I’m Just the Messenger ~ The Story Behind Composing Amelia By Alison Strobel

Alison inherited her writing gene from her father, Lee, and grew up comprising stories on everything from napkins to typewriters. Her talent earned her many awards throughout school, a two page spread featuring her work in her senior yearbook, and even saved her from failing college chemistry. it wasn’t until she moved to California after college that she wrote her first full-length novel, and that’s when God made Alison’s lifelong dream come true.

Alison and her family now live in Colorado. When she’s not writing, she reading, obsessively stalking her favorite online parenting forum, playing pet store(or reading books or teaching homeschool) with her daughters or out with the whole gang exploring their new home state.

You can visit her website here

An Unexpected Encounter

When I was in college, God brought me together with a roommate named Jen. We quickly became friends, and our sophomore year God used our late night chats to bring her into a relationship with Him. The transformation was awesome. She was on fire, a natural evangelist. She stood strong in the face of persecution from friends and family. The presence of the Spirit was almost palpable when you were around her.

I spent my junior year abroad, and one morning I checked my email and found a message from her. It said, “I am so depressed. I want to kill myself.”

It came from nowhere, at least for me, six time zones and an ocean away. My mental picture of her was still that of a young woman living passionately for Christ. I didn’t know about the slow descent into depression she had endured over the last few months, or the history of mental illness that ran in her family. Although curiously, neither did she. It was a carefully hidden family secret—but one you can’t run from when it’s inside your DNA.

For the next three years, Jen struggled to first get a diagnosis, then to get her family’s support for the illness they said was “all in her head” (they were right, but not in the way they meant), and then to find a medication that would keep her stable. She was in and out of the hospital, struggled to pass her classes, and hurt and confused by the new label she wore: bipolar.

Struggling to Find God's Peace

As you might imagine, her faith took some hard hits. But what made it infinitely worse were the ignorant, asinine, and wholly unfounded judgments and advice she received from fellow Christians. 
One guy from our church claimed to have been bipolar until he prayed for deliverance. And while I didn’t doubt his story, it was his assertion that she just wasn’t praying hard enough for healing that made me want to sock him. A hospital chaplain flat-out blamed her, saying her walk with the Lord wasn’t strong enough. And there were people who said she just had to get over it, stop dwelling on it, or push through it, as though she was just being lazy, as though she didn’t agonize over this new reality and would have done anything to change it.

What is it about mental illness that the church has such a hard time dealing with?

What is it about needing medication to keep your brain chemistry stable that makes them think you must not be a real Christian? I’ve never heard someone tell a diabetic they shouldn’t need their insulin, and that they’d be healed if they just prayed harder. I’ve never seen someone tell a wheelchair-bound believer that it’s their own sin that keeps them in the seat. What is the difference?

When Jen was newly diagnosed, we went searching for resources to help her cope. We found a couple books written by people with bipolar, but not much, and nothing from a Christian perspective. I knew then that I wanted to write a book someday that talked about what it was like to be a Christian who struggled with mental illness, and how the people in her life could help her.

Giving a Voice to the Silent


Fast forward ten years: I’m a novelist now, with the ability to do just that, and so I’ve written Composing Amelia. But, as I experienced with Reinventing Rachel, my plans for the book and God’s plans for the book were not the same. And since God always wins in the end, Composing Amelia is not the book about bipolar that I expected it to be. 


At first I was frustrated: the Christian community desperately needs some help in this area, and I really wanted to be a part of bringing understanding to that community. But the more I think about it, the more fitting it is to me that Composing Amelia is about so many other things, and not just the issue of mental illness as it was in my first drafts, because people with bipolar disorder are not defined by their illness, nor is it the only thing they will struggle with in their lives.

But regardless of how the book does or doesn’t influence the Christian community’s understanding of mental illness, it has had a tremendous influence on me, because for the second time now God has bludgeoned me over the head and said, “Hey you, quit trying to save the world. That’s MY job, not yours.”


 I do tend to get a little starry-eyed at the thought of my books having an impact on people—the impact I want them to have. But as an author who writes for Christ, I need to remember that I am just the messenger. My job is to tell that message as skillfully as I can—not to decide what the message should be. I fought with Reinventing Rachel for the same reason, but apparently it takes me a while to learn my lesson. I think I’ve got it now, though.

I do hope readers out there who struggle with bipolar or know someone who does will be affirmed and encouraged by Composing Amelia. And I really hope they won’t be offended by the fact that I didn’t explore the many ancillary issues that I could have. Apparently this wasn’t the right book for that. But it was the right book for something. I know He has plans for it. And though they're not likely to be the plans I was expecting, I'm excited to see what they are.

Composing Amelia

Newlyweds Amelia and Marcus Sheffield are recent college graduates and city dwellers, trying to stay afloat in LA while searching for their dream jobs. Marcus hopes to become a mega-church pastor. Amelia has an esteemed music degree, and longs to play piano professionally. The Sheffields are clearly city people.

But when a small town church offers Marcus a job, the couple's dedication to their dreams and each other is tested. After a risky compromise is made, Amelia falls into a dark emotional place, where she finds skeletons she'd fought hard to deny. In desperation, she calls out to God. But why can't she find Him? While Amelia struggles, Marcus learns news that nearly crushes him. He must lean on his faith to withstand the pressure . or risk losing his wife forever.

