The One Person Who Changes Everything You Create

Every writer has an ideal reader living somewhere in the back of their mind. And every content creator has an ideal viewer.

Not the entire audience. Not the demographic profile or the market category. One specific person. The individual toward whom you're instinctively aiming, whose response you're imagining when you make a thousand small decisions about what to include, what to cut, what to convey plainly and what to leave for the individual to discover on their own.

Mine has shifted over the years, but she has always shared a few qualities. She's honest with herself, even when it's uncomfortable. She carries her faith seriously but not rigidly. She has been through something hard and is still standing, a little worn but not defeated. She reads because she needs more than distraction. She needs to feel less alone in the specific texture of her experience.

I write for her.

Knowing the individual who will receive what you create doesn't narrow the content. It focuses it. In writing, the most universal books are almost always the ones written with deep specificity toward a particular kind of reader, because specificity is what creates the feeling of being truly seen. A reader who feels seen becomes a reader who stays.

If you create anything — writing, art, music, content of any kind — knowing your one reader, your one viewer, your one listener, changes everything about the choices you make. It moves you from performing for a crowd to speaking directly to that one, individual person who needs what you have to offer.

That is where real connection begins.

Who do you create for? Is there one person, real or imagined, whose response matters most to you? I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

Why Stories Reach Places Sermons Can't

Why did Jesus use parables and tell stories?

He could have delivered doctrine. He could have outlined theology with precision and clarity and left no room for misunderstanding. Instead he told stories about lost coins and prodigal sons and farmers scattering seed. He wrapped truth in narrative and handed it to people who wouldn't have received it any other way.

That wasn't an accident. It was strategy. And it's the oldest and most effective one we have.

Stories reach places that direct instruction cannot. They slip past the defenses we carry. The skepticism, the self-protection, the quiet resistance we bring when we feel like anything is trying to change us. We let a story in because we think we're just being entertained. By the time we realize it's doing something more, it's already done it.

I've seen this happen in readers. A woman who picked up one of my novels during a painful season and found, in a fictional character's struggle, the language for something she hadn't been able to name in her own life. A reader who said a particular scene spoke to him in a way that years of sermons hadn't touched.

I don't say that to diminish sermons. Preaching is also a key way to convey those hard-hitting truths. But story does something different. It creates an experience rather than delivering a message, and experience changes people in ways that information alone rarely does.

That's why I write fiction. Contrary to what some might think, fiction isn't a replacement for truth. It's stories pointing readers toward it, leading them through it, and wrapped in it.

The story is the sermon the heart is often most willing to hear.

When has a story (a book, a film, a song) reached you in a place that nothing else could? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Find Your People: Why Community Changes Everything

Writing is solitary work.

A story gets built inside one person's imagination, transferred through one person's hands, shaped by one person's understanding of character and language and what makes a scene feel true. No one can do that part for you, and no one should try. The solitude is where the work actually happens.

But that solitude is sustainable only when it's held inside a larger community. The writers who last are almost never the ones who go it entirely alone.

I know this from experience, both kinds. I know what it feels like to be connected to a community of people who understand this work from the inside, and I know what it feels like when that connection frays or goes quiet. The difference is not subtle. It's part of what led to my period of silence and lack of new releases.

What ACFW Gave Me

I've been part of American Christian Fiction Writers almost since it began, and the organization has shaped my career in ways I'm still discovering.

The most obvious gift is access to editors, agents, craft education, and the broader ecosystem of Christian publishing. But what has mattered more, in the long run, is the relationships. The authors I've met through ACFW who have become genuine friends. The ones who understand without explanation what it means to be in the middle of a difficult manuscript, or to receive a disappointing editorial letter, or to watch a book release into the world and wonder whether it found the readers it was meant for.

There's a particular relief in being known by people who share the specific aspects of your experience. It doesn't require as much explanation. You can say certain things about the loneliness of a long project, about the doubt that lives alongside the work, about the strange grief of finishing a book, and be understood immediately, without having to first explain why those things are hard.

I never want to take that kind of community for granted.

Why Community Matters More Than You'd Think

Writing community doesn't have to be formal or large to be real. Some of the most sustaining connections I've had in this work have been a single author friend who checks in during a hard stretch, who celebrates a win, who tells you the truth about my work and encourages me.

The authors who have been that for me are among the people I value most in my professional life. And I try, imperfectly and consistently, to be that for others.

