"The First Five Things Every Spirituality Writer Should Know" -- A Guest Post by Vinita Hampton Wright

The First Five Things Every Spirituality Writer Should Know

—Vinita Hampton Wright

There are really only so many things that go wrong in writing. After twenty-three years as an editor, I’ve made thousands and thousands of fixes, but often they applied to the same mistakes made again and again. Here’s a short list of issues I encounter often when editing material on spirituality.

Nothing makes up for poor craftsmanship.

I can say this confidently as a member of the publishing community: The number one reason a manuscript is rejected is that the writing just isn’t good enough. With so many manuscripts floating around, editors can afford to be picky and will dismiss so-so writing—usually after reading a paragraph or two. Most readers are impatient and won’t stay with writing that is mediocre—they will click to another blog or pick up another book. Especially now that cyber tools make it possible to generate and publish material almost instantly, writing must be flawless and beautiful to stand out above all the rest.

Save teaching for the classroom and teaching for the pulpit.

People attend a class to learn or go to church to hear a sermon. They open a book or an article for a different experience. Welcome and respect the reader. Give her an experience, not just information. Walk alongside her as a fellow explorer rather than stand in front of her as an authority.

Fiction is about storytelling, not teaching.

If you want to write fiction, then serve the story above all else. A good story will reach the reader’s heart and mind because it is well written, its characters are interesting, and the plot compels the reader to find out what happens next. Good fiction also contains moral, philosophical, and spiritual content, but it must grow organically from the story. Good fiction is not a moral lesson dressed up with characters and a plot; that’s a fable or a parable—and those have their purpose, too, but they are not novels or short stories.

The reader becomes engaged when she has to do some of the work.

Spiritual writing draws upon the reader to add his experience and story to the mix. It invites the reader to ponder and puzzle. Spiritual writing engages the reader, and to engage the reader, the writer must respect and care about the reader. Also, refrain from spoon feeding information and supplying answers; invite the reader to articulate the questions and wrestle with them. 

Personal writing must be transformed in order to work as public writing.

The most powerful writing begins as personal writing—the writer works through an issue, mines wisdom from a memory, or tries to put an experience into perspective. Rarely does such writing automatically translate well to the larger audience. It must go through a revision process before it can be accessible and useful to others. Sometimes the revision is minimal, but more often it’s pretty extensive. When you transform personal writing for public reading, you revise it with the reader in mind, which means that you recede into the background. Which means that some of the material that’s quite meaningful to you will be changed or deleted. In the realm of spirituality writing, this is called service.

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Vinita's The Art of Spiritual Writing is now available at fine booksellers everywhere.  It's a must read for any writer -- from beginner to expert.

A Novel by a Spiritual Non-Fiction Writer Set in Central America? Twenty Years Ago? Really?? -- A Guest Post by Writer Paula Huston

Paula Huston is the author of the newly released novel A Land Without Sin.  She is also the author of Simplifying the Soul: Lenten Practices to Renew Your Spirit, The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life (both of which I highly recommend), and many other books.  I invited her to write about A Land Without Sin.

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I’ll admit, it does sound a little far-fetched.  But there is a back-story here.  In fact, I was a fiction writer long before I began writing books like THE HOLY WAY.  I wanted to be a novelist from the time I was about seven years old, and actually began practicing way back then by writing a 36-page thriller about King the Dog, a super-canine hero who looked and acted an awful lot like Rin Tin Tin.  I took creative writing in high school, but got really serious about short story writing in my early twenties.  Since I had opted to get married and take on a full-time job in my late teens rather than go to college, I had no formal training, but I soon figured out that the library was full of great teachers.  I checked out all the BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORY anthologies I could get my hands on and studied the techniques of my favorite writers.

I sold my first story to a literary journal when I was about thirty, and by the time I actually went to college four or five years later (I’d been through a divorce by then, along with an eye-opening stint as a single mom, so I was more than convinced it was time to get a degree), I’d published quite a few of them.  A few years later, now remarried, a new step-mom, and armed with a Master’s in Literature degree, I got a job teaching at the local university and began trying to put together my first short story collection.  But one of the pieces, which was about the classical piano world at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, began to grow  uncontrollably, and pretty soon I realized I had an infant novel on my hands.  DAUGHTERS OF SONG  was published by Random House in 1995.

A year before it came out, however, my husband Mike and I made a backpacking trip to the jungles of Central America to see the Maya ruins.  We had just left southern Mexico for Guatemala when the Zapatista Uprising in Mexico began.  Like a lot of Americans, I knew very little about this part of the world, but this close brush with a revolution triggered an intense curiosity.  And that got coupled with my already-intense interest in the Mayas (my first major, before I switched to literature, had been anthropology).  I asked Random House if I could substitute a novel about all of this for the short story collection they’d planned to publish next.  They gave me the go-ahead and I spent the next three years researching and writing the book.  One of the biggest disappointments of my life came the day they informed me they’d decided not to publish it after all.  I stuck it away in a box and tried to forget about it.

Meanwhile, I met an editor-turned-agent at a writers’ conference who listened to my sad story and suggested I try writing spiritual nonfiction.  I resisted at first, but he was a great mentor, pointing me to wonderful spiritual writers I’d never read and eventually becoming my new agent.  It was his suggestion that I write a book about the simple life, the book that became THE HOLY WAY.   Much to my surprise, I found that I really liked writing nonfiction--it seemed refreshingly straightforward compared to fiction writing, which must always tell the truth but tell it “slant,” as Emily Dickinson puts it.  By the time I published my sixth book in this genre, I’d pretty well abandoned any notion of returning to fiction writing.

