Author Robert Fate ~ Interviewed

N.J. readers. Robert Fate has given us an offer we just can't refuse. Read his comments about marketing and make sure you leave a comment. A dozen of you will be randomly chosen to receive one of Robert's Baby Shark books. Make sure I can get in touch with you for your snail mail addy should you be one of the lucky winners. Thanks, Robert. Deadline to comment...June 15th. Winners will be notified.



Tell us a bit about your current project.

In case some of your readers are not familiar with Robert Fate and his Baby Shark crime/adventure series, may I explain a bit about the storyline and the characters?

The Baby Shark stories take place in Texas in the 1950s.

Baby Shark is Kristin Van Dijk’s nickname. Baby because that’s what her father called her and Shark because she shoots a mean game of pool.

In the ’50s, she is the youngest private investigator in the American southwest and the only woman in Texas to carry that permit. She is Otis Millett’s partner at the Millett Agency in Fort Worth.

Kristin was 17-to-19 years old in book one and is 23 years old in book four. She’s a natural platinum blonde, five seven, and varies according to her exercise from 125 to 130lbs. She doesn’t think of herself as pretty, but folks say she is. Her standard dress is black Levi’s and boots with colorful shirts and a short leather jacket. In cool weather, she wears a black wool stocking cap.

She carries a Colt .38 Super Automatic and can use it. She also carries knives in her boots, and can use them, too. She learned to handle these weapons so she would never be afraid again. Read Baby Shark, book one in the series, to understand why.

Her on again off again boyfriend is a Dallas homicide detective named Lee.
Her dearest friend is Henry Chin, a Chinese/American who saved her life.
Her dog’s name is Jim, a 120 lb German shepherd who pretty much does what he wants.

The Baby Shark book titles are: Baby Shark; Beaumont Blues; High Plains Redemption; and Jugglers at the Border.

Now, about your question - Baby Shark’s Jugglers at the Border was finished this past month and is scheduled for release in September 2009. This is book number four in the Baby Shark series and will be introduced on the back cover as follows:

October 1958––When Otis Millett’s estranged wife, Dixie Logan aka The Dallas Firecracker, as she was known on the Texas striptease circuit, is murdered it spurs a manhunt that pairs Kristin and Otis with Lt. Carl Lynch, a straight-arrow homicide detective with the Fort Worth PD.

This blending of by-the-book and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants investigative styles brings Kristin way too close to a ruthless cop-killing gang of bank robbers and their boss, a dreamy maniac who lives with his mother and hears voices.

The question that endangers Kristin’s life and leads to a chase from Fort Worth to New Mexico is where did Dixie hide the bank heist loot?

Hold on tight––once again bad men learn too late they should have taken Baby Shark seriously.

However, if you mean by “current project” what I’m writing at the moment, here is the answer to that: I am presently writing a standalone novel, not associated in any way to the Baby Shark series. I decided, just for a change of pace, to pen a contemporary noir in third person with a male protagonist. I call the novel Kill the Gigolo and it takes place in New York City and on the Pacific coast of Mexico. The book cover copy will say something like the following:

Al Foley, the Boston Godfather, didn’t have his boys simply kill Freddy Bledsoe. He had him mutilated by an IRA fugitive he harbored. So Freddy spent the final few terror-filled minutes of his life staggering about disrupting traffic at Broadway and Amsterdam until he collapsed and died from loss of blood.

The New York Post bought up every nasty cell phone picture taken of Freddy’s departure. Which meant most of the city had its nose in some mob business, and the feeling was the business was unfinished. The city held its breath; who would be next?

That would be Erik Lamar if Al Foley had his way.

Because what got his friend Freddy murdered, Erik was a part of. It was an incident really, a small matter in the overall scheme of things, but the old Irish mobster didn’t see it that way. So Erik got it––what happened to Freddy was a Girl Scout demerit compared to what was planned for him.

But first Al Foley had to catch him, and Erik was headed for Mexico––unfortunately, out of the frying pan and into the fire.

So, that’s what’s happening at the moment. If all goes as planned (laughter here), Kill the Gigolo will be released in the spring of 2010.


We are all about journeys...unique ones at that. How convoluted was your path to your first published book? Share some highlights or lowlights from your path to publication.

