What can a fiction writer bring to a world with broken wings? For sure, a world like this one is full of fragmented people–fodder for a writer. And just as sure, a writer will translate human brokenness through his or her own lens. So what is my lens?
Here’s a little about why I write as I do.
For some writers, fiction is an author’s attempt to open a little window on the meaning of human life 
itself. Some fiction writers perceive people as good because God made them to be like Him. I am one of them. I also recognize free will. We can choose not to be like Him, and even choose not follow Him. But the job of a writer who sees people as coming from God, is to translate His goodness in some concrete form for her readers; and that is a difficult job in our world today because many don’t believe in a Creator, and others don’t see our world as good. So what is such a writer to do?
First, I believe this sort of writer will have strong emotion about current events where goodness is not: The murder of children. Debilitating disease. Greed. Arrogance. Sadistic, sexual perversion. Dishonesty. Meanness, and on and on–just check ‘I choose not to follow” on each of The Ten Commandments. So, the paradoxical question for a writer like myself becomes, “Can interior goodness be found where exterior goodness is not?”
Yes. Our Creator is powerful enough to draw out goodness from atrocities that emanate because of the misuse of human free will. In this writer’s imagination, there is a link between the divinity of God (the supernatural world) with the natural world. The task becomes that of interlocking the two. Representations are created, and specific truths about God’s presence in our world appear in the writer’s mind. She translates it in her settings, characters, and dilemmas. And what she translates is a tenet called grace, both Sanctifying Grace and Actual Grace. Sanctifying Grace, inherited from the God who made us, lives in the soul and stays in the soul. By contrast, Actual grace doesn’t live in the soul; rather, throughout a lifetime, it acts in the soul as divine pushes from God toward His goodness. But those pushes require cooperation. The translating writer understands that a person must accept grace by his own free will; and grace, like love, is sometimes prickly.
A writer who translates grace in a world on edge must first have a good, well-written story. Then she must see a double beginning and ending in everything, and I mean everything, including the awful, current events mentioned above. Along with this, she realizes that knowing reasons why is a human characteristic. She perceives a cause, and an effect that creates another cause, and effect, and so on into infinity. Stories are discovered in her imagination and brought to light by a very intimate flashlight, one that shines a light on the many causes and effects of free will, and on the causes and effects of grace; both working, and often conflicting, in the same human soul.
Over the past twenty years, I have been writing books centered around the many misguided bandages my characters put on their inevitable broken wings, those wounds that life churns out. I’m not getting any younger, and I don’t want to leave behind stacks of paper. So, I am publishing the books I feel are worthy. There will be others to come, but my latest novel–Bridge-Man Burning: The Sins of a Southern Man–is the sequel to my debut novel, A Hunger in the Heart. The print copy of Bridge-Man is now up, with Kindle coming soon. Take a look. I will be offering both on Kindle in the upcoming days, to those who kindly follow this blog.
Translating a World on the Edge 