Show Don't Tell: When a Story Preaches Unintentionally

It happens in the revision.

You're reading back through a scene you wrote weeks ago and you stop at a line of dialogue that feels a little too on-the-nose, a character observation that reads more like an essay than a thought, a moment where the story pauses and your intention becomes visible underneath it like a watermark.

The story is preaching. And you didn't mean for it to do that.

This is one of the more uncomfortable moments in the writing process, because you have to honestly face your own instincts. The impulse to make sure the reader understands the point is understandable. You care about the truth you're carrying in this story, and you don't want the reader to miss it. But caring too much, holding the message too tightly, has a way of working against itself. The reader feels the grip and pulls back.

The fix is almost always the same: trust the scene to do the work without the explanation. Cut the line that names what the scene is already showing. You know, the famous, "Show, don't tell," command. Let the character feel the thing without narrating why it matters. Return the story to experience and let the meaning live inside the experience rather than beside it.

This is easier to describe than to do. It takes a great deal of authorial restraint that goes against the instinct to make sure the reader gets it. But readers are rather perceptive. They get it. Give them the benefit of the doubt. They get it more fully, in fact, when the story trusts them to see it.

The best message is the one the reader finds without being shown where to look.

Have you ever noticed a story trying too hard to make its point? Did it pull you out of the experience? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Characters Who Don't Know They Have Faith

Some of my favorite characters to write are the ones who don't know what they believe.

They're not skeptics exactly. They don't carry a philosophical position against faith. They're just people who have been shaped by something they haven't yet examined, who operate from a set of values that have roots they haven't traced, who reach instinctively toward hope in dark moments without understanding the source of that instinct.

They have faith. They just haven't called it that yet.

Writing this kind of character takes quite a bit of patience. The temptation is to move him/her toward knowing too quickly. To engineer the moment of clarity and give the reader the satisfying resolution of a character who arrives at belief. Sometimes, that's the right story to tell.

But sometimes, the better story is the one where the character doesn't fully arrive. Where they move closer to something they can't quite name, where their actions increasingly reflect a faith they haven't yet claimed, where the reader can see what they can't see about themselves.

That story reflects the truth about how belief actually develops in real people. It rarely happens all at once. And rarely in a single illuminating moment. More often, it's gradually, quietly, in the accumulation of choices and experiences that slowly reorient a life without the person fully realizing it's happening.

You want to tell that story with care and without rushing. The unnamed faith is still faith. And the reader knows it, even when the character doesn't.

Have you ever seen yourself in a character who was finding their way toward something without quite knowing what it was? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Grace in the Difficult Scene

The easiest scenes to write are the ones where everything goes right.

The breakthrough moment. The reconciliation. The answer arriving after a long silence. Those scenes are satisfying to write because they're satisfying to read. They deliver what the story has promised and the reader receives them with relief and recognition.

But the hard scenes are something else entirely.

The betrayal. The loss that doesn't get explained away. The moment when a character does the wrong thing for understandable reasons and has to live with it. These are the scenes writers sometimes soften, pulling back from the full weight of what the story requires because it feels too dark, too painful, too much.

But grace doesn't live only in the bright scenes. It actually lives most powerfully in the hard ones.

A character who receives kindness she hasn't earned in the middle of her worst moment. A relationship that survives something it probably shouldn't have. A small, quiet act of mercy in a scene that could have gone a different direction entirely. These moments create a completely different landscape than the triumphant ones because they arrive where they're least expected. In the darkness, where grace is most itself.

Writing the hard scene honestly, without softening it into something easier, and then placing grace inside it rather than after it? Well, that's actually one of the most truthful things a writer of faith can do. It reflects how grace actually operates in the real world.

You don't find grace after the hard thing. You find grace inside it.

Has a difficult scene in a book ever moved you more deeply than a triumphant one? What made it stay with you? I'd love to hear in the comments.

What Doubt Looks Like on the Page

A character who never doubts is a character no one believes.

Faith that has never been tested doesn't read as strong. It reads as untried. And readers, especially readers who have carried their own faith through genuinely hard seasons, recognize that difference immediately. A character whose belief is too clean, too certain, too untroubled by the weight of real experience feels like a stranger to them.

Doubt on the page, written honestly, creates recognition. It says to the reader, this person knows what it actually costs to believe, and that makes everything that follows feel earned rather than assumed.

Writing doubt well means resisting two temptations. 

