4) What happens when the old stories don't work any more - we need new ones
New stories mean new ideas, new fandoms, and new myths to understand ourselves. Maybe you hold the keys to a new future we all need.
Ever feel torn between writing the stories on your heart and meeting everyone’s expectations—too “preachy” for some, not “evangelical” enough for others? I’m Dominic, founder of LegendFiction. If you’re struggling to balance faith, creativity, and the joy of good storytelling, you’re not alone. This isn’t about ‘stuffing doctrine’ into every page or apologizing for your imagination. It’s about finding freedom to write boldly, letting faith inspire without limiting your art. This mini-course Storyteller: How Faith-Inspired Authors Can Find the Freedom to Write the Coolest Fiction in the World shares what it really means to be an author, how to respect your audience, and why your faith is a lifeline to go anywhere and not get lost. Let’s drop the guilt, embrace what’s real, and write stories that matter.
Tolkien and the Inklings faced a horrible, dawning realization.
Squinting through smears of mud, marching in lines under leaden skies, staring through scopes at their German brothers across the bullet-blasted wastes of the first World War…
Whatever liturgies and books built in that world, it didn’t stop armies from killing twenty million people.
If stories give us identity and direction, and help us share experience… maybe we’re telling the wrong stories. I think that’s why they created new ones. And their tales are still trending.
Most of the stories from that world doubled down on us vs them, my family is better than your family, my people has a greater right to life than your people.
I’m convinced this is one of the reasons why the Catholics got together and convened a new council during the trigger-happy, nuclear-pressure of the Cold War. We needed to update our theology to match reality. To tell a better story. Whether we liked it or not, the world had changed. Become more connected.
Humans now face a whole new set of challenges: learning to thrive together as a global human family, without losing our local identity. Culture feels like a complete free-for-all.
This is where storytellers are first-responders. Because stories are about people. And we need new stories. We might need your stories.
You know you need your stories.
If you’re trying to write the coolest fiction in the world, I don’t think storytellers want to be sidelined on a Christian shelf, far from people who just give up everything to vibe with your desperate hunger to figure out life, to share your visceral joy of being alive, and to feel that every person matters, no matter how small, and no matter what they believe, or what they regret.
“The great mistake that the unthinking Catholic reader usually makes is to suppose that the Catholic writer is writing for him. Occasionally this may happen, but generally it is not happening today. Catholics brought up in sheltered Catholic communities with little or no intellectual contact with the modern world are apt to suppose that truth as Catholics know it is the order of the day except among the naturally perverse.”
Flannery O’Connor, ‘Catholic Novelists and Their Readers’
For half a century, Catholics became known for writing a certain kind of fiction.
The stories were evangelistic, catechetical, didactic. Fairy-tale like in their simplicity. They sought to inspire young readers like saints stories. But these saints’ stories had been carefully pruned of any lurid details of personal failure. Kids needed models.
Perhaps the idea was well-meant. But then and now, adults felt the lack of any real fairy tale grit. Any actual reality. Saints were surreally detached while being lightly fried in oil, legally tried in courts, or locked inside towers and marriages.
Daily life is as dark as old fairy tales.
It is still full of the same gods and giants and angels and demons. Maybe they show up differently now. Maybe they continue to show up in exactly the same way as they ever did. The unwashed lives of the saints are just as raw and real as yours and mine. And modern readers and adults need these stories.
Today, many Christians are proud to have their own shelf in the bookstores, separated from all the rest of the stories. They’re very proud about being spice-free, squeaky clean, and faith affirming, with nifty little rating charts.
To be clear, some readers love clean fiction. Some need this. Highly sensitive people, for example, definitely need calm stories and Hallmark endings to remind them that life can be cheery, calm, and friendly.
The mistake is saying that’s the high-water mark for religious fiction.
"In today’s secular culture, any reference to a divine intervention in human affairs is problematic. Readers do not want a homily, let alone a work of Catholic apologetics."
Piers Paul Read, ‘Dangers to the Soul’
The Catholics that I grew up with felt that the ideal is more of this fiction, replete with religious figures, carefully ordered families and idealistic characters.
I think this is why readers return to the myths. Over and over. As weird and messy and pagan as they are. They’re as weird, and messy, and pagan as our souls.
Pagan in the best sense: rustic, rural, with dirt under the nails and berries in the mouth and twigs in your hair because you hunted grouse and grapes in the dawn, thanked the local gods for their food-gifts, skirted the local fairies, honored the ancestors, kept salt and bells to ward off spiritual parasites, trained in war to protect your children, trained in lovemaking to bloom your people, trained in religion to focus your life.
God doesn’t struggle for your attention, with his nose pressed up against the glass, one more paparazzi outside your home yelling for your attention.
He doesn’t compete with that. He has nothing to compete with.
How can he? He is the attention in your mind, the reason why you’ve shut your door, the inhale-exhale of your thought and breath in prayer and in storytelling.
He is present with every pain and agony and difficulty. Think about yourself as an author. Imagine your characters praying and yelling to you to make the pain go away.
What is your answer?
To make them go on the adventure. To experience every single thing, every moment of darkness, every dull, grinding swathe of boredom.
