Is there enough explicitly evangelical content in this story? If there isn’t, am I not really a Christian writer? Well. Are you a Christian? Then write without fear. Do not worry about writing a sufficiently Christian story.

There is no replacement for the habits of reading and writing, but the habit we must pursue in our reading and writing, the one that ought to pervade the rest, is deep thinking. The best writers I know have mastered the habit of the daydream.

If you think about the sound of words, how certain words work better than others in certain sentences not simply because of their meaning but because of the way they look or the way they sing in your head, you’re probably a writer.

In fact, thinking about our writing as primarily for the divine audience will help us avoid writing things that are unhelpful, unwise, and, yes, ungodly.

I outline all of my nonfictions. Starting with a central idea or thesis, I chart out a list of things I think I could say about that central idea or thesis. This list may shorten or lengthen, but it becomes the basis for my chapter outline. If I don’t think I could say a chapter’s worth of things about that supporting

the entering seminarian today has the faculties of a sixth- to eighth-grader sixty years ago, and the seminary curriculum cannot make this seminarian an adult by the time he graduates.

Marilynne Robinson says, “If we could know as feeling what we can know as fact, our literature would be transformed—into something very like the best in all the books we have always loved.”14

Context Rising action (or conflict) Climax Denouement (or falling action) Good stories tend to follow this narrative arc.

In regard to film, challenge yourself with older classics (the works of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock are great places to start) and foreign films (try Akira Kurosawa or Werner Herzog).