7) There are readers who desperately want your story out there—write for them
Not everyone needs or wants the same fandom. And that’s the best news ever.
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.
The best way to help yourself and your storytelling is to decide who you’re creating it for.
Who you dream of enjoying it best.
Who you think will understand what you’re trying to do. Sometimes, to accept that your intended reader needs to be someone specific.
Early on in your creative process, pick an age group, a life experience, a specific kind of person. Perhaps pick a film rating and a genre. Now you’ll know what most readers expect of a story. You’ll also know what the formulas are that you need to work with, or work around, to bridge your readers to your story.
This suddenly gives you the freedom to let bad feedback be just that. Bad. Not good. Not helpful, when it comes from people who aren’t your intended audience. The feedback that should matter most to you is your reader. You can happily ignore someone else’s idea of what you should do.
We find ourselves in stories
In the Silmarillion, Eru Illuvatar sends the Flame Imperishable into the dark, there to carry the music and vision of the angelic symphonies. That dark emptiness is like a womb, receiving a godly gift. Stories are like that gift.
We find ourselves in stories. Sometimes we need a constellation of stories to meet ourselves, to see ourselves for the first time.
It’s already so hard to meet ourselves in this life, with everything caterwauling and clamoring for attention. We’re overwhelmed with a rainstorm of apps and notifications, battered by deadlines and doldrums of everyday life, unable to dig ourselves out of the mudslides of things like inflation and debt… Fewer of us have time to do the most important thing.
Like sit and watch a river burble by, slit by dragonflies in sunlight, and just breathe. To restore the sense of an enchanted world. It’s in those moments of stillness that we can ask ourselves who we are, who we want to be, and what we hope to do with our one, wonderful life.
Sadly, for a lot of us, life isn’t wonderful. It’s colored in monochrome grey, it’s an unending cringe comedy of errors, its jack-knifed with traumatic intrusions, and you can’t stop running because nothing will catch you.
For some, it’s like a horror-comedy fest highlight reel.
That’s why the less free we feel, the more we turn to stories.
And we often want to look right and left, to those of us alive today, so that we can ask “Have you figured anything out?” We need to know that someone in the human family around us can help. Not only the parliament of ancestors who guide through laws and monuments and mythology. Living people who can meet us eye-to-eye and talk.
We’re human, and that means called to communion.
I think it’s hilarious that the materialist-industrial complex of scientists and philosophers worked so hard in the last few centuries to eliminate all religious language from the scientific pursuit, and found themselves up a galaxy without a purpose. The more they doubled down on the idea that matter is all, and matter is dead, and might makes right… the average person rebelled.
And in the realm of storytelling, it’s been a full-blown revolution against the machine.
With all the apparent ‘data’ that humans are a meaningless mycelium on a space rock… we’ve yelled for Hogwarts, Jedi, Hobbiton, Hoth, and Harrenhal. DnD groups are on the rise.
Movies and stories are the fastest growing entertainment. These things can change lives and start fandoms almost overnight. And it’s not slowing down. Why? Because The meaning crisis is happening now.
We are in the midst of a mental health crisis. There are increases in anxiety disorders, depression, despair, suicide rates are going up in North America, parts of Europe, other parts of the world… enmeshed within a deeper cultural historical crisis. I called the meaning crisis… There is an increase of people feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, from a viable and foreseeable future.
People are desperate for new stories about almost every part of human living.
We are desperate for the simple things, away from the rat race, where mice serve meals in chintz burrows, and the only thing to fear is if the souffle will be done by the time Mrs Couplewallow shows up for tea.
We are desperate for heroic action where teams of tactical warriors can actually believe that airdropping behind enemy lines is still doing something good, and not a footnote for a meaningless meat-grinder.
We are desperate for our inspiration and imagination to have a chance at the sunlight, where we can dream of better worlds, and build the apps and apartments and attitudes that create the future.
And it goes on.
Each reader, each audience, needs something different from stories.
Stories prove that there’s more than the pain, the bleakness, the suffering around us. Stories hum along like programs that we can install in ourselves. Run that program in the game of life, and maybe you make different decisions, become a different person, create a whole new ending.
Stories call for audiences. A story is a shared thing, born in the mead-hall of the mouth and borne through air and light into the hidden worlds of other persons. Sometimes a cry of recognition bursts from the dark, and the person can reach out to another for the first time.
Stories serve a million different purposes.
Every year you’re alive has it’s own stack of stories to help you navigate it. Every phase of life, kind of person, personality type, astrological sign, citizenship… each comes with a bushel of stories.
Hamlet is not a good reading choice for a classroom of manic depressives. Young adolescents aren’t ready for the Song of Songs.
Not everyone needs Macbeth in their life. Not everyone appreciates the panorama of the Sistine Chapel. Plenty are perfectly happy without Brambly Hedge (I’m sorry to say).
We’re always sorting through the stories that will help fill a hole or help a need in our life.
Here’s why this is the best news for you: we all constantly need new, different, and better stories. And we love it when storytellers make stories specifically for us in mind.
Create with the right person is key to knowing that to say, how far to go, where to pull short, what to leave in, what to double down on. The better that you know your audience, the better you can make something they will love.
The wrong people will always pick up your book and comment their concern.
“It’s not religious enough.”
“Not enough trigger warnings.”
“You didn’t include this topic.”
This isn’t always a flaw in your story. It could be a flaw in the reader.
You are an artist. An actual artist doesn’t paint what someone else wants. An actual artist is open to impulses and suggestions from the world, and they try to capture infuriatingly complex ideas into experiences or journeys for other people.
An artist that works on commission is creating art. But it’s not the same thing.
Actual art requires the right audience to see it and understand it. Mass-produced stuff is produced for the masses. It doesn’t expect the audience to know anything special.
Actual art isn’t made for money, but meaning. It’s true that a bunch of actual art can’t be made at all until money flows more freely. But that’s not the same thing.
Actual art isn’t trying to teach someone, to dumb things down to help them climb higher. Art is a challenge, a concept, that usually calls someone to spend time and effort to get it. And that time spent changes you.
“There are those who maintain that you can’t demand anything of the reader. They say the reader knows nothing about art, and that if you are going to reach him, you have to be humble enough to descend to his level. This supposes either that the aim of art is to teach, which it is not, or that to create anything which is simply a good-in-itself is a waste of time. Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”
Flannery O’Connor ‘Catholic Novelists and Their Readers’
A lot of beginning storytellers will take their fiction to friends and family, hoping for warm support and encouragement to keep going.
It can be a rude awakening to watch their eyes glaze over, to see them point out all the errors, or worse, to wish you’d never do anything like this again.
Not every film or book will have broad market appeal. Even Marvel knows what stories to tell and not tell. They know their audience, and they tell the humorous, epic and riveting romps that they know folk will pay for.
With this in mind, approach your writing and your promotion of your book to target it to the audience you know will appreciate it.
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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.
