Writing Toward the Light: Faith in Fiction

The most powerful light in a room is often the one you don't look at directly.

You see it in what it illuminates . The way it falls across a surface, the shadows it creates, the warmth it lends to everything it touches. Someone doesn't need to point it out to you. You know it's there because of what the room looks like with it present.

That's how I think about faith in fiction.

The moment you name it too directly, the moment a character stops and delivers a tidy theological conclusion, the light stops illuminating and starts blinding. The reader feels the sermon underneath the story and the spell breaks. What would have been an experience becomes a lesson, and lessons, however true, don't change people the way experiences do.

Writing toward the light means trusting that it's present without announcing it. It means a character making a choice rooted in grace without stopping to explain that grace is the reason. It means a moment of forgiveness that holds significant weight because the story has earned it. Secondary characters don't need to narrate the significance.

This restraint is one of the harder disciplines in writing. The instinct to make sure the reader gets it is understandable, but it's usually wrong. Readers are perceptive. They feel what's underneath a scene even when it isn't labeled. They receive the light even when no one points at the source.

Trust the story. Trust the reader. Write toward the light and let it do its own work.

Have you ever read a book where faith felt present without being stated? Where something underneath the story moved you without announcing itself? I'd love to hear about it 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.

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.