The answer to their prayers is to lead them in spiritual ascent. To level up out of the darkness of their life into a little more light. Because you know that even a little sunshine to a light-starved eye in the dark is an anchor for a whole being.
You can’t show up in your story and solve all their problems, because you’re the narrator. The whole point of the story is that your characters become more fully and more freely themselves.
Sounds like real life, doesn’t it?
"Many of the great writers of Catholic fiction neither used Catholic characters nor told of overtly Catholic events—they “simply” wrote about life in all its reality."
Michelle Tholen ‘What’s Wrong with Contemporary Catholic Fiction?’, ‘Dangers to the Soul’
And real life is really messy. Especially for canonized saints. They were a tangled tumble of emotion and trauma and cultural baggage. And that’s ok. They struggled to see a way through it all, pointing themselves toward the highest, best good thing they could imagine.
For many, being a religious author has meant writing from a sanitized, pious worldview, one where the characters smile from the winner’s stand, wisely promote hope, and enjoy their happy endings. These heroes are noble, their relationships ideal, their environment an envied fantasy.
Also known as spiritual wish fulfillment. And let’s call it for what it is: childishness.
Maybe our stories will become more authentic and real when we pull out all the overtly Catholic and Christian stuff.
What happens when you get real about what you think, and create something needed and new? What might happen to the future? We have no idea.
But 20 years ago, no one expected that the world would be so vibrantly unified across fandoms like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, K-Pop Demon Hunters, etc.
The world now has new language in our cultural imagination.
“[Dante] said that the literal meaning of the Divine Comedy is the way in which human beings by their own free acts earn eternal punishment or reward. That is the vision of human action that makes fiction Catholic. It is not a matter of having priests and nuns on the set, not a matter of explicit reference to Catholic things, but rather the Dantesque vision. There are priests and nuns in stories that lack this vision; this vision is present where there is nothing peculiarly Catholic in view.”
Ralph McInerny, ‘On Being a Catholic Writer’
Dante Alighieri tasked himself to imagine the heights and depths of the Christian experience, inspired by the mythologies and theology of his time. Like what Thomas Aquinas did for theology, Dante foraged and fused so many mythic, psychic, and spiritual themes across myth and culture, that he defined the popular imagination of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven for centuries.
His writings defined our imagination of spiritual things for centuries. He gave us a new mythology for things unseen and (as yet) unlived.
New myths for a new world
It’s been said that myth is lies breathed through silver. It’s been written off as explanations for thunder and lightning. It’s been dismissed as the bawdy bar tales of high pagans.
Whoever thinks this has not read enough myths, and not understood what they read. Myths break down into fairy tales, fables, cautionary tales, explanations, ritual ideas, tribal origins, and more.
But the greatest myths are often the oldest. They’re retold the most often.
Jordan Petersen calls them ‘Maps of Meaning.’ That’s the best definition. They are incredibly smart maps of what’s going on inside our souls and psyches.
And if most of it doesn’t make sense, that’s ok. That’s because before, you would have been raised in a single culture, a single cinematic universe of sigils, symbols, and ideas.
But the last 500 years changed everything. Humans rediscovered international travel. And suddenly our libraries exploded, our theologians pulled out their hair, our storytellers rejoiced, and the human conversation created the internet.
Our western mind had been isolated from the rest of the world, maybe through no fault of our own. We reopened the Pandora’s boxes in our basements, and tumbled into bioluminescent alien worlds like Pandora. We rediscovered tens of thousands of years of psychological and spiritual wrestling with the gods.
It takes a lot of fresh stories to challenge everything and hold fast to the good that stands the test of time.
Be a good storyteller first. Tell a good story.
Look at Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Martin, and their impact on this century of readers.
They’ve added to the world hoard. They’ve created new languages to unite peoples. We call them fandoms. Fandoms are how we make friends, and fellowships against the encroaching dark.
In the Children of Hurin, Tolkien wrote the terrible tale of Turin Turambar. It is meant as a mirror-opposite of Aragorn, the Aragorn who failed on all fronts. He wanted to explore an epic character who constantly made the wrong decision to his karma, his fate. He abandons his duty, abandons his identity, abandons his promises. Around him, family, friendships, futures collapse. Sobbing and grasping in grey desperation, he continues to fail all the way through the grisly, gut-wrenching end.
It’s not a story for popcorn and family time. It’s dark, on purpose. Knowing this story lends heft to Aragorn's success as a man, friend, and king. In the back of his mind, he knew he shared the same weakness as Turin. But with fellowship, he overcame the weakness.
Tolkien intended Turin's story to continue beyond the grave. Turin's failure in life meant nothing unless it was repented and resolved in the next life. Death here is not the end, a theme to which he returned with an elvish joy.
“Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity.”
On Fairy Stories, J. R. R. Tolkien
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About me: Dominic de Souza
I’m a cradle-Catholic who’s been writing scifi and fantasy novels since I was 13, graduated from the Writer’s Institute for Children’s Literature, and found out I was living in a Catholic doomsday cult. This led to a decade careful rebuilding of what it means to be religious, a book and movie nerd, occasional gamer, and accidental world traveller. Today, I’m a dad, work fulltime in marketing, and build LegendFiction to bring together the coolest storytellers in the world.
