It is my pleasure to introduce Chick Yuill to my blog today, sharing his thoughts on Christian fiction, and why he feels telling people compelling stories can lead them to an encounter with God.
Over the last thirty years I’ve written eight books on subjects such as discipleship, spiritual warfare, holiness, sexuality etc and published with IVP, Authentic and Monarch. I got weary of doing that and troubled by the increasing realisation that the only people who would ever read them would be committed Christians.
I try not to write ‘Christian fiction’ with heavy moralising and glib easy endings. But because I am a follower of Jesus, because my worldview is firmly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, that will be reflected in my writing.
I think there are really only two kinds of novels – well-written novels and not so well-written novels. I want to write stories that are accessible to Christians, to people of other faiths and people of no definite faith – stories that deal with the big issues of life, that face readers with the big questions, and that leave them free to make up their minds.
Too much ‘Christian fiction’ in the past was really evangelistic tracts unconvincingly disguised as novels. That was dishonest and artistically flawed.
My first aim is to tell a convincing story with believable characters who are dealing with credible and challenging situations and who are encountering truth. The highest compliment I receive from readers is that they couldn’t put the book down and that it made them laugh and cry.
When I start to write the first chapter of a novel I have no real idea of what’s going to happen. I know that, as the author, ‘I’m making it all up’, but it really doesn’t feel like that. I follow the characters and get to know them as life happens to them.
For example, in The Man who Broke into St Peter’s I didn’t set out to deal with the results of sexual abuse. That’s just where the story took me. In The Mystery of Matthew Gold I didn’t choose to deal with suicide and sudden death. Again, that’s just where the story took me.
Three things drive me:
1) I get a little irritated at times by what I see as the glibness of too much evangelical thinking, although I stand firmly in the evangelical tradition. Telling a convincing story means that you can’t get away with glib and easy answers. Life just isn’t like that!
2) My increasing conviction is that what we have to offer the world is not primarily a set of doctrinal propositions but a story – a messy story, with all kinds of loose ends and questions we can’t easily answer, but a story in which people encounter God – the only story that in the end makes sense of life. As I try to say in The Mystery of Matthew Gold, the story that takes them beyond the mystery of life not to a set of neat answers, but to the deeper mystery of grace and love and forgiveness.
3) Evangelism often focuses on telling people what they should believe and trying to get their agreement. And that approach, of course, has its place. Yet it seems to me that Jesus rarely did that. He told stories, most of which didn’t specifically mention God! They raised questions that settled like seeds deep in people’s minds.
I want my readers to enjoy a really good read, I want to move them emotionally, I want to stimulate their thinking, and I want to leave them with questions that will lead them to an encounter with the One who perfectly embodies grace, truth and love.
Chick Yuill has spent over 45 years in full-time ministry and church leadership, mostly leading and pastoring local congregations both in the UK and the USA. He is a passionate communicator and has appeared on national radio and television in the UK, as well as regularly been a speaker at major Christian conferences. Writing has been an intrinsic part of his ministry. His passion to engage with the wider culture beyond the walls of the church has stimulated his desire to write fiction. His stories include: Rooks at Dusk, The Man who Broke into St Peter’s and The Mystery of Matthew Gold.