I fully expected that this fiction thing was going to be hard. I even expected that it would be harder than I expected. Turns out, it’s even harder than that. I have a page or two for chapter one almost ready to post, but I’m not entirely satisfied with it.
A lot of religious genre fiction takes pains to avoid the inside of a church. A lot of people like and enjoy church… but it’s not much of an attention-grabber. I’m sure the authors guess that their readers will no more want to sit through two pages of church in a book than they really want to sit through an hour of it in real life. So, they try to set a scene that doesn’t lead the reader to automatically check their watch.
So, I’m taking a chance by starting the narrative with a church service. It’s important to me to get inside the dynamics of religion early, since a great deal of the premise arises there.
I’m also taking a chance by describing a church service that isn’t very familiar to me. I’ve had limited exposure to pentecostal and non-denominational type services. I’m taking this route for three or four reasons. One – I need to push outside my comfort zone. I’d be tempted to be lazy describing church the way it is second nature to me. Two – the pentecostal/non-denominational mindset is particularly open to innovation. Since innovation is key to the premise of an emerging new eschatology, it is likely to be most believable coming from within pentecostalism. Three – if I write about church as I’m familiar with it, I’ll have a hard time not checking my own watch. The Third Wave / rock & roll / Praise & Worship / non-denominational service has less inherent drab factor. In fact, if you are in the mood for it, that way of doing it can be fun and energetic. So, maybe it can help – Four – keep other people interested.
But, like I said – it’s some work writing about something you’ve experienced relatively infrequently. And a church setting doesn’t make introducing characters particularly easy.
So, when I publish the first few pages, give me some feedback. And bear with me.
When it comes to the end of the world religion is very important but so is politics.
But I like the idea of some group looking at the evidence and saying hey, ya’ll have gotten it all wrong. This is the real way it is going to come down.
Be sure and watch Jack Van Impe from time to time to get the conventional wisdom.
But we definitely need a new interpretation. Something to take us for another couple of thousand years.
If you’re going to depict a church service from a tradition you are not familiar with….you might want to carve out some time and attend a few. It might help shape where you’re going in your writing and also prevent you from unwittingly drawing a caricature.
But wouldn’t checking one’s watch be a sign that the scene was startlingly authentic?
Good advice, Terri. I actually have attended a variety of services in pentecostal, independent and non-denominational churchs. More than a dozen. And my hope is to rely on memories of the variety and create a type of synthesis of them that is authentic. I certainly don’t want a caricature – but I’m not sure that I should go back for more research since my deadline for writing that first chapter is today!
You might eventually want to include something about folks who react to pentecostalism as Matthew Murray did.
Mickbic… Yeah – I have to take care to include the darker side of human nature if the story is to have any depth. I don’t think anyone will come in to the first church service shooting – that’s not how I intend to advance the plot line. But there are characters in the shadows of every human endeavor, and I will have to take pains to represent them as well as possible.