3) Why Storytellers Must Dig Deep—And What Happens When They Do
Ideas can come thick and fast... and that's a problem. Which ones matter? Storytellers field ideas on a whole new level, that few understand.
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.
Stories are a way we share human experience with each other.
We help readers feel and live through something that would never happen in ordinary life, such as orcs and dragons and Celestials. Through imagination, we share an experience of what it means to be human.
Our novels can fill with passion and hope, change the way we look at the world, perhaps challenge someone to change the way they live.
“I have found that people outside the Church like to suppose that the Church acts as a restraint on the creativity of the Catholic writer and that she keeps him from reaching his full development.”
Flannery O’Connor, ‘Catholic Novelists and Their Readers’
As a storyteller, your faith must be part of the inspiration we’re using to create.
Perhaps it already is, but you’re unconscious of it.
We are either awake to what we think, conscious of our own convictions. Or we’re unaware of what’s in our mind, and carrying out someone else’s convictions.
It is critical to reflect and dig deep. Find out why we are moved by things.
You see, we don’t sit down and generate ideas. Not the big ones, the true ones.
We create and combine the little ideas, the half-baked ones that come to us in dreams and reveries and moments. These ideas bubble up and fade in our imaginations.
But the real ideas, the big ones, things that relate to humanity across ages, these are much bigger than us. They come to us from the outside.
Humans are not airtight little water balloons, and we control what comes in or out.
We’re a branch on a vine, held in communion with roots and sap and the great greening identity of a tree. We’re a star in a supercluster, seamed with energy causeways and shared tension and superpositional quantum fields.
We’re in constant communion with spirit and biology and divinity. And it doesn’t end at the edge of your skin, it runs right through you into everyone.
Israel means the ‘God-wrestler’, loosely speaking. Throughout her history, Israel has grappled with Heaven and the mysteries. Not blindly accepted everything from on high. In fact, every figure usually argues with God before he wins them over.
Storytellers are like seances for angels. Storytellers can also be mediums for things left unsaid too. Obviously, that can get dark pretty fast. But it’s not unusual. Public speakers, priests, parents… are all in the same boat.
Storytellers do it on a whole different level. Have we explored the basements of our minds, pried up the slats under the carpets, seeking the strange chink of light that calls us deeper? Where everyone else is afraid to go deeper, that is where we begin.
Ideas have us.
"The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn’t mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater."
Flannery O’Connor, 'Catholic Novelists and Their Readers’
We turn a corner one day and are struck with inspiration. The ‘muse’ has hit.
I like to think of it as a spiritual bubble gun blowing in our face. Each bubble is an idea. If we’re not careful, all kinds of ideas bubble up and expect attention. That’s the mind’s job, to filter through a constant stream of ideas.
But you are not your mind. It serves you. It is an organ in the constellation of psychic and biological organs that make up your body. And ideas come from all sorts of places: other people, cultures, angel… even parasitic psychic phenomena.
Some of it feels comfortable. Some makes us uneasy.
The mature, discerning adult in faith doesn’t automatically accept ‘good feels’ equals good ideas, and ‘bad feels’ equal bad ideas. That’s kryptonite to any spiritual growth.
Great truths and ideas are like multi-sided icebergs, with only a shard pressing through into our dimension. At a later time, a new, resonant truth will emerge to enrich the last.
We must challenge everything, and hold fast to what is good.
Martin Shaw took 100 days to sit in the wilds and tell stories to the trees and river edge and undergrowth, to find out what it’s like to be an ancient storyteller. By the end of his retreat, the rain and relentless sunlight and scores of spirits broke through his armor, broke into him. He was finally ready to meet the Wild and Mossy Face of Christ in the wilderness. And Christ came.
Martin has never been the same. Today, he seeks communion with the Orthodox church.
“When the Catholic novelist closes his own eyes and tries to see with the eyes of the Church, the result is another addition to that large body of pious trash for which we have so long been famous.” Flannery O’Connor, ‘Catholic Novelists and Their Readers’
Fiction is more than a new stained-glass window to look at the same things.
Fiction is a Narnian door, a golden ticket, a stumbling over a dragon egg. It is a delving into our own personalities, interests, and hard-won insights, like swimming in a sunless sea for the glint of treasure.
We are like pioneers for our people, wrestling with ourselves to understand our own contribution to the world hoard.
We digest deep, dangerous, and delightful ideas for others into a story.
When culture crashes, storytellers are first-responders. Almost like time travelers, because we imagine a future we believe in, and travel to it in our imagination, and publish our ideas to help others get there too.
Our ideas of a thriving human world can be wrapped in cosy fiction, in thrillers, in anti-hero grimdark, epic fantasy, murder mysteries… All of it.
Ideas crash into the gravel, wind-blown beaches of our mind, like elves making landfall, pulling themselves hand over hand out of the grim, grey salty surf, exhausted, needing care. This beach is the edge of us, where we end, and where everything else begins. We gather up these elves in our arms, some small and huddle them in our hut with a little soup and soft bread. Coax them back to life.
Maybe they stay, maybe they move on.
“Stories will show up powerful, disoriented, and needing shelter, that we desperately need to know about, need to welcome. Amid the garbage washing up in our world, things will arrive on our shore that we need to know about. Not usually mythologies, but fragments of a myth. No idea if they will flourish, or fade. We must see what it has to say.”
Martin Shaw, Courting the Wild Twin
Storytellers do that work for everyone else, because we love it. And it matters. Stories are how our souls survive.
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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.
