2) You’re a Storyteller First. No Apologies: You're here to Write Stories, not Sell Faith.
Still wondering if your writing should come from Faith or Craft? Here’s the real Truth that most Sunday Schools don't know what to do with.
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.
Let’s get right to it. First and foremost, we are storytellers.
We tell stories. That’s our calling. It’s what fascinates us in early dawn writing sessions, our hands crabbed around a cup of something warm. It’s why we steal time at the end of the day away from yelling family to add a couple of paragraphs to a blank page.
We dream of sharing a tale that captivates and spellbinds a sick child in hospital to forget their fears for an hour. Perhaps longer than that.
Why? Because we ourselves are captivated and spellbound by the ideas in our mind.
Our calling is to learn how to do something amazing: to learn how to tell a story.
We’re wrestling with something in the dark, wrestling against raw animal power and flapping wings, gasping for a blessing, demanding that our vision condense into a flutter of letters on paper. We hope the sacrifice we make won’t hurt too much, but even then… we don’t much care any more.
We’re seeking to pull someone into a whole new world, like a hand reaching through a wardrobe and hauling us through heavy fur cloaks into a landscape of snow, witches, and talking lions.
Most authors are changed by the process. Afterward, we walk through the world gimp-legged, worlds without end inside us. Half in this world, have on this. Perhaps we’re now half-blind from one eye turned outward, one turned inward. We’ve been blessed by the elves with a storytellers’ second sight, and it makes us a strange thing.
And we would never be unspeared of this sight.
Yes, I’m mashing up Narnia, Odin, and Jacob. Writing is a deeply mythic thing.
The writing pros call it the ‘fictive dream,’ or the ‘suspension of disbelief'.’ I’m with Martin Shaw, who talks about stories being living things. Not all of them are equal. Not all do the same thing.
So if your job is to tell a story that captivates, then how do we get it wrong? When our craft is so poor that someone ‘wakes up’ and doesn’t want to keep reading.
Catholics, Christians, Orthodox, and faith-inspired authors get stuck here asking: Where is the line between fiction and evangelization?
My answer: there isn’t a line. They’re not the same thing.
The way most people understand evangelization, it’s a soapbox for megaphoning a checklist that doesn’t respect your conscience (proselytism or preachiness).
Fiction is a golden ticket to the Polar Express. An invite to an experience.
“No matter how much his character may be improved by the Church, if he is a novelist, he has to remain true to his nature as one. The Church should make the novelist a better novelist.”
Flannery O’Connor, ‘Catholic Novelists and Their Readers’
If you’re like me, writing fantasy and fiction feels like breathing.
As a kid, it filled my free time and intruded on my thoughts during school. I filled notebooks with my own bestiaries, plotted adventures, and outlined endless series I’d never write of talking mice, storm troopers facing dinosaurs, secret agents on death-defying missions.
The point was to learn how to create. The point was to sidle up to the vocation that called to me from the Perilous Realm.
But then…
My cult upbringing would rear with a rash of regret. All this time, I had created it all without a single nod to God, or Catholic doctrine, or the Faith. I hadn’t made a plan to evangelize anyone in to saving their soul.
All the fun I’d been imagining with Tyrannosaurs and lightsabers wasn’t going to do anyone any good.
I now know that I was wrong.
Novelists aren’t evangelists. Some authors do write ‘evangelistic fiction.’ But unless that’s you… that’s not you.
Some evangelize through hospitality and medical care.
Some evangelize through dance and social events.
Some evangelize through food and caretaking.
We are storytellers.
Our job is to understand why humans tell stories at all. And it’s for much deeper reasons than cavemen’s cautionary tales, or escapist ‘wish fulfillment’ because someone can’t ‘handle’ real life. Or to convert people to a faith tradition.
“The tensions of being a Catholic novelist are probably never balanced for the writer until the Church becomes so much a part of his personality that he can forget about her—in the same sense that when he writes, he forgets about himself.”
Flannery O’Connor, ‘Catholic Novelists and Their Readers’
A lot of authors feel conflict. We’re torn between the worlds we want to explore, and the sermons we hear on Sundays. We feel something is true and good about these imaginal continents filled with Silmarillions of elves and orcs. But there’s most Sunday Pastors are up to their eyeballs in administration and confessions, and your questions about dragons as an expression of Christ is more than they can handle.
So don’t ask them. They never wanted to be storytellers anyway.
Light, or the Revelation of Light?
