Most of you regulars who will read this first either hate religion, remain skeptical of the church, or you’re a Christian that feels bored/frustrated/faithful-yet-concerned with out-of-touch Midwest Megasomething. Books by pastors, we can safely assume, bore the living Barjesus out of you.

Me too.

(You who found this post via the recommendation of some first adopter will be pastors that suck at writing books. It’s okay, I won’t tell, but you might want to make sure no one’s watching you read).

Now I’m no expert – I’m just some young no-name schmuck making an observation – but let’s pretend you simply must to listen to a sermon for some academic assignment and that you’re not the sermon-listening type. Sheer boredom from the listening experience will probably burrow little holes in your soul as each minute passes. Curious that “boring” describes something tedious and “boring” implies drill bits that burrow like flesh-eating beetles. Painful. Experience.

Got it? Are we all (pastors and non-) starting with a default button that reads: BORED ?

Okay, story time:

Chatted with a former pastor last Sunday who used to work 3^rd shift at a factory to provide for his large family only to turn around and do full-time pastoral work during days. Once he went to preach after having worked overtime all night. Somewhere in the middle of his sermonizing, feet cocked shoulder-width apart, he fell asleep. Some time later – to this day the length of time escapes his memory – he awoke to find the stupid grins of a whole congregation staring back.

It’d be overstatement to say, “I know a preacher who preached a sermon boring enough to put himself to sleep,” because he was working grueling shifts. Even still, the image sticks as soon as you say it: a preacher once put himself to sleep in the middle of his own sermon.

I mention the sleeping preacher to make this point: imagine a sermon thirteen hours long. Imagine your listening assignment has a time factor – you must listen to a twelve-hour sermon. Could you even do it? Could any of us modern Americans come close with our short attention spans?

But that’s what most preachers do when they write — they ask their audience to sit through the book version of a twelve-to-twenty-hour sermon. Why?

Benjamin Franklin hinted at the in his Autobiography. He spoke about the preacher George Whitefield:

[Rev. Whitefield’s] writing and printing from time to time gave great advantage to his enemies; unguarded expressions, and even erroneous opinions, delivered in preaching, might have been afterwards explain’d or qualifi’d … or they might have been deny’d; but litera scripta manet. …I am of opinion if he had never written any thing…his reputation might…still [be] growing, even after his death, as there being nothing of his writing on which to found a censure and give him lower character.

Preachers write boring books or superlative books or frivolous books because they’re used to oral manuscripts. Where something could have been explained or qualified in the preaching moment, those words, when printed, fuse to the page. Imagine preaching a sermon to a crowd of people who have your every note in hand with every move highlighted. They know everything you’re going to do, assuming they read ahead. That crap — for thirteen hours.

That’s about how long it’ll take to read a book. Sometimes it’s more like twenty-four, others it’s shorter like nine, but it’s always exponentially longer than the average 20-minute homily. Yet preachers constantly treat their book manuscripts like sermon outlines. In fact, very famously mega church pastors simply hire people to rework old sermons into lame books that no one reads except mega church pastor groupies.

Yes, lame. You’re not hiding anything by having “Zondervan” or “IVP” on the spine. As great as your editors may be, they are sincerely overworked and underpaid. They don’t have time to give blue-pencil attention to a book that will auto-sell to your several-thousand-person congregation. Sorry.

But hold up, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here…

You want me to be really honest? This part might shock some from the first crowd, the ones nodding along so far: I actually enjoy listening to some preachers and pastors. And you know what? Chances are that you do too, you just don’t know it.

Here are some preachers you may have heard, linked to YouTube clips:

• Martin Luther King Jr.
• N.T. Wright
• C.S. Lewis
• Mr. Rogers
  
• Pope John Paul II
• George MacDonald
• Dr. Timothy Keller
• G.K. Chesterton
• Karl Barth

And I’m not the only one who enjoys a good sermon…

Benjamin Franklin, the famous inventor and Deist, listened to preachers for entertainment as recorded in his Autobiography:

In 1739 arrived among us from Ireland the Reverend Mr. Whitefield, who had made himself remarkable there as an itinerant preacher… The multitudes of all sects and denominations that attended his sermons were enormous, and it was matter of speculation to me…to observe the extraordinary influence of his oratory on his hearers… It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants.

…The sight of [many helpless children unprovided for] inspir’d the benevolent heart of Mr. Whitefield with the idea of building an Orphan House there… He preach’d up this charity, and made large collections, for his eloquence had a wonderful power over the hearts… of his hearers, of which I myself was an instance.

…He had a loud and clear voice, and articulated his words and sentences so perfectly, that he might be heard and understood at a great distance… He preach’d one evening… being among the hindmost in the Market-street, I had the curiousity to learn how far he could be heard, by retiring backwards down the street towards the river; and I found his voice distinct till I came near Front-street, when some noise in that street obscur’d it.