I might not have done this to you except you used the word “convoluted.” So, here’s a little bio biz to help launch this answer. Robert Fate is my pen name. The name on my birth certificate is Robert Fate Bealmear. I’m a Marine Corps veteran who lived in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne. I worked as an oilfield rough neck on a Texaco rig in Northeastern Oklahoma and a TV cameraman in Oklahoma City. I was a fashion model in New York City for a few years to earn a living while I co-authored a stage play with my buddy Don Chastain. We never sold it.

I was a project manager and later a sales exec in Las Vegas after working as a chef in a Los Angeles restaurant, where Gourmet Magazine asked for my Gingerbread recipe—actually, it was my grandmother’s recipe. Along the way, I owned a company that airbrushed flowers on silk for the garment industry, and then I wrote scripts for the soap opera Search for Tomorrow. With the support and encouragement of Bruce Cook, a good friend, I produced an independent feature film. As a Hollywood special effects technician, I won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement.

I live in Los Angeles with my wife Fern, a yoga enthusiast and ceramic artist. Our fabulous daughter Jenny is a senior at USC. We have a dog, four cats, and a turtle named Pharrell.

Along about the age of 70, I decided to write crime fiction, and that birthed the Baby Shark series, told in the voice of a young woman (or girl, as the Texans are fond of saying). Everything that I have done, everywhere I’ve lived and worked, every person I’ve met has inspired some aspect of my writing.

The “walk on” characters in my books, the people we meet––maybe only once in our lives and only briefly––tell us a lot about themselves in those few moments our paths cross. It is realism I’m striving for when I expose their lives in my stories, those momentary insights enrich our existence and, I think, round out a story. Years ago, the man on the bus in Thessaloniki who pretended to pull his hair while complaining that it was idioms that made learning foreign tongues difficult has helped me with Henry, a Chinese/American who works constantly to improve his English.

The publication of Baby Shark happened after many inquiries, many rejections, and the kissing of lots of frogs. Giving up wasn’t part of the plan, so I kept working it until I finally met an editor with Capital Crime Press, a small publishing house in Colorado who liked my writing––or probably more to the point––he liked the story and the way it was told. Fortunately, Baby Shark was appreciated and applauded by some influential web sites, 4MA and DorothyL in particular. That exposure led to the first book ending up on some top ten lists, winning some awards, and becoming a finalist for an Anthony at Bouchercon 2007. You have to think if the story could do all that, what were the rejections all about? But few books are everyone’s cup of tea. So I guess the message is to keep looking for your tea drinkers, those who like your work while accepting the fact there will be those who don’t.

Most recently, my publisher was instrumental in the sale of the motion picture and television rights to a Hollywood producer. Brad Wyman, producer of Monster (starring Academy Award winner Charlize Theron), has Baby Shark on his production schedule for 2009. I was thrilled by this turn of events and am grateful for all that’s happened, but in my heart, I don’t believe the journey of Baby Shark is anywhere near its end. I think there is more in store for Kristin, Otis, Henry, and Jim, things that haven’t even been considered yet.


Do you still experience self-doubts regarding your work, or struggle in a particular area such as writers block or angst driven head-banging against walls? Please share some helpful overcoming hints that you’ve discovered.

Since I long ago relinquished all creative credit to that “other guy” who does the writing while I’m spaced out in alpha state, I never suffer writers block or angst driven anything. For example, I’ll be sitting in the living room staring out the window at the distant mountains and my wife will ask me if I’m working. See how that goes? It is most apparent to me when I’m reading something the “other guy” has written and I’m surprised by it. “Did I write that?” I look forward to every minute I spend writing. And, since writing is really rewriting and a book is never really finished, it’s a good thing there are deadlines. It’s difficult to stop doing something that is so enjoyable, so satisfying.


What mistakes have you made while seeking publication? Or to narrow it down further what’s something you wish you’d known earlier that might have saved you some time/frustration in the publishing business?

I’m not certain that mistakes would be the way to put it, but if writing is the fun part, marketing is the necessary part, and that’s something anyone seeking to publish a book should understand. With a small publisher, I quickly learned that marketing, promotion, and advertising were shared efforts. Every deal is unique about how sharing is defined, but the items mentioned above will need to be addressed to some degree no matter the size of your publisher. The big time writers––we know who they are––have these things happen for them like magic. But the rest of us, the majority, must do some or all of what generates sales or nothing, make that NOTHING, will happen with our books.

So, give up the idea that you can write it, go to Bora Bora, and just cash checks. It simply doesn’t work that way––for the majority. Write something that makes you a big time writer and all bets are off.