Creative isolation is a danger. And you often don't see it until it's already a problem.

You can go a long time producing work without meaningful community and not fully realize what's missing until you find it again. Until you're in a room full of people who understand the work you do and feel something loosen in your chest that you didn't know had been tight. That happened to me. It's part of why the long season away was as hard as it was, and part of why returning to community has been as restorative as returning to the writing itself.

If you're a writer reading this and you've been going it alone, find your people. It will change things in ways you can't fully anticipate from where you're standing. The work is yours alone to do. But you don't have to do it in isolation.

Have you found your community, or are you still looking? What has connection with other creative people meant to you? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Faith in Fiction: How I Write What I Believe Without Preaching It

"Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under cover of romance [fiction] without their knowing it." ~ C.S. Lewis

I've been asked more than once how I keep faith from feeling forced in my novels.

That's a fair question. Anyone who reads broadly in the inspirational fiction genre has probably encountered both ends of the spectrum. You have the story where faith is woven in so naturally you barely notice the seams. Then, there's the story where a character delivers what amounts to a theological treatise in the middle of what was supposed to be an emotionally charged scene.

The second kind pulls you right out of the story. It reminds you of the author behind the curtain with a message to deliver, and suddenly you're no longer living inside the narrative. You're being instructed by it. This aligns with a common bit of advice: Show, don't tell. That second kind? It's telling, not showing.

That's not what I want to write. It's never been what I want to write. And I try hard not to write it.

But I also don't want to scrub faith out of my stories entirely, because it's genuinely part of how I see the world. It shapes how I understand people, why they make the choices they make, what they're really looking for underneath the surface desire or conflict. Removing it entirely would be like trying to write without a moral compass at all. While that's technically possible, it would produce something that doesn't actually sound like me.

So how do you write what you believe without turning your novel into a sermon?

Starting With People, Not Lessons

Sometimes, when in the beginning stages of writing a new story, it's tempting to start with the theme I want to explore or the spiritual truth I hope a reader takes away. But that will almost always lead to preaching or narrative instruction. 

No. To avoid that, you start with the people. The ones who are broken, contradictory, wanting things they can't quite name, afraid of things they won't quite admit.

Real human beings, even fictional ones, are complicated. They don't move through life collecting tidy lessons. They stumble into grace sideways. They resist the very thing that would help them. They sometimes do the right thing for the wrong reason and the wrong thing out of genuine love.

When I start there, with characters who feel true, the faith elements find their natural place in the story. A character wrestling with whether she can forgive someone who hurt her isn't a vehicle for a lesson on forgiveness. She's a person in pain, and the question of forgiveness is simply part of what that pain demands of her. The reader doesn't feel preached at because I'm not preaching. I'm just following this woman through something hard and letting the story ask the question without forcing the answer.

What Faith Actually Looks Like in a Story

In practice, this means faith in my novels tends to show up the way it shows up in real life. Quietly, imperfectly, and usually smack dab in the middle of something difficult.

It looks like a character who prays and doesn't get the answer she wanted. Or someone who grew up in the church and still isn't sure what he believes anymore. It looks like a moment of unexpected grace that a character almost misses because she's too busy being angry. And it also looks like doubt that doesn't get neatly resolved by the final chapter, because some doubt doesn't resolve that quickly and readers know that.

It won't look like a character who exists primarily to speak truth into another character's life at convenient narrative moments. And it doesn't look like a crisis of faith that gets wrapped up in a single conversation. It also won't have a redemption that costs nothing.

The faith that resonates in fiction is the faith that has been tested by something real. And the only way to write that honestly is to let the characters be tested by something real first.

Why It Matters to Get This Right

I write inspirational fiction because I believe story is one of the most powerful ways truth travels. Not truth shouted for all to hear. Lived truth. The kind that sneaks past your defenses because you're invested in a character and you feel what they feel before you've had a chance to decide whether you agree with the premise.

A heavy-handed faith narrative can do more damage than good. It can make readers feel manipulated, or confirm the suspicion that Christian fiction is more interested in delivering a message than telling a real story. I don't want to contribute to that.

Instead, I want a reader to finish one of my books and feel something true. Maybe something they couldn't have articulated before they read it. Maybe something they needed to feel without knowing they needed it.

If the faith in the story helped carry them there without announcing itself along the way, then I've done my job.

So, have you ever read a book where the faith element felt completely natural? How about one where it felt forced and pulled you out of the story? What made the difference? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.