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@obrian-of-the-surface-world I’m not @steward-of-the-pen so please forgive me for interjecting my own thoughts.

But if you somehow knew the author was writing this character deliberately that way, so that it would cause a certain alienation between characters, how long would your patience hold with this character if you knew that he would later come to understand that relationship precedes revelation?

You have to make clear to the reader this is a “flaw” from which the character is going to grow. So long as you do so, you make a promise and beg the reader’s patience. Hopefully your reader is charitable and not too annoyed by whatever particular flaw it is. On the other hand, in a specific situation like this, it would need to be blatantly obvious to me that this was a “flaw,” because one of the tropes of Christian fiction is that this trait is a positive virtue rather than a flaw. If I thought a character was going to spend the whole story piously spewing Scripture while the world constantly rejects and shuns them for it, I’d think the author just had a victim complex. Which is usually the case with characters like this. Glad to hear you’re doing differently in your own work.

In light of that statement, what do you think the purpose was when Jesus spoke to the people in parables? Just want your take on it.

Again, can’t speak for Steward, but we aren’t Jesus, and we aren’t proselytising with our fiction. At least, I hope not.

Are there stories that can show us more than what we already believe?

Without question. Unless you know all there is to know about every facet of human existence, you can’t possibly know how what you believe applies to all of life. Internalizing lived experiences of other people will give you a better, closer-to-objective perspective on what it means to believe what you believe. Put crudely: You can preach all you want that murder is wrong, but if you’ve never felt the urge to hurt or kill, never seen the effects of murder in a community, never heard of or seen a person who murdered and then repented: You’ll be a far less effective preacher of the truth, because you’ll have no idea what you’re talking about. You could argue your involvement in it is meaningless because God is the one to do the important work, but I’m a firm believer in giving God the best we have to work with. No point in being lazy about it because we aren’t supposed to be the ones doing the heavy lifting. Not that I’m saying you or anyone is lazy =P

Yes, craft sharpening will come, but you improve by the doing, more than by studying all the rules and trying to implement them.

I don’t agree at all. Purposeful, deliberate practice makes perfect, not just any practice. I won’t get better at chess by playing a lot of chess, nor will I get better at basketball by throwing a ton of balls at a hoop. You get better at chess by studying the patterns of grandmaster play and internalizing them, and you get better at throwing basketballs by deliberately changing every single shot until you consistently achieve the ideal. We let the relative subjectivity of writing impede improvement in the same ways other crafts and practices have learned to improve themselves. Putting a rapid first draft on paper is a great skill because it helps you finish a thing, but with enough deliberate practice I promise you could get to where your first drafts are worth using.