But one day a year or so ago I got an email from an old friend, a Christian editor who was starting a new literary imprint called, ironically enough, SLANT.  He asked if I had “any old novels lying around.”  I did!  And eighteen long years after I’d stuck it away and nearly forgotten about it, I dragged out that dusty old draft and reread it--and fell in love with it all over again.  Greg Wolfe, the Christian editor in question, liked it too.  He asked me some great editorial questions that helped me launch into a major revision, and a year or so after that initial email, A LAND WITHOUT SIN finally saw print.

How does it feel to hold this long-delayed book in my hands?  Surprisingly enough, I’m very grateful Random House did not publish it back then.  I learned so much during those many years of writing spiritual nonfiction.  First, I did not have any formal training in theology or divinity, so I had to educate myself in those areas--which made it possible, for example, for me to write much more believably about the struggles of a young priest to come to terms with the question of evil.  Second, when I wrote that first draft back in the early 90‘s, I was a very recent returnee to Christianity, still wet behind the ears, and this naive inexperience showed up as a certain kind of preachiness in that earlier version.  And finally, like a lot of people in their sixties, I’ve said goodbye to some of my youthful idealism by now--and I think this makes me a stronger, more realistic, and more truthful writer than I used to be.  Certainly a better writer for a book like this one, packed as it is with The Big Questions and their Not-So-Easy Answers.   

Readin', Writin' and Faith

I just returned from a two-day event at the Alban Institute. titled "Secular and Sacred Story: Finding Connections that Enrich Transformation and Ministry." Participating in the event were folks such as C. Michael Curtis (fiction editor of the Atlantic Monthly), Barbara Nicolosi (founder of ActOne), Heidi Christensen (National Cathedral’s Cathedral College), and Craig Detweiler(filmmaker of "Purple State of Mind") and others. It was a time of ideas and discussion of the power of story, especially as it intersects with congregational life.

I mostly listened (something which faithful reader will find hard to believe), but was asked to lead the "Writers' Fishbowl" -- a time of dialogue about writing as a person of faith. I had (if I do say so myself) some really great questions. They were so good that we only got to two of dozen or I had prepared before time was up. Which made me think -- perhaps others who see their writing as an act of ministry might like to think about them. And share their answers. So ... here they are.

1. Leland Rykins, of Calvin College, wrote that about “Reading and writing as a means of grace” – adding once wrote that, “A means of grace, as I use the phrase, is anything in our lives by which God makes his truth and beauty known to us, and correspondingly anything in our lives by which God's presence becomes a reality to us.”
a. Is it the role of writer to make God’s truth and beauty known to the reader?

2. I heard somebody (and I wish I could remember who… but I’m old) say that Gospel is a uniquely Christian form and so gives some support to the idea of novel as distinctively Christian in origin.
i. Characterization (Mark 1:6)
ii. Scene setting (John 3:1-2)
iii. Dialogue (Matthew 19:16-22)
iv. Shows, doesn’t just tell (Luke 22:39-44)
v. Lack of wasteful adjectives (Mark 1:43) (“strong used just 4 times in all of Mark)
vi. Tension & release cycles (Luke 8:22-26)
vii. Builds towards climax
viii. Resolution (Luke 24:50-53)
ix. Also has primary, secondary & tertiary characters
b. Have you ever thought of the art you’re creating as a sort of Gospel – a telling of good news? If so, in what ways do think of it that way? Likewise, if not, why not?

3. “If I understand the Gospel, it tells us that we are to spread the Good News to all four corners of the world, not limiting the giving of light to people who have already seen the light. If my stories are incomprehensible to Jews or Muslims or Taoists, then I have failed as a Christian writer. ….” Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water
a. Do you think this sort of comprehensibility is also important for writers of other faiths such as Michael Chabon, Dara Horn, Salman Rushdie,etc?
b. Is there any such thing as a Christian screenwriter or Jewish novelist? Or are we merely writers who are informed by a particular faith tradition?
c. What is the role of the audience in creation of art?
d. Does the idea of an audience – say, congregations or adult faith groups – ever enter in to your creative process?
e. How does the audience influence your idea about where a character/scene/idea is working?

4. “Creation is surpassingly wonderful, and God is greater than anyone can possibly imagine. I write about the things I do because I can’t help it. I think flowers bloom to the glory of God. I write stories to the glory of God, to celebrate the privilege and miracle of being alive.” Mary Ward Brown, novelist.
a. So why do you write?
b. What do you wish a congregation using your creation for whatever purpose would know about you?
c. What do you wish a congregation using your creation for whatever purpose would know about the piece they’re using?

5. “At its best, art transfigures the world around us for a brief time, strives to let the radiance of truth, goodness, and beauty flash out for an instant. Art wakes us up, trains our perceptions, and reminds us that when we try to build rigid structures around presence we inevitably lose what we attempt to keep. The purpose of art is not to strand us in an alternate world, but to return us to the realm of the ordinary, only with new eyes. After the light had dimmed and the cloud had dispersed, the disciples found Jesus alone. Seeing their bewilderment, he must have had compassion on them. He must also have known that, though the disciples were temporarily blinded by the light, an image had been imprinted on their hearts that would never be erased.” Gregory Wolfe, Image, #27
a. So how do you see art, in this case story, film, etc as transfiguring the world?
b. What are ways you could see this “awakening” as Wolfe calls it, work in congregational settings?

What sayest ... um, er, writest... thou?

--Brent