Secrets to Writing a Spiritual Novel

Excerpt 1, Secrets to Writing a Spiritual Novel ©

Today, the world is changing. In the past, when someone had the resources to print their own book without the “help” of a major publishing house it was dismissed as “vanity press” and ignored by bookstores and reviewers. Fortunately, today the eBook option is available. With almost no upfront cost, a book can now be available worldwide for instant download. As this new media replaces the old media, the term “self-published” or “Indie” has gained in respectability.  Those courageous enough to make the leap into the marketplace are no longer relegated to the back of the publishing industry bus.  If you’re writing a spiritual novel there is an additional level of things to consider. Most “Big House” publishers are secular humanists and the idea of dealing with something with the slightest whiff of religion makes their skin crawl. The critics are going to pan your book. Frothing at the mouth anti-religion zealots are going to write quite nasty reviews of your book on Amazon, usually without having read a single word of it.

The goal of this book is to help you avoid the most common pitfalls of the first time author.  Hopefully, the ideas presented will make sense to you and you will incorporate them into everything you write, not just your novel.

Excerpt 2, from Secrets to Writing a Spiritual Novel©

Who Will Want to Read Your Book?

When you write a spiritual based novel, it means following all of the normal guidelines of good storytelling plus a few more rules that might not have occurred to you. Like any good novel, it will need a good plot and pacing, interesting characters and dialogue that rings true. But, in spiritual novels your choice of language can dramatically impact the size of your potential audience. 

Do you think the Star Wars movies would have appealed to a mass audience if Obi Wan Kenobi had looked at Luke Skywalker and instead of saying, “may the Force be with you,” had said, “may God be with you?”   

By changing, “God” to “the Force,” the potential audience for the series expanded from a few hundred thousand to hundreds of millions. 

A lot will depend on who exactly you’re writing your book for. It is not always necessary to hedge your bet with your choice of language. The Shack and the Left Behind Series are good examples of highly successful novels that made no attempt to mask their religious or spiritual messages. Books like The Celestine Prophecy and The Fourth Awakening used a lighter touch. You can go any direction you like but realize if you are too overt with religious content, you will likely be relegated to a much smaller “niche” of the fiction market.