Novel Preaching

Tips from Top Writers on Crafting Creative Sermons

Alyce M. McKenzie

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781611644388
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

In this lively and accessible book, Alyce McKenzie explores how fiction writers approach the task of writing novels: how they develop their ideas, where they find their inspiration, and how they turn the spark of a creative notion into words on paper that will captivate the masses. McKenzie's study shows how preachers can use the same techniques to enhance their own creativity and to turn their ideas into powerful, well crafted sermons. Novel Preaching offers a wealth of advice from successful fiction writers, including Isabelle Allende, Frederick Buechner, Julia Cameron, Annie Dillard, Natalie Goldberg, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Melanie Rae Thorn, and also includes a number of sample sermons from McKenzie herself.

Part 1

Cultivating the Imagination

Chapter One

A Knack for Noticing

Advice from Fiction Writers for Preachers

My dad, Robert H. Fowler Sr., was a newspaper and magazine publisher and author of eight historical novels. Until his death in 2002, he regularly challenged me with the question, “Why don’t you start writing novels?”

I always had my answer ready. “I’m waiting until I have more life experience.” The older I got, the less credible that excuse became, until finally I was forced to face the real reason. I don’t write novels because I don’t feel called to write novels. Thank God lots of other people do, though, because, as a preacher, I need to learn from them. And so do you.

In this chapter, I consult with creative writers about their methods for cultivating the imagination for writing short stories and novels and apply these methods to our preaching task. I pick the writers’ brains for the answers to questions like, What kinds of details about daily life should we preachers be noticing? How can we develop the knack for noticing them?

Along the way, we’ll also hear from a number of preachers and homileticians whose specific advice about preaching echoes these same ideas. After we’ve consulted with creative writers and teachers of preaching on how to cultivate our imaginations through careful observation, we’ll discover (in chapters 3 and 4) how they then use what they have observed to shape their stories, novels, and sermons.

Before we go any further, I want to make clear what this chapter is not. It is not a historical survey of literary theory and the imagination. Nor is it a comprehensive review of prose fiction writers of the past two centuries. It is not a survey of how contemporary novelists conceive of the purpose of their art (though that one is really tempting) or a polling of explicitly religious novelists on how they express their faith through their fiction. It is not a compendium of examples from literature that you can use in your sermons. If you feel inspired by reading the chapter to travel down any of those fruitful avenues, by all means, follow your inclinations.¹

I’m switching on the street lamps now for the path that lies ahead of us in this chapter. The chapter first describes the piece of meta-advice that almost every creative writer mentions: that we be attentive to life within us and around us. The chapter then outlines the three obstacles to that attentiveness: lack of daring (the desire to avoid pain that comes with the close observation of life within and without), lack of direction (not knowing exactly what to be attentive to), and lack of discipline (not being willing to cultivate the imagination through specific disciplines).

After a description of what creative writers mean by “attentiveness,” the chapter focuses on creative writers’ advice on what we ought to be noticing. Then comes their advice on disciplines for remembering and recording what we have noticed.

I think that you and I should go to a writer’s conference together sometime. I know you are busy and may need some convincing that this time would be well spent, so here is my brief pitch as to the relevance of learning some fiction writing principles to your preaching task.

The Relevance of Fiction Writing Principles to Preaching

Novels and sermons are exercises in imagination. Sermons and novels are different genres of communication, but both require the use of the imagination. The methods involved in producing a private, written medium like novels are instructive for a public, spoken medium like sermons.

“Fiction” originally came from the Latin and meant “something shaped, molded, or devised.”² We use it to refer to prose stories based on the interaction of an author’s imagination with his or her surroundings. The essence of fiction is narration, the relating or recounting of a sequence of events or actions. Works of fiction usually focus on one or a few major characters who undergo some kind of change as they interact with other characters and deal with problems.³

The novel, though written, has oral antecedents and components. Today’s sermons, though spoken, depend on prior study of written material—biblical text and secondary sources.⁴ The antecedents of the novel lie in the oral performances of epic, heroic tales, which were crucial to preserving the collective memory of cultures before the advent of writing. Although the precursors of the novel preceded the printing press, the novel’s proliferation as a literary form was made possible by the technology that allowed for the dissemination of mass copies of these extended written narratives.