You can purchase Composing Amelia at:

www.christianbook.com › Books › Fiction

View the video on YouTube here

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Guest Blogger ~ Alison Strobel

Alison Strobel writes stories that stay with you about life, love, and faith. She lives in Colorado with her husband, Dan, with whom she has co-authored a children s book, and their two young daughters. When she's not writing, she's spending too much time on the Internet, crocheting, or playing with her girls. Visit her website.

The Mechanics of Crafting 

Brutally Honest Fiction

There’s a time and a place for books that spare us the burdens of reality, that allow us to lose ourselves for a few hours in stories that make us feel warm inside, and leave us with smiles on our faces. We need these books when we’re overwhelmed by the darkness of the world and tired of the depressing news we get from the media.

There’s another side to that coin—times when we need to grapple with life, to wrestle with the darkness and hear someone else asking the same questions that plague us, and doing it through fiction allows us that opportunity.

But writing that kind of fiction—brutally honest fiction that stares the sins of the world in the face and shines the light of Christ into them—is a difficult task, requiring the author to walk a tightrope between authenticity and voyeurism, between being honest and being graphic. It’s the challenge I faced when writing my latest release, Reinventing Rachel, and I want to discuss here the whys and hows for those who are seeking to write the same way.

Why Brutally Honest Fiction?

Not every reader is looking for this kind of writing. As with every book you write, think first about who your reader is before tackling brutally honest fiction. For me, the answer was somewhat unique this time around, as I wanted to target a segment of the market often missed by Christian fiction: college-aged readers.

My protagonist is a coffee-slinging recent Christian college graduate looking to apply to grad school. She is just a step or two ahead of my target reader in life, which makes her more relateable than the usually late-20’s/early-30’s protagonist of the majority of contemporary Christian fiction.

This reader is also inherently skeptical and, in the case of those at secular colleges, living alongside people whom frequently making God-dishonoring decisions. This kind of reader isn’t as interested in softer stories. They’re in the process of grabbing life with both hands, and I believe they will more deeply connect with a story that depicts characters doing the same.

How Do You Write Brutally Honest Fiction?

For me, successfully writing brutally honest fiction requires attention to three things. The first is the fine line between being honest and being graphic. Honesty makes sure the reader knows what happened—but being graphic gives the reader every gory detail. 

Honesty means allowing really awful things to happen, because that’s what happens in real life—but being graphic means explaining those really awful things gratuitously. I don’t think graphic writing has a place in Christian fiction. It is not edifying, and can leave images with readers that soil their minds and are difficult to shake.

Think of the difference between a movie scene in which two lovers are seen kissing as the scene fades away, as opposed to a scene in which we witness their naked roll in the hay. With the first scene, we get the idea—we know they’re in love, and for the purpose of the story that’s all we need to know. In the second, we’re witness to the most intimate form of that love, a form that we have no business watching. We must include what is necessary to be true to the story, but not embellish it with unnecessary details that paint a lurid picture.

The second thing to which I pay attention is real-life reactions. When I write a scene about a Christian character, I don’t consider whether his or her actions are Biblical. I consider whether or not they’re believable. Character driven fiction has to judge how a character would respond based on who they truly are, not why they wish they were or who we, the writer, want them to be. I try to be as skeptical as I can about my characters’ actions. If someone said or did this in real life, would I roll my eyes? If so, it gets deleted. (Unless, of course, an eye-rolling reaction is what I’m going for!)

Bending the wills and words of characters to achieve an end goal or fulfill an agenda leads to stilted and inauthentic stories. It robs the reader of any measure of trust in the character—trust that they will live their lives in a way that makes sense in the world we know.

The third area I watch is my own expectations. I try not to think about the expectations people have of or for Christian fiction. In all honestly, I don’t think of myself as a Christian fiction novelist. I think of myself as a novelist who writes fiction that features Christian characters and which are written from a Christian worldview. I think there’s a big difference between the two, too nuanced to go into here, but it affects the expectations that I—and, I think, my readers—have of my books.

I also try not to think of my books as having a message until after I’ve written them. Writing fiction to get across a particular message almost always comes across as preachy and heavy-handed. Instead, I focus on the characters and their goals and the events that shape them, and let them live out their lives and see what happens. When the story is over, the message is always loud and clear, but it’s because the characters have conveyed it—not me.

Reinventing Rachel went through four distinct forms before becoming what it is now. That’s because I was working through these things—the fine line between honesty and being graphic, depicting realistic actions, and removing my own expectations and message from the story—as I worked on each draft.

Once I managed to figure out the appropriate approach to each area, the story came together. Take a look at your own manuscript and think about how you can pull back on the graphic details to let readers use their own imaginations, how you can tweak your characters’ actions to reflect how people really act, and how you can erase your own expectations from the story so it blooms and grows more organically. What you’ll be left with is brutally honest fiction that can open the door for readers to grapple with their own lives and struggles—and a story that grips the reader every time they open the book.

Reinventing Rachel

God let Rachel Westing down. For twenty-six years she’s done everything by the book; she figures He should have her back. But then she learns her fiancé is cheating on her. Her parents are getting a divorce. And her Christian mentor has a pill addiction. Where is God in all this? Nowhere, as far as Rachel can see. Wounded, bitter, and with a shattered faith, she quits her job and goes across the country to live with Daphne—her childhood best friend whose soul Rachel once thought she was meant to save.

Confident, successful, fun-loving Daphne sets about helping Rachel reinvent herself, and for a while it’s exciting. But when another tragedy shakes Rachel to the core, what little bit of self-possession she has left begins to unravel. A true-to-life story that will draw you in and keep you biting your nails until the end.

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