads. I kept revising superficial elements of the story without committing to its depth, and I couldn’t commit to its depth because I wasn’t actually sure why the story mattered.
My drafts were heavy on vibes and light on substance. I kept styling and re-decorating scenarios that, no matter how gritty I thought I was making them, remained effectively frictionless and therefore incapable of generating the kind of heat that draws a reader to narrative in the first place. I don’t think a writer needs to be a preacher, or even have any attachment to organized religion, to benefit from what preaching taught me.
Growing up, I had attended a conservative evangelical church. I left the church in college but, as an adult, found myself pulled back to the Christian tradition (this time, though, to denominations with different theological commitments). It didn’t take long, after my return to church, for me to realize that I was interested in preaching myself.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