Novels, though now a mass-produced, written medium, depend on what were originally forms characteristic of oral communication (imagery, vivid scenes, memorable characters, repeated themes, and exciting story lines) to connect with readers. As sacred literature, the same can be said of the Bible. Novels are a literary form with oral roots. As novelist John Gardner put it, “True fiction is, in effect, oral storytelling written down and fixed, perfected by revision.”⁵

Novels and sermons are invitations to enter into a story. Now more than ever, people need to be drawn into a coherent story that is bigger than the disjointed episodes of our distracted lives. Much of the narrative preaching proposed over the past generation of homiletical theory assumes that people are, with their imaginations, creating a coherent narrative out of the events of their lives and that we can, as preachers, simply connect aspects of their story with the Bible’s story. But some observers claim that people today aren’t creating holistic narratives out of the disparate events of their daily lives. Rather, they are immersed in the episodic experiences of life with neither the skills nor the desire to look beyond them. In a recent essay, preacher, author, and homiletics professor Thomas G. Long questions whether people in our attention-deficit, high-tech, visual culture have the skills or the will to be engaged in an ongoing process of making a story of their lives. He suggests, rather, that many people are living in “random bursts,” “our attention fleeting from American Idol to the troop movements in the Middle East to the desire to purchase a more powerful cell phone, a kind of cultural attention deficit disorder.”⁶

Over twenty years ago, David Buttrick, in his book Homiletic: Moves and Structures, asserted that the biblical narrative of salvation provides an encompassing master story into which we can place our individual stories. The biblical narrative of salvation gives our often incoherent, episodic lives a new prelude and a new closing chapter.⁷ His point may be pertinent now more than ever.

If people today don’t have the skills to fashion a coherent narrative of their lives, why not turn to novelists, a group of people whose vocation is fashioning narratives inspired by their close observation of the people, places, and events of their daily lives? Why not consult with novelists whose passion is the creation of fictional worlds that invite readers to identification and transformation?

Novels and sermons begin with an openness to inspiration. A preacher seeks prayerfully to rely on the Holy Spirit when entering into a dialogue with a biblical text on behalf of the congregation. Often, we have the sense that our theme chooses us rather than the other way around. Many novelists have expressed a similar sense that their writing is a discovery more than an invention—that, in their work, they listen and allow characters, themes, and stories to emerge as much as or more than the novelists create them. There is a sense of receiving a gift in the way that many novelists speak of their creative flow. Annie Dillard says it well: “At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then—only then—it is handed to you.”⁸

Julia Cameron describes the writing life as “being an open channel,” affirming that “we can ‘plug in’ to the flow of writing rather than thinking of it as a stream of energy we must generate from within ourself.”⁹

On the Porch

All right, that was my best shot. Now back to that writers’ conference I’m hoping you’ll attend with me. According to my online research, writers’ conferences can take place in any number of settings. These include, but are by no means limited to, an airport Sheraton in Portland, Oregon; resorts in Maui; upscale hotels in Manhattan; retreat centers in the mountains of western North Carolina; and picturesque inns in Connecticut.

The Breadloaf Inn in Middlebury, Connecticut, looks quite scenic. Those Green Mountains would make a lovely backdrop for this chapter. The Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, held every August since 1925 at the Breadloaf Inn, sounds a little daunting, though. The online description includes words like “rigorous” and mentions meetings with faculty, agents, and editors.

I say we keep a Breadloaf-like stage set, but imagine attending a lower-key, more laid-back event, the kind in which we lounge on a porch, put our feet on the railing, and nurse our beverage of choice. Because this is our imagination talking, any creative writer or novelist, dead or alive, can show up and hold court briefly, giving us mini-lectures and sound advice.

Be prepared to hear our creative writers focus on the importance of attentiveness. In my reading of numerous essays and books by creative writers about writing, this theme shows up again and again. I recently went to lunch with C. W. Smith, professor of English at Southern Methodist University and author of eight novels. He graciously fielded my barrage of questions about what and how preachers can learn from novelists. Something he said that stuck in my mind was, “As a teacher of creative writing, much of my time is spent in trying to get students to notice what they see. And then, the next step is to get them to trust that there may be some significance in their observations.”

Now, if everybody is settled comfortably in their respective rocking chairs (the kind with comfortable cushions), let’s begin by talking about attentiveness—not just seeing but noticing . . . or, as Professor Smith puts it, “noticing what you see.”

A Brief Interruption

As we are settling into our chairs, an elderly but vigorous gentleman strides out of the inn to stand before us. He is wearing elbow patches (and a tweed jacket, too, of course) and a cape (my impression is that authors stereotypically wear capes), a beret, jeans, and high-top red sneakers. He has lustrous gray hair, swept straight back from his brow. He has suspiciously good posture for a man his age. He has mistaken us for the continuing education class from the local community college for which he has agreed to do a guest lecture on the history of the novel.

Before I can stop him, he begins to speak in that pseudo-British accent so often adopted by announcers on luxury car commercials.

“Like the imagination, the novel has always had its fans and its detractors. Its detractors have caricatured it as a distraction from serio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Cultivating the Imagination
• Part Two: Shaping the Sermon
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index