As authors, we do our readers no favors by giving them false confidence in easy victories. If we want to encourage them to hold fast to righteousness and life, we need to write stories that show truth’s triumph over evil’s strongest arguments—not its weakest.
Storytelling is an opportunity to experiment with life. We get to try on characters’ worldviews for size and experience how they play out in action.… Read More »Experiment on Your Characters (How to Make Readers Think)
Thought-provoking stories don’t just make us wonder whether the characters are going to learn their lesson. They push us to pursue truth by putting us in situations where WE don’t yet have the answers.
As an author, the best way to do this is by forcing your characters to confront dilemmas where every option comes with a devastating cost.
There’s something deeply satisfying about a story worth chewing on. As much as we appreciate a great story’s offer of an escape, we also hunger for meaning to follow us back into real life and transform the way we see the world.
When we remember our favorite stories, we often think first of the climactic battles, traumatic events in the backstory, and world-rocking inciting incidents. But often,… Read More »The Power of Small Moments: The Little Things that Make a Life
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a story of discovery because it is a story of desire. Longing is the wind that fills the… Read More »Longing & Curiosity
“This is a very great adventure, and no danger seems to me so great as that of knowing when I get back to Narnia that… Read More »Reepicheep: On Embracing Adventure
When the dragon Eustace came to the well, he thought the water would soothe his pain. The Lion had something much bigger in mind. For… Read More »The Awakening of Eustace: Part IV
Eustace Clarence Scrubb did not know how to be a dragon. His sharp tongue and pretentious vocabulary were useless in a dragon’s mouth, and his… Read More »The Awakening of Eustace Part III
Eustace Clarence Scrubb did not like adventures. Adventures meant drowning in something you had no capacity to control. It meant reality shifting under your feet… Read More »The Awakening of Eustace: Part II