What is your favorite source for finding story ideas?

I don’t get ideas. That other guy does. I just nod my head and say thanks when they come rolling in. But, as far as I know, they emerge from the deep unconscious or maybe from some little something you noticed while out for a walk. All this is to say, I don’t know where ideas come from, I’m just happy they appear. In fact, your question has given me an idea.


Have you ever had one of those awkward writer moments you’d like to share with us, the ones wherein you get “the look” from the normals? Example, you stand at a knife display at the sporting goods store and ask the clerk which would be the best to use to disembowel a six foot man…please do tell.

It’s interesting how we have preconceived ideas about the reactions of others. I have asked policemen (after telling them I write crime fiction) about certain details concerning an act of violence or the use of a weapon and have never gotten anything but complete and candid answers. Maybe living in Los Angeles gives a writer an edge, since there are so many screenwriters and other creative sorts out here working in the entertainment industry. But I have telephoned businesses in distant cities, explained my need, and gotten cooperation, too. I’ve found Americans in general to be friendly and cooperative, if given a chance––also, I once called a business in the UK and got the same good-natured cooperation. That was to confirm the direction of traffic on the street where their business was located. They were amused to take a long distance call for that purpose, but gave me what I needed. Weren’t they surprised later to read that someone was murdered on their stoop?


With the clarity of experience what advice would you offer up to the wet-behind-the-ears you if beginning this writing journey today?

I have answered this question before and would say the same again. Marry wisely, someone smart and strong who keeps you honest, and never let a day go by without writing.


What event/person has most changed you as a writer? How?


My friend of thirty years or so, Bruce Cook, writer, filmmaker, teacher, insisted that I write a crime novel. I had written in many other forms and seen my work performed, published, and produced, but somehow, I’d convinced myself I could not write a novel. He insisted that I try. I wrote for seven months, threw it all away, and then wrote Baby Shark. Sometimes, when you’re loitering at the end of the board, someone just needs to give you a little push.


What piece of writing have you done that you’re particularly proud of and why? (Doesn't have to be one of your books or even published.)

A poem I wrote for my wife to help her when she’s having trouble falling asleep. You see the mere mention of my poetry puts her in the arms of Morpheus. All I have to do is say I’ll get the poem from where I keep it handy and her eyes begin to flutter. In fact, it works on one of our cats, too. Out like a light. The whole house is snoring before I get past the first stanza.


Do you have a pet peeve having to do with this biz?

You mean besides not being on the New York Times bestseller list?


Share a dream or something you'd love to accomplish through your writing career.

My initial goal was to write a novel. Then the goal became to write three novels in two years. Now the goal is to have written six novels in four years, and so on––three novels every two years. It would be good if readers liked them, too, of course.


What gives you the greatest writer buzz, makes the trip worth the hassles (besides coffee or other substances, or course )?

Being interrogated by a brilliant mind on a dynamic blog. It doesn’t get better than that.


What is one of the more unique or strange life experiences that has really given you an extra oomph in your writing?

Nothing specific, everything combined. Great friendships and lots of approval that started when I was young. I’m spoiled. My mother gave me a portable typewriter when I was thirteen. I was forty plus when my father-in-law came by the house while I was gone, took (stole) my new IBM Selectric from my desk and sold it. He gave me the check from the buyer and told me to get a computer. No discussion. Just a gentle nudge.


Describe your special or favorite writing spot or send a picture if you'd like.

I use an iBook G4 at a desk that faces a wall. Natural light comes from behind and to the right. Sometimes it’s noisy, sometimes dead quiet. It doesn’t matter. I give it over to the other guy and stay out of the way. My wife will advise me if the house is on fire. If I’m traveling or in a doctor’s waiting room, I write in longhand on a yellow tablet, but usually never use what I write, just refer to it when I’m back at the computer. I rewrite as I go. I don’t really do drafts. My final edit if from hard copy. I often read aloud what I have written, especially dialogue. My wife comes to the door and asks me if I’m working. See how that goes?


What aspect of writing was the most difficult for you to grasp/conquer? How did you overcome it?

Getting started in the first place. I was a geezer before writing the first novel. Now I can’t stop.


What is the first thing you do when you begin a new book?