Imagining then a semicircle, of which my distance should be the radius, and that it were fill’d with auditors, to each of whom I allow’d two square feet, I computed that he might well be heard by more than thirty thousand. This reconcil’d me to the newspaper accounts of his having preach’d to twenty-five thousand people in the fields, and to the antient histories of generals haranguing whole armies, of which I had sometimes doubted.

By hearing him often, I came to distinguish easily between sermons newly compos’d, and those which he had often preach’d in the course of his travels. His delivery of the latter was so improv’d by frequent repetitions that every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of voice, was so perfectly well turn’d and well plac’d that, without being interested in the subject, one could not help being pleas’d with the discourse; a pleasure of much the same kind with that receiv’d from an excellent piece of musick. This is an advantage itinerant preachers have over those who are stationary, as the latter can not well improve their delivery of a sermon by so many rehearsals.

Even George Whitefield had all kinds of literary critics. Franklin said that Whitefield wouldn’t have had the same problems in a sermon – especially an itinerant sermon. Why?

Because literary manuscripts play by different rules than oral manuscripts. Oral manuscripts need repetition to drive home a point, but books only need re-reading. Oral manuscripts depend on the rise and fall of the voice, but books depend on the rise and fall of sentence structure, syntax, and phonoaesthetic garnish like assonance/dissonance. Oral manuscripts require inflammatory language that can go away faster as you read the audience and respond to their reactions, but books burn thoughts into their minds—they can cite you again and again and again.

The Emancipation Proclamation was made not for the lectern, but the newspaper. People loved those four hundred words after reading them over and over again.

A blunder in a book can’t be undone as easily as a blunder in a sermon, and sermon blunders are bad enough. Just look at the things people copy and pasted from Driscoll’s blog over the years as compared to the things they’ve quoted him on in his sermon. He’s removed or edited far more blog posts than sermons.

If you’re a preacher who is writing, you must respond to your book baby as if it’s a child set apart and distinct from your sermon babies. If you’re someone reading preachers, start by reading the classics (Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Chrysostom, Clement, Paul) and work toward the era of modern audio recordings.

Story time:

In my first year of marriage, I found neither the finances nor the time to justify moving to study under a rather popular Christian writer. To request his mentoring, I wrote him a letter.

Months later, he wrote back.

So I wrote back.

A year later, he sent me a second letter – he’s a busy man, so I considered this a fairly quick turnaround.

We continued to a third correspondence, but his last came on the back of a simple postcard. I got the message – he’s a busy guy and I’m some random young gun trying to learn long-distance. It’s impractical to continue correspondence, but I was still flattered that he responded that often.

Up until now, only like five people know that I own these letters, and I’ve kept them pretty secret for three reasons: (1) to respect the writer’s privacy with the majority of what he wrote; (2) they address some of my personal anxieties both as an aspiring mainstream fiction writer and as someone who actively tries to follow Jesus (I often find myself at odds with both communities simply by existing); (3) I hate it when people name-drop. People name-drop because they think fame actually means something, that naming someone famous somehow gives them residual fame or karma or whatever. Fame means nothing. Greatness is everything. You can be great and obscure or famous and a moron. Just look at Jack Black’s fame and Emily Dickenson’s obscurity upon her death.

As you’ll see from his suggestions, this great man knows what a writer/preacher like me needed to hear. I shared some of his notes with a very close writer friend and they seemed to help him too.

So I’ve chosen to share those snippets here because I think they’ll help many others.

(If the Author who wrote these bits of advice gets ahold of this post and feels offended, then I simply apologize for sharing something you wrote me in a personal letter. Sharing your words on my site was not my original intent in writing you. As you know, I sought your counsel, nothing more).

He probably doesn’t remember me anyways, so it won’t matter. It was only four letters, after all.

That said, I’m going to name this man because his name implies greatness, not fame, in American Christian circles. His name will simply lend credibility to those things he wrote, those things I will share.

Eugene Peterson encouraged me in these ways:

You asked for counsel. Two things, steep yourself in the company of good writers…. [Those preachers you mentioned in your letter] are none of them what I would call real writers—they have a “message” but don’t really care for the art of language. Not many evangelicals do. Find a stable of writers from whom you can learn. You mention [Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Anne Dillard, Flannery O’Conner, J.K. Rowling, T.S. Elliot, Tolkien] – you are putting yourself under the tutelage of men and women who know how to write a good sentence.

…The second thing is don’t be in a hurry to publish. Especially by “Christian” publishers. They are looking for writers who make things easy and popular; they are very selective about marketing. I wrote seriously for fifteen years, accumulating stacks of rejection letters before I was published. I had determined that I would not cheapen my vocation by writing what would “sell.” Let your gut and the Holy Spirit shape your writing, not the marketers in publishing…

…face the reality that the pastoral vocation is in