By Elizabeth Amy Hajek

“I think my favorite thing about this book is how you created a world where Christianity and magic both exist. I’ve read plenty of fantasy, and fantasy books by Christian authors, but never a book where Jesus and magic coexisted. It was fascinating to think through all the ramifications of that; thank you for thinking through all the ramifications of that.” – Rachel McNicholas

I received this message from a friend upon her completion of The Raven and the Crown, and it tied into several other thoughts I’ve been wrestling with lately. Given that it has been a while since I’ve talked about faith in fiction (Elenatintil: Why I am Writing for a Catholic Publisher (When I’m not Catholic)), and my latest novel brought some new concepts into play, I thought I should probably write up another piece.

Now, I want to take a moment and tread carefully here and make two important points.

#1. Art is subjective

AND

#2. Reading is allowed to be fun.

If you love a book, it doesn’t really matter if I or anyone else judge it to be well-written. If you are generally happy with most Christian Fiction you pick up, then this probably isn’t the article for you, and I would, with sincere kindness, suggest navigating away.

However, if the label “Christian Fiction” makes you cringe, or mourn, or yearn for deeper, more complex offerings that honor a Christian worldview and the desires and needs of a wider scope of Christian readers…read on.

So often, when Christians hear the label “Christian Romance/Fiction/Fantasy/etc.” there tends to be one of two reactions:

#1. Yay! It’ll be clean and it’ll mention Jesus and I can read it ‘safely.’ (They may not think this through in such concrete terms, but it comes down to this.)

#2. Ugh. I guess it’ll be ‘clean’, but it probably will be poorly written and have a salvation message and a few corny prayers shoe-horned in.

I do not claim to have read even a fraction of all of the Christian fiction out there, but I have heard variations on these themes so many times that I know it’s more than a bias on my part. Even with all that I have personally read, when asked for truly awesome Christian book recommendations, I struggle to come up with options.

For me, a good book has a complex plot, engaging prose, rich characters, and soul-moving themes. I’ve found very few “Christian” books that hit all of these. Of the books currently being put out by major publishers, there are only one or two authors that I feel reach the standards of truly excellent writing.

Yet, ironically, many of the most endearing, masterful works of the Western Culture Canon, the ones that delight us, that we turn to over and over again, have their roots in authors who were devout Christians.

You probably know who I’m talking about: J.R.R. Tolkien. C.S. Lewis, and Jane Austen, just for starters. Throughout history, there have been many excellent writers using their talents to entertain us with glorious stories that explored deep truths about the human nature and God’s creation but often (though not always) keeping God and faith as a backdrop.

What changed? Why don’t we see this kind of fiction today?

Well, blame the publishing industry.

See, Christian publishers have to earn their label. They need to fulfill their mission. Their books must be explicitly Christian, to the point where many authors would say it becomes difficult to truly execute their craft.

So, for those who want to just tell a good story, they turn to the secular publishing world. Where, of course, as everywhere else in the Secular world, Christianity is only tolerable when it’s been stripped of its truth. Take away anything other than vague ‘feel good’ platitudes, or show Christians as the villains, but heaven forbid the deep richness, the soul wrestling, the awareness of the failures of the sinner and the restorative grace of Christ come through in its entirety!

What secular publisher would dare touch that? It’s not profitable.

Now, Christians are allowed to write a great stories that have no or little explicit reference to God, Christianity, or the Bible. And that’s totally fine! We do need just plain good books—engaging stories with beauty, truth, that uplift and delight in their entertainment. And, no, they don’t have to be fluffy and can absolutely achieve these goals while wrestling with hard and even dark themes. Case in point are the many classics that manage to achieve this, starting with The Lord of the Rings!

I thought that was what I was going to do. (and, to be fair, that is what the Lilibet books are!) Yet, even as I walked intentionally toward this, I was never totally at peace with it. I didn’t just want to write books—I wanted to write excellent books that had the love of my Lord and Creator in them. I wanted them to sing with his beauty and glory.

How was this going to happen? I couldn’t figure it out.

Thankfully, I wasn’t walking this path alone. God had his own plans.

You see, almost twenty years ago, I happened to browse through a friend’s bookshelf and discover a book that piqued my interest.

“Well, it’s Catholic,” my friend said to me, unsure whether I’d be offended.

“But it’s a fairytale retelling!” I told her. “Can I borrow it?”