I will have been thinking about stories for weeks, sometimes months. When I know I’m really going to start a book, I choose one of the stories, sit down, and start writing as fast as I can. After a few thousand words, I have a look, share what I’ve done with a few close friends, and then get busy straightening out the mess. While writing a book I think about it constantly, awake and asleep. I love being distracted (NBA playoffs for instance) because when I get back to it, i.e., let the other guy loose, the work usually goes well. It is rare, but sometimes I don’t feel like writing. So, I don’t. That never lasts long––a day or so, at most, and I never worry about it. When I’m ready, I go back to it. That’s the advantage to being self-employed.


Writing rituals. Do you have to sit somewhere specific, complete a certain number of words, leave something undone to trigger creativity for the next session? Some other quirk you’d like to share?

Nope. Nothing special. Just get some coffee, sit down, and write. Very dull guy. I find that messing with the last dozen or so pages completed is enough to get me back in the flow.


Plot, seat of pants or combination?

If you are asking if I outline, the answer is not really, certainly not a traditional outline. I make notes to myself that spur direction, but mostly I just start writing with a general idea of where I’m going and surprise myself when I find out I didn’t really know where I was going. Mostly, I have the story sort of figured out and then I visualize scenes and consider weather, sounds, time of day, time of year, and scents in the air – all the elements surrounding the characters and the setting. Weird, I know, but that’s what happens. It’s like building a picture, this happens, that happens, but where and what did it sound like? What did it smell like? Here is an example – in Jugglers at the Border, a few minutes after Kristin has shot and killed a man who came way too close to killing her, she leaves the farmhouse where it happened to walk down a dark country road and retrieve her car. The last thing she wants to do is mull over the violence she has just experienced. She looks around as she walks, considers where she is, and thinks about more congenial things.

The walk down the dirt road was cool and pleasant. I thought of my grandma’s farm and tranquil summer evenings and wished I were barefoot. It was overcast, but the moon must’ve been full beyond the haze to cause the sky’s dull glow. The mild breeze smelled of rain. No bugs or animals; they’d long ago hunkered down. Here and there across the silent farmland, single points of light pierced the darkness. Many miles away, along the thin southwestern horizon, lightning danced.

I want the reader to experience what Kristin is seeing and feeling and smelling and hearing and understand her need for gentle memories. That’s what I mean by visualizing a scene. Put a few of those together and the next thing you know, you have a book.


Have you received a particularly memorable reader response or peer honor? Please share.

To have had Baby Shark and Baby Shark’s Beaumont Blues both nominated for the Anthony Award were honors I will never forget. That was rare company for a new guy – see? Spoiled, once again.


Have you discovered any successful marketing/promo ideas that you'd share with us?

Write hard, market harder. How about this – I have four each of the three books in the Baby Shark series that I will send to a dozen of the readers of your blog. You devise the contest or method of distribution and send me the names and addresses and the books will be in the mail PDQ. This is marketing I enjoy. I will be delighted to have twelve new readers. To be clear: that is four copies of Baby Shark; four copies of Baby Shark’s Beaumont Blues; and four copies of Baby Shark’s High Plains Redemption. Ball’s in your court.


Parting words? Anything you wish we would’ve asked because you’ve got the perfect answer?

Perhaps, some time in the future, your readers might like to hear some of my poetry. Just a thought. Thanks for being so gracious.

Read More

TRUTH AND FICTION, by Gene Edward Veith

"Used by permission © WORLD magazine, all rights reserved Subscriptions: 800-951-NEWS or www.worldmag.com."

Christian fiction has become a genre unto itself, filled with clichés, conventions, and pop-culture imitations. And yet, Christian authors were once the giants of literature, writing about all of life from a Christian worldview and using their art to influence the imagination of the whole civilization.

What writers, publishers, and readers need today is not just Christian fiction but fiction informed by a Christian worldview, with the potential to break through once again into the wider culture. Toward that end, WORLD is working with WestBow Press, Thomas Nelson’s new fiction division, to sponsor a fiction-writing contest to discover a new wave of Christian writers.

Some 45 percent of all trade books sold today in the United States are fiction. Although Christian writers were the great pioneers of literature, for awhile evangelicals, both authors and readers, lost interest in fiction. But this has been changing. Fiction is the second-biggest-selling category for Christian publishers, just after “Christian living,” making up 15 percent to 20 percent of all their sales.

Lately, Christian authors and publishers have been imitating the pop culture, with its formulas and conventions, rather than creating genuine literary art. But Christian writers and Christian readers are growing in their tastes and in what they are capable of writing and reading. Though for awhile Christian novels were only read by Christian readers, the barriers that ghettoized explicitly evangelical books have been coming down. Christians have a powerful literary tradition, extending well into the modern era, ready to be reclaimed and carried on.