1. Making it too dramatic — doubt as crisis, as collapse, as the thing the plot pivots on. Real doubt is often quieter than that. You find it in the ordinary moments, the unanswered prayers, the silence that stretches longer than expected.
2. Resolving it too quickly — a single conversation, a convenient revelation, and everything is settled. Real doubt doesn't work that way, and readers know it.

The most honest thing a faith-infused story can do is let doubt exist without rushing to fix it. Let the character sit in the uncertainty for a while. Let the reader sit there with them.

That doesn't mean the character is having a crisis of faith or even failing in their faith. It's just what faith actually looks like when it's being lived rather than performed.

How do you respond to doubt in fiction? Does it make a character more relatable to you, or does it make you uncomfortable? I'd love to hear your perspective in the comments.

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.

Letting Characters Speak Words You Can't Say

Some of the most important things I've ever said, I said through a character in one of my novels.

Sometimes I don't realize it until I'm rereading a scene months later and something in it catches me. It could be a line of dialogue, an interior thought, or a moment of raw honesty that I recognize as something I needed to say and didn't know how to say it any other way.

Fiction creates a kind of permission that real life doesn't always offer. Behind the shelter of a character, a writer can approach truths that feel a bit too risky or maybe even embarrassing to state directly. The character can be afraid, or angry, or broken, or desperate in ways the author might not feel safe being in plain view. And paradoxically, that roundabout honesty often reaches readers more deeply than a direct confession would have.

Readers feel this from the other side too. A character says something and a reader thinks, yes, that's exactly it. That's the thing I've been carrying and couldn't name. The character has done the work of articulation that the reader couldn't do alone, and suddenly the reader feels less isolated in their own experience.

That exchange from writer to character to reader, where the truth travels the long way around, is one of the most quietly powerful things fiction does. It connects people across the distance of their private experience and says, you are not the only one. You are not alone.

That's one of the many reasons I write these stories. And it's a very worthy goal to set, every single time.

Has a fictional character ever said something that felt like it was meant specifically for you? Something you'd been feeling but couldn't find the words for? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

The Story You Didn't Know Your Soul Needed

Nobody picks up a novel thinking, this is going to change me.

We reach for a book because we want to be entertained, or transported, or because someone we trust recommended it, or because the cover caught our eye at exactly the right moment. We come to fiction looking for a story. We don't come looking for surgery.

But sometimes surgery is what we get.

The books that have marked me most deeply are almost never the ones I approached with high expectations and deliberate intention. They're the ones I stumbled into during an ordinary afternoon and couldn't put down, that left me sitting quietly afterward with the specific feeling of having been rearranged. Something had shifted. Something that needed to move had moved.

A few off the top of my head that have left a lasting impact are:

• Down from the Cross by Joyce Livingston
• Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers
• Ribbons of Steel & Ribbons West series by Tracie Peterson
• It Had to Be You by Linda Windsor

I didn't know I needed it until it happened.

As a writer, I find this both humbling and clarifying. It means I can't always know, while I'm writing, which scene or character or line will be the one that does something real in a reader's life. The moment I think will land sometimes doesn't. The quiet, seemingly small moment I almost cut sometimes turns out to be the one a reader mentions years later.

My job is not to engineer the transformation. My job is to write the truest story I can and trust that it will find the reader who needs it, in the moment they need it, and do whatever it's supposed to do.

That requires a particular level of faith, and it's one I'm still practicing.

Has a book ever found you at exactly the right moment? One you didn't know you needed until you were already inside it? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Truth in Disguise: the Surprising Power of Fiction

Fiction lies, technically speaking.

I often joke and say I get paid to lie. The characters aren't real. The events didn't happen. The places, in many cases, exist only in the architecture of my imagination. A novel is, by definition, made up.

And yet.

Readers regularly describe fictional experiences in the language of truth. That character understood me. That story changed how I see things. That book told me something real about myself. We don't say those things about things that are simply false. We say them about things that have gotten somewhere true by an unexpected route.

That's the paradox at the heart of fiction, and it's one I find endlessly valuable. A story can be factually invented and emotionally, spiritually, humanly true at the same time. The invented surface carries something real underneath, and what the reader receives is the real thing, not the invention.

This is why I've never felt any tension between writing fiction and caring deeply about truth. The fiction is the vehicle. The truth is the destination. A well-crafted story doesn't lead readers away from reality. It leads them more deeply into it, through a door that would never have opened otherwise.

In this case, disguise isn't deception. It's strategy and grace rolled into one. It's the reason a made-up story can tell you something true about your own life that no amount of straightforward instruction could have ever reached.

Has a work of fiction ever told you something true? Something you recognized as real the moment you encountered it? What was it? I'd love to hear 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.