Imagine an attic, or a cave, filled with dimly lit things. You can barely see anything in the musty gloom.
Imagine a leaf twists away from an empty gap in the rafters, and a yellow spear of sunlight picks out the silent waltz of dust motes, tracking a path across the floor.
Blinking from decades in the dark, pale eyed and cautious, some authors will stare at the shaft of light, wondering how they’ve been deprived for so long. They enter into it, stare up into it, eyes gasping, until black spots blur their sight. It is an obvious and brilliant truth. We will want to write about why this light is the illuminator of the world.
But the light dweller is used to light, knows that human eyes can’t meet the gaze of the sun. We admire the prismed radiance, stare at everything that exists. Light picks out the silk in early morning corn, turns the grey world green through the bending leaves. It presses apart the clouds and casts shadow between the mountains, trues the night under the river pebbles. It floods an enthralled concert hall with the presence of a thousand other people sitting in the dark. Shadow is part of light. All things are seen by light.
It’s pretty normal to learn something new, fall in love with it, and turn it into a story to try and convince a reader. The more mature thing is to marinate in it. Understand why it moves you, and what it means. Then tell a story about why a character was convinced, and maybe the reader will believe that.
Some writers can only write about the light itself. These are those with a preachy message, inside and outside of a faith tradition.
We need more who write about what the light reveals. These are those in touch with the world, who get that each person is on their own journey, their own spiritual ascent into God.
Belief is like light.
We are human. We are persons. We don’t seek the Father of Lights the way we seek the sunshine in a dark attic. We see the AllFather in all gifts, in all the shades of light and dark. And our very ability to see and understand anything is a gift of his power.
“We need to be tellers of dark stories, for we live in a dark and sorrowful world. Now I’m certainly not arguing against the place of light and happiness. After all, we proclaim a great story where redemption is the ultimate reality. Yet if we neglect the place of darkness, sin, and evil in our stories, the weight of human moral action, the tragedy of the Fall, if any of these things are missing from our stories, we are failing in our art.”
John Carswell, ‘Tolkien and the Evangelical Power of Beauty’
We’re like fishes suddenly realizing we’re surrounded by water.
We’re fishes being told to slow down and realize we’re in an ocean. We’re already ‘in’ God, because ‘in him we live and move and have our being.’
You don’t need a cast of nuns and priests in clerical clothes in your novel. You don’t need your character to have a ‘come to Jesus’ moment. Not the way you think.
A character making a 1% turn toward doing something better, living better, making a change for the better, is their ‘come to Jesus’ moment.
Not because they became card-carrying Christians. That was never the point of your story. It’s because the urgency and energy of your story was to confront a character with something that changed them. Really changed them.
“The religious elements aren’t obnoxiously grafted onto the narrative but emerge intrinsically from the circumstances of the characters.”
William Giraldi, ‘Confessions of a Catholic Novelist’
Be a good storyteller
Imagine Da Vinci had a vision early in life, and hastily grabbed his paintbrushes to smear out his interpretation of the Incarnation. He hasn’t yet spent a decade of ten thousand hours, hasn’t mastered his skills, hasn’t become the great Da Vinci we know and love.
His theme is sublime, but his lack of talent stops us from seeing the message. The hasty sweeps of the colors, the imbalance of tone and shade, and the clunky proportion makes us critique the painting, and we miss his point.
Your first job is to be a good author. This means: if you want to be good at something you have to train in it. You have to learn the discipline. You have to know when the rules apply, and when you can skirt them.
You have to practice writing stories, and trying to finish novels, and sketching characters, and stumbling through life like the rest of us, one day at a time. And you can’t stop.
Some authors spend a hundred hours trying to make a perfect story.
Some authors spend a hundred hours writing a hundred short stories.
Who will learn better and faster?
The one who gets the experience.
“The artist has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to his art. He can safely leave evangelizing to the evangelists.”
Flannery O’Connor, ‘Catholic Novelists and Their Readers’
Without enough time and attention spent simply writing, you won’t have a sense of your style, your interests, your message. You will have a vague idea. But you will need clarity. Stunning, simple, visceral, bone-gripping clarity.
It doesn’t matter how amazing your message is. We’re artists. We don’t demand mercy-watching, or mercy-reading. We want our art to be good on its own. If it isn’t, we get better.
We want our reader to get sucked into the first few pages, to be so swallowed into the story and the ideas and the promises of this adventure that they cancel their weekend plans to keep reading.
Our first responsibility: be a good author.
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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.