That book was The Shadow of the Bear and it featured all of the elements of a good story—but also vibrant, living Christianity organically interwoven into the story. Somehow, Doman had taken her rich faith and put it into a story and it didn’t come across as shoe-horned or fake or fluffy—it breathed sincerity, and that sincerity was engaging and worked. It also did not come across as preachy, or at least, not in a way that upset me or pulled me out of the story. It worked in the book because it was a real, breathing part of the characters. They weren’t speaking about their faith to squish a sermon into the narrative, they spoke the way a real Christian would, when their faith is authentically integrated into every aspect of their life.

I stayed up far too late finishing the book, sped through the sequel the next day, and bought book #3 as soon as I was aware of its publication…and this despite the hefty self-publishing price tag!  $20.00+shipping was a massive investment for the poor college student I was at the time.

Friends—that $20 book, Waking Rose, was the key that unlocked my faith-in-writing dilemma. I vibed with that book on such a deep level that I sought out Regina’s blog and started following not only her writing, but the comment section below her posts. I realized there was an amazing community of like-minded young people just aching to connect. Thrilled by the possibilities, I wrote Regina and gained permission to start a fan forum for her readers.

Throughout the course of that, many things happened, enriching my life in SO many ways. Here I’ll just stick to the one relevant to this article: Regina became my writing mentor, and another friend of hers became not only my second writing mentor, but also, for a time, my cowriter. Then these two mentors started up plans for a Modern Christian YA Fantasy series, and brought me on board as a junior author !

That brings me back to the beginning of this article. You see, I can’t take credit with where the series started (that was Regina and her team), nor where it ended up. Sure, I put a lot of blood, sweat, tears, imagination and faith into the series, but it didn’t go at all how I planned. The original multi-author framework fell through. Since I had such a solid draft of The Mermaid and the Unicorn at that point, I was given permission by the team to separate out a few of the series ‘trademark’ elements and strike out on my own.

Yet being part of that original plan had given me not only confidence and guidance but also actual marching orders to follow Regina’s framework of integrating faith and fiction. I don’t know if at that point I could have made it work in any way with Protestant Characters, but I knew how Regina did it with Catholic characters, and I could follow those same guidelines.

Suddenly, I wasn’t just trying to write a good book. I was trying to write a book like Regina did, that was authentically Christian even as it was engaging fiction. And somehow, I found that magic elements (though always working hard to keep in alignment with real theology) actually made it easier to talk authentically about Jesus and the Christian faith! It wasn’t just that it was Catholic, (although the visual imagery there is so rich and helpful to an author), it was the fantastical itself.

The strange thing was, even though I could see it working before my eyes, I didn’t quite understand how it was happening. Then, one day, I happened to speak to my pastor about the issue, and he reminded me that this is very much what C.S. Lewis and Tolkien talked about. Sure enough, as I refreshed myself on their writings, I found a piece that clarified everything.

“On that side (as Author) I wrote fairy tales because the Fairy Tale seemed the ideal Form for the stuff I had to say. Then of course the Man in me began to have his turn. I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm.  The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical.  But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons?” –C.S. Lewis, “On 3 Ways of Writing for Children.”

It wouldn’t work for every author or every reader. Yet for me, the Lord had a plan with a very specific path he wanted me to walk to understand that to tell the stories I wanted to tell, I had to do it the Regina way, the Lewis way, harnessing fairy tales and, even more importantly, growing in my own faith journey first.

In God’s graciousness, he allowed me to publish The Mermaid and the Unicorn when I was 27. Young enough to give me a solid boost of encouragement in my journey, but old enough to have a robust enough faith to write Daphne’s story. But I had to mature, walk a darker, more difficult, more gold-refining road before I was ready to write Kate and Derek’s tale. I had to face the real monsters of adult human life before I could put both the magical and the spiritual ones in The Raven and the Crown. But, as has so often been true throughout human history, it is the myth, the legend, the fantastical that helps us understand our own place in the story of God.

Regina had Jesus, and she retold fairy tales, but she didn’t use magic. Tolkien’s works bloom with the undertones of Catholicism and Christianity, but he never brings Jesus into it. Lewis comes awfully close with Narnia, and even closer with That Hideous Strength, and indeed, we referenced the way Lewis wove Merlin into this story when we were first building our original series. I suppose I took elements of all of these and wove them into the world of The Song of the Fay, which is our world but not our world, because we don’t have magic. An alternative reality, a ‘what if’, but never a replacement for the real Truth. Only pointing toward it—toward loving Him.

I don’t claim to be at the level of any of these greats, but I will acknowledge my deep debt to them. I feel the gravity as I build on the foundation they laid, bringing the best books I can craft to audiences craving more of this ethos of storytelling.

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Ready for some Faith and Fairy Tales? Head off to magical Paris and Scotland in The Song of the Fay.