Last August, a young man in my church killed himself. He came from a large family, and our community loved him. I decided to chronicle the impact of his death, because a Christian suicide is a troubling situation. If the gospel is a message of hope in the midst of ultimate suffering, what happens when a Christian commits the ultimate hopeless act?
One of the most common tips writers hear is “Just write.” Though that’s a true sentiment, it’s also deceptively simple. How are you supposed to write amid school, family, jobs, sports, church functions, and other activities?
Writers tend to view symbols as literary tropes to develop a story’s theme. However, well-executed symbols not only deepen theme: they enhance the audience’s enjoyment of a story. Here’s a few lessons we can learn from the new Star Wars trilogy about how to craft symbols that emotionally impact readers.
As writers, we love the heroes in our stories, and despite putting them through intense misery, we want them to support the right side. But in Fawkes, the scenario is the opposite, because Thomas spends most of the story fighting for the wrong cause.
Sometimes a book’s theme is straightforward. Eustace is sucked into a painting and learns humility. Henry York crawls through a cupboard and learns bravery. Parvin Blackwater crosses the wall and learns to trust God. But the path to transformation isn’t always that simple. Characters may need to wander through labyrinths of tyranny, persecution, murder, neglect, and revenge.
Fawkes is one of those novels that breaks the “rules” for how to deliver a Christian message without sounding preachy. Many of the tropes used in this novel would be cliched or annoying in other stories. But Brandes makes them work without any of those downsides. Here’s how she did it.
Authors are notorious for inflicting pain upon their characters. In our defense, how else would we propel the plot if our characters didn’t brave the gauntlet?
How is fiction useful? Is devoting our lives and careers to it appropriate? Most of us have wrestled with these questions. For some, concern has been posed by parents, who want to ensure that their children spend their time constructively and seeking truth. Others have sensed unspoken skepticism from the culture around them, as if writing couldn’t possibly be a meaningful pursuit on its own.
Red ink everywhere. If you’ve ever had your writing edited professionally, you’ve experienced the dread of opening the revised document for the first time. All the markup can be discouraging and overwhelming.
Poems come in all shapes and sizes. Some are short like blips on a radar screen, provoking a burst of thought in the reader (haiku, for example). Others are long, sweeping songs full of passion, emotion, suffering, and death (Homer’s epics). And many in between tell stories of people, objects, and animals (from Tennyson to e. e. cummings). But few types of poetry leave you as simultaneously stuck and fascinated as the villanelle.
