C.S. Lewis – Almost An Author

Why a Pastor Writes Speculative Fiction by MB Mooney

My pastor and mentor, Larry, grimaced at me back in my early twenties. “Why do you like those scary movies and books? They’re disturbing, violent, and weird.”

I grinned at him. “Have you read the Bible?”

God got a hold of my life at the age of fourteen, and I dove in with everything I had, learning, growing. I couldn’t get enough.

I also loved speculative fiction. I read and watched horror, sci-fi, fantasy, superheroes, all of it. Novels, movies, stacks of comic books. I consumed it all.

Now, I love all kinds of stories, but I always felt drawn to the weird and dark ones. Today, as a pastor and author of epic and urban fantasy, I have studied writing, literature, and scripture, and I understand why.

The best of sci-fi and fantasy (even horror) does the same as all great literature – makes commentary on the human condition. Whether it was Verne with the Time Machine or Tolkien with the Lord of the Rings, these stories connect and endure because of universal questions of identity, humanity, or good and evil. Oh, there may be spaceships or dragons or serial killers, but at the heart, they tell us something about ourselves.

As I told my mentor, there are disturbing parts of the Bible that I didn’t learn about in Sunday School. Judah has sex with his daughter in law, who he thinks is a prostitute, and then she gets pregnant with a kid God used in Jesus’ lineage. And in Judges! We would love to forget the Levite who allows his concubine to get raped, and then when she dies, he cuts her into twelve pieces to motivate the other eleven tribes to go to war with the Tribe of Benjamin.

I could go on with stories from David or Lamentations and even the New Testament. They express an important truth. Life is sometimes tragic and violent and disturbing. Is God good in those moments? Can God redeem those stories and the people within them? He can and does. Christian literature, whatever the genre, should show the tragedy and the redemption.

C.S. Lewis said, “Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”

Jesus spoke in parables, stories to teach a point. Often, however, those stories only confused people. His disciples begged him to stop speaking in parables and rejoiced when he spoke clearly (John 16:29). Jesus didn’t speak in parables to fully express the truth but to start a conversation, to hide the truth and see who would dig further than a story into the God telling the Story. (Matthew 13:10-17)

Not to mention, God is a creative God. His people should be the most creative. Speculative fiction gives us new worlds, future technology, and impossible creatures. Sounds like our Father.

And here is where writing speculative fiction, at its best, comes in. Yes, it can entertain, but it should use that wild imagination to begin spiritual conversations. Who better than pastors and Christians to be creative and tell the types of stories that engage the culture?

Tips for Christian authors as they write speculative fiction:

Learn the language. Like any missionary, know your audience. Read and learn to love the best of speculative fiction. Find your favorites and watch for themes and universal emotions.
Be creative. Don’t copy other writers. Pray and wait for those original ideas that make people say, “I never thought of it that way before.”
Kill your fears. Connect with human fears and flaws in your story. The best way to do this? Find what your greatest fear is, and write a story that kills that fear with the truth of faith, hope, and love.
Be redemptive. It is more common to have stories in our culture from an amoral, nihilistic worldview. But if we believe we are created in the image of God, people long for stories of redemption, hope, and moral good. Tell those stories. And be ready for the conversation.

Peace.

MB Mooney has traveled and ministered all over the world. He writes fantasy and non-fiction, works for #CoffeeThatMatters, and pastors a church where he lives in Suwanee, GA with his amazing wife and three great kids.

Say It Like Sayers- How the Queen of Copywriting Introduced the King of Kings to a Nation at War

December 1941. London. The worst of the blitz just ended. A nation at war faced Christmas. The BBC’s charge? Uplift the spirits and strengthen the spines of Britain with a radio drama about Jesus. The whole nation will tune in. Needed: One writer who can tell history’s most powerful story to a people facing unprecedented evil.

Who did the BBC choose to write the play The Man Born to Be King?

A genius.

Was it C.S. Lewis? Nope. It was Dorothy Sayers. And you know how Sayers got her start as a wordsmith? If you guessed “advertising copywriter,” you nailed it in one. Give yourself a chocolate.

Sayers spent the years 1922-1931 writing ad copy. Her clients included a mustard company and the producers of Guinness beer. She is credited with coining the phrase, “It pays to advertise.”

Dorothy Sayers wasn’t just any old copy hack, and I don’t mean to give the impression that she was. She was one of the first women to attend Oxford University. Her scholarship of Dante is legendary. She was an acclaimed novelist and poet. Her works on theology, feminism, and creativity are cited regularly by writers today. But with all that talent, she spent nine years writing about such riveting topics as mustard and beer. In fact, her first novel was entitled Murder Must Advertise and is about the death of a copywriter in his office at an ad agency.

Some folks might argue that it was Sayers’ theological scholarship or skill as a novelist that earned her the privilege of writing The Man Born to Be King. She was a heavyweight theologian and novelist, for sure, but I believe Sayers alone could write the BBC’s most important religious and political work because she was an ad copywriter at heart. That means everything she wrote, she wrote with her audience in mind. She wrote with a creative eye on those people who would turn on their radios, shush their children and enter into a story world that lit their homes with hope in a time of deep darkness.

The radio drama, The Man Born to Be King, proved to be among the BBC’s most controversial productions ever. One religious group even claimed the fall of Singapore was proof of God’s disapproval of the program.

Why such a fuss? A passion play is pretty dry fare for church folks these days. Not in 1940s England though! The BBC even had to garner special governmental permission to include Jesus as a character in the production. And what a Jesus he was!

Sayers made her characters speak in the everyday slang, jargon and accents of 1940s Britain. The Biblical characters were just like the hearers’ neighbors, full of conflicting motivations and common human feelings. It was dramatic. Thrilling. Immediate.

Mailboxes at the BBC soon swelled with letters from people telling how the drama had indeed uplifted their spirits, strengthened their resolve, and in many cases, reintroduced them to a life lived in the Spirit of the Man born to be king. C.S. Lewis read the play every Holy Week. In his letter to Sayers, Lewis wrote, “I shed real tears (hot ones) in places.”

Dear Aspiring Novelist, do you want to write a narrative that can bring tears to the eyes of C.S. Lewis and inspire a nation to live its faith in the face of evil’s onslaught?

Start by writing advertising copy.

All the time that Dorothy Sayers wrote about beer and mustard, she was learning how to communicate with the average British buyer of her day. She knew what he spent his money on, so she knew his heart and imagination. Better than any other scholar or novelist, she knew those folks had no time or emotional space for a scholarly, erudite, and high-sounding Jesus. If He was to matter to them, He had to talk like them. His friends and neighbors had to sound like their friends and neighbors.

Where did Sayers learn that? At Oxford? Hardly. She learned it staring at a blank piece of paper, wracking her brain for a way to make mustard meaningful.

I write ad copy for hotel chains, and we call that “guest-centered copy.” When I worked in non-profit communications, we called it “donor-centered copy.”

What does it mean to write with your audience in mind? Three quick things:

Tell them exactly what they want to know. Avoid pure marketing speak. Since the time readers spend on websites can now be measured in nanoseconds, every word has to be informative as well as interesting. As my editor told me, “Don’t just say the hotel is an oasis of comfort. Say what makes it an oasis of comfort.”
Use everyday language. Unless you are writing advertising copy for a swanky brand, stick with plain language. Someone recently said to me, “It’s Dollywood, not Hollywood.”
Imagine the scene from the reader’s or buyer’s perspective. What feeling do they get when they imagine themselves swimming in your hotel’s pool, spreading your mustard on their sandwich, or pouring out a glass of your brand of beverage? Evoke that feeling.

Of Jesus’s passion, Sayers’ wrote, “God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own.”[1] Because she was an advertising copywriter, Sayers got – really got – people “painfully like us.”

Want to write a write a story that’s powerful enough to bring C.S. Lewis to tears? Learn to write buyer-centered ad copy first. You’ll be amazed what it does for your storytelling prowess. Oh, and did I mention that writing ad copy pays? Yep, it pays to advertise.

About Holland Webb

I love telling the stories that people put down so they go take action. I’m an advertising copywriter by day, an aspiring novelist by night, a parent, a dog-lover, a prison volunteer and a follower of Jesus.