Divine narrative

The Christian literary heritage begins with the Bible. God reveals Himself not primarily through visions or mystical experiences but through a book. Thus, Christians have always prized reading.

God’s revelation in the Bible—the very word means “the book”— comprises many literary forms: poetry, laws, letters, and while it does contain passages of theological discourse (for example, the epistles of Paul), much of God’s Word consists of narratives. That is to say, stories.
A narrative is a rendition by language of an unfolding action. Whereas expository writing sets forth ideas, narrative re-creates an event. A story gives us characters, dialogue, and description, all of which enables a reader or listener to enter into the experience vicariously by imagining what took place.

The Bible’s narratives are true and historical. (Prose narratives in the historical style that are fictional would not be invented until the 18th century.) But God’s Word gives us true stories of human beings, in particular places and times, doing things, enduring conflicts, and interacting with each other and with God: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the saga of the patriarchs, Moses and the children of Israel, the historical narratives of the judges and the kings, the exile and the return, the four Gospels recounting the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the story of the church in Acts, the mysterious last days in the book of Revelation. Christians have always known that such stories bear rich meanings and that reading them is a profound blessing.

Narratives, whether true or fictional, depict characters, portrayals of human beings. These characters act, creating the story’s plot. Nearly always, the plot entails some kind of conflict, whether an external battle against some enemy, an inner struggle within the heart of a character, the clash of different beliefs, or a combination of all three. There is also a setting, the sense of place and time where the action takes place, and a theme, the truths or insights that the story conveys.

The plot of a story is not just a sequence of random events. Rather, a plot tends to have a definite structure: a beginning, middle, and end.

The Bible, as the Book of books, has a plot of its own, contributing a particular shape to Western narratives. It sets forth a clear beginning: the creation of the universe. There is conflict: human sin vs. the grace of God. The narrative has a middle, a climactic turning point, in which the conflict is resolved: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And the book moves to a definite conclusion, a dénouement tying up all the loose ends into a happy ending: the coming of Christ, the last judgment, and His eternal reign. Not only the biblical narrative but all of human history is taken up into this story, as is the life of the individual believer.

Biblical narrative is very different from the narratives of pagan mythology. Those are organized into cycles. Time repeats itself, with multiple creations and endlessly recurrent patterns. Thus, Greek epics begin in the middle of an already occurring action. Greek plays are organized into cycles of generations caught in the webs of a constantly repeating fate. The Bible’s stories, though, show time as a straight line, with not only a beginning and middle and end but a direction. Thus, Western narratives after the Bible tend to follow a chronological order in which characters can change and grow. Also, myths take place in an idealized realm removed from ordinary human experience. Biblical narrative, though, takes place in specific places and times, emphasizing historicity and stylistic realism.

While biblical narratives are true stories, there is also a sense in which the Bible enabled the invention of fiction. The early church proclaimed that the pagan myths were untrue. They were just stories. They could be appreciated as stories, said the early church, as long as they were not believed to be true. Christians were encouraged to look at myths as stories that may be pleasing and even instructive and worth studying, as long as they understood that the events they recorded never happened. Thus, the early Christians, as far as Western literature is concerned, invented fiction.

Life as it should be

The highest biblical authority for fiction, of course, is the example of Jesus Christ, who taught the kingdom of God by means of parables. Indeed, says Matthew, “He said nothing to them without a parable” (Matthew 13:34). The term comes from the Greek word for “comparison” and was a common ancient genre that explained a truth by comparing it to a hypothetical tale. Jesus used parables to communicate vast spiritual truths to the fallen human mind. His parables, though, did not make the truths He was revealing simpler or easier to understand. Rather, He used parables not only to make things clearer but apparently sometimes to make them more difficult (Matthew 13:10-17), since one symptom of the fallen human mind is to seize upon some superficial knowledge while remaining blind to the full truth and failing to “understand with the heart” (Matthew 13:15).

Some Christians, historically, have objected to fiction on the grounds that it consists of “lies.” But Sir Philip Sidney, with his Puritan sympathies, decisively answered that objection in 1595 in “A Defense of Poesy.” A lie, he said, is something affirmed to be true when it is not true. A piece of fiction, though, “affirmeth not.” It is not presented as something true, but, by its very name, something made-up, an imaginative construction. History, philosophy, even theology, said Sidney, are full of lies: statements put forward as true when they are really false. Fiction, on the other hand, because it never affirms, never lies.

And yet, Sidney says that fiction is connected to a larger truth. Fiction, he said, presents life not as it is, but as it could be and should be. Sidney believed that literature had an important function in the teaching of morality. Fiction can instruct us in the human condition and provide models for us to emulate or avoid, training us to take delight in what is good and to be repulsed by what is evil.

William Kirk Kilpatrick, in Psychological Seduction and Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong, has shown how the moral formation of children is shaped by stories. Children learn to root for the “good guys”—and to identify with them—and to fear and be repulsed by the “bad guys.” It is not enough to tell children abstractly what is right and what is wrong. For them to internalize morality, it must be brought to life.

Fiction does not need to be moralistic to be a good influence. The very act of entering into a character’s point of view is training in empathy, the ability to “rejoice with those who rejoice” and to “weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). Fiction also gives us vicarious experience, the ability to imaginatively experience something without having to experience it in real life. It becomes possible to undergo life-shaping experiences—the danger of war, the trials of love, the stimulation of travel, the overcoming of suffering—from the comfort and safety of one’s easy chair. Though vicarious experience is secondhand and nowhere nearly as powerful as actually experiencing such things in real life, the benefits of reading fiction in broadening a person’s horizons should not be underestimated. Reading fiction can also be a way of reflecting upon the human condition—its tragedies and comedies, its complexity and glories—and it can serve as a mirror to help readers know themselves.

Of course, that fiction can have such a powerful positive influence means that it can also have a negative influence. Vicarious experience can be sinful, with some fiction encouraging evil fantasies and emulation of models that are destructive. Readers need discernment and taste, and they need high-quality books to read.

Romance novels

The earliest fiction in Christian Europe was the genre known as the romance. This refers not primarily to love stories but to medieval tales of knights, chivalry, and adventure. Love was usually an issue in the medieval romances, which led to the later meaning of the term, but their main characteristic was an emphasis on plot, external action, and fantasy (as opposed to hard-edged realism).

The romance tradition includes Christianized versions of pagan legends (such as Beowulf). It also includes imaginative sagas of Christian kings and heroes (King Arthur). The impulse toward fantasy also manifested itself in symbolic stories (the quest for the Holy Grail) and theological allegories (The Divine Comedy).

Realistic fiction, though—as in novels that emphasize characters and their inner lives in an actual-seeming setting—developed much later. At first, these took the form of mock-romances, which made fun of medieval ideals by contrasting them with actual life (Cervantes’s Don Quixote [1605]). Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) took the medieval genre of the Christian allegory and rendered it with an innovative realism. Then there were the pseudo-histories, renditions of romantic plot devices (such as being stranded on a desert island) in a historical style (Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe [1719]).

The first modern novel is probably Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, published in 1740. This work consisted of a series of letters from a young serving girl trying to make her way in the big city. Before long, her employer tries to seduce her, leading to elaborate abductions and escapes as Pamela defends her chastity against a dastardly villain, who eventually becomes converted. The letter device allows Richardson to develop what would become hallmarks of modern narrative: Instead of the author narrating the tale, the main character, Pamela, tells what happened to her in her own voice. And the rather slender and far-fetched plot becomes secondary to the character delving into her own inner life.

After Pamela, the novel as an artistic form exploded in popularity and variety. The early novelists, by and large, worked from a Christian worldview. Pamela knew that extramarital sex was wrong, and she resisted a predatory man to keep her virtue. Even stories that had little explicit religious content assumed a moral and spiritual order. Right and wrong were objective categories. Human beings were seen as sinful yet spiritual beings in a challenging yet ordered world. The early novels’ constant themes of love, marriage, family, responsibility, duty, and purpose were all informed by a biblical view of life.

Jane Austen, the pastor’s daughter, wrote unparalleled fiction about the comedies and dramas inherent in her small country parish. Charles Dickens invented unforgettable characters and sparked social reforms.

Other novelists took up explicit Christian themes and explored them in their depths. Nathaniel Hawthorne explored the dark recesses of our fallen human nature. Fyodor Dostoevsky plunged into the mysteries of sin and redemption. George MacDonald explored his faith both in realistic novels and in highly symbolic and evocative fantasies.

Even in the supposedly secularist 20th century, Christians continued to make their mark as fiction writers. A number of Catholic writers wrote powerful works that addressed the spiritual emptiness of modernity with a vision of Christianity that was seldom merely the theology of Rome: Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory); Walker Percy (The Thanatos Syndrome); Flannery O’Connor (The Violent Bear It Away). Then there were the enormously popular and influential Christian fantastists J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings) and C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia).

These authors were all published by secular, general-market publishing houses. They gained wide audiences and critical acclaim. They also influenced their cultures and touched the lives of their readers, in some cases bringing them to faith.

Yet, ironically, evangelicals—readers, writers, and publishers—were largely ignoring fiction, until they invented a genre of their own.

Genre fiction

In the United States, many conservative Protestants separated themselves from the increasingly secularist modern culture. Part of this was due to Christians who wanted to be uncontaminated by the godless culture, and part of it was due to the godless culture’s hostility to Christian faith.

The Christian publishing industry grew up and its products were sold in Christian bookstores. Most of the books put out were devotional helps, Bible studies, and guides for Christian living. Except for a few historical novels and Bible retellings, there was very little fiction.

Then, in 1978, Frank Peretti’s spiritual thriller This Present Darkness was published, a dark tale about a titanic conflict between demons and angels that loomed behind a small town’s controversies. Jan Dennis, who was Mr. Peretti’s editor with Crossway, told WORLD that his manuscript had been turned down by 15 publishers before Crossway took a chance and put it into print, in a tiny print run of only 4,000 copies. But the Christian horror novel sold over 2.5 million copies.

Mr. Peretti’s novel and its sequels showed evangelical readers the power of fiction (though, arguably, many of them were so inexperienced with fiction that they took the “spiritual warfare” motif as fact, instead). Evangelical publishers now had a market for fiction, which they proceeded to serve with a great variety of products. Today, as much as one-fifth of the sales for Christian publishers comes from fiction: Christian romance novels, Christian horror, Christian science fiction, Christian fantasies, Christian conspiracy novels, Christian political novels, Christian techno-thrillers.

The limitation of this fiction is that it is mostly “genre fiction,” that is, fiction written according to a predictable formula based on prefabricated models. It is geared mainly to entertainment, rather than reflection. It follows conventions, rather than being original. It is written to sell, rather than to be a serious, complex work of Christian art.

Writing in a particular genre need not prevent the work from being valuable. Great literature too has its conventions. The “novel of manners” perfected by Jane Austen and followed by many more is about social interactions leading to marriage. Mysteries, with their detectives solving a crime, follow strict conventions, and yet the form has produced some outstanding writing, including that of Christians (Dorothy L. Sayers, P.D. James). But too often, in the hands of indifferent writers, genre fiction is little more than a collection of clichés.

The bigger problem is that for all of the different genres it follows, evangelical fiction has become a genre unto itself, with conventions of its own. One-dimensional virtuous characters contend against one-dimensional villains. The style is preachy. The theme is moralistic. The plot is characterized by implausible divine interventions. While the convention demands a conversion, the characters are never allowed to do anything very sinful, or, if they do, the author is not allowed to show it. At the end, all problems are solved and everyone lives happily ever after. It is all sweetness, light, uplift, and cliché.

The biblical complexities of sin and grace, the inner conflict between the old nature and the new, the necessity to bear one’s cross, are missing. So is biblical realism. So is the ability to draw in nonbelievers and confront them with the hard truths of God’s Word.

What happened is that while evangelicals at one time pulled away from engagement with the culture, they rejected the high culture of ideas, creativity, and the arts. But they embraced uncritically the pop culture, the realm of entertainment, pleasure-seeking, and shallow commercialism. While the modern and postmodern high culture may be hostile to the biblical worldview, Christianity can compete with the high culture on its own terms by claiming and building upon the absolutes of truth, goodness, and beauty that current worldviews have abandoned. But in embracing the pop culture, evangelicals have opened themselves up to what is shallow, fake, and empty in contemporary life. Instead of filling those voids, pop-Christianity falls into them.

But Christian fiction is changing, heralding perhaps a more fruitful engagement with the culture on the part of American evangelicals.

Mainstream breakthrough

The Left Behind books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins were, in many ways, conventional Christian fiction, following the genre of End Times novels. And yet, the 12 books in the series, swept along by millennium fever, dominated the bestseller lists for a decade. They sold so many copies that they broke out of the Christian bookstore market, into the Barnes & Nobles and Borders, into airport newsstands, onto The New York Times bestseller lists, which once excluded books from Christian publishers no matter how many they sold.

“Left Behind did break down the barriers,” said Mr. Dennis. “It became so huge that it was given an opportunity that most Christian fiction doesn’t get, to sell in the general market.” The secular bookstores started carrying other evangelical titles. In the meantime, Christian publishers started cashing in with other crossover titles (The Prayer of Jabez, The Purpose Driven Life). They now had access to the general marketplace, a vast new audience, which also gave them a new mission, to reach secular readers with the Christian message.

But this meant they had to compete with the established secular publishers. There was a time when books from Christian publishers just did not look as good as those from mainline presses. They looked cheaper, had poorer paper, bad cover art, and just did not seem as professionally designed. This has changed, though, as Christian publishers give more attention to the quality of their production. The writing also had to get better, and it has.

In the meantime, talented Christian writers were finding success with publishing companies that were secular but that allowed them to express their faith in terms of their art: Walt Wangerin (The Book of the Dun Cow); Frederic Buechner (Brendan); Larry Woiwode (Beyond the Bedroom Wall); Jan Karon (The Mitford series); Leif Enger (Peace Like a River); Bret Lott (Jewel). Not to mention Christian authors who became sure-fire bestsellers who wrote more popular fare that was not explicitly religious, but nevertheless allowed their worldview to shine through (John Grisham, The Firm; Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October). Christian publishers wanted to attract writers like that. Lately, some talented new authors have emerged from Christian circles, and now Christian publishers are more inclined to turn them loose.

(**This article was written in 2004. This contest has already taken place**)

WestBow’s experiment

Thomas Nelson is the biggest Christian publisher. Moreover, it is the ninth-biggest publisher of every kind in the world. Currently, over half of its sales are in the general marketplace. The company has just launched a new fiction division, WestBow Press.

Allen Arnold, the head of WestBow, told WORLD that “the days of traditional Christian fiction are over.” His plans are to publish authors who write from a distinctly Christian worldview but whose works go beyond the typical formulas and have the potential to reach beyond the typical Christian marketplace to have an impact on the culture as a whole. “We don’t publish Christian fiction,” he said. “We publish fiction from a Christian worldview.”

He wants to free Christian authors, who often feel constrained by secular publishers to tone down their faith and who feel constrained by Christian publishers who will not let them tell their stories.

“We’ll only partner with authors who write from a Christian worldview, but the stories will be true to what the stories are about,” Mr. Arnold said. “Sometimes faith will be explicit; sometimes more implicit.” Just as the biblical worldview encompasses all of life, the fiction he is looking for need not even be conventionally “religious,” as long as it embodies the reality that God has made.

This does not mean that WestBow will blindly emulate secular publishers. “Readers should know they need not fear being corrupted by a WestBow book,” he said. “We will never publish something that we feel we could not stand with before God.” But there will be no predetermined model or list of rules. There will be no attempt to imitate commercially successful patterns. We should not try to copy what the world is doing or what other publishers are doing, he told WORLD. “We should be tapping into the ultimate creator of all—God—the source of true creativity.”

WestBow inherited Thomas Nelson’s other fiction titles, so some conventionally Christian fiction remains on their list. Mr. Allen stressed that the company will still publish books specifically for the Christian market. But the new division has higher goals. He wants WestBow to become one of the top 20 publishers of general-market fiction.

The vision of publishing high-quality works of art by Christians for general audiences may seem ambitious. But Mr. Allen points out that this is the way it used to be. Christian formula fiction is relatively new, dating just to the 1970s. “Before that, Christian writers wrote for everyone.”
WestBow takes its name from the printing press and bookshop operated by the original Thomas Nelson back in Edinburgh in 1798, which was located on a street named West Bow. That shop sold Bibles, and it also sold Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and, later, books by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and other of the best authors of his day. Why shouldn’t we have Christian writers like that today? Why shouldn’t Christian literature have the cultural influence that it once did?

But God needs to call and equip writers equal to that task. And those writers need to be discovered, mentored, and brought to the public.

To that end, WestBow, in its search for new talent, is working with WORLD in the WORLDview fiction contest. (See the sidebar for details.) If you are a storyteller, enter the contest. If you are a reader, check out the entries that will be posted on WORLD’s blog site, giving your feedback and voting for your favorite. Either way, do your part in carrying on the Christian literary tradition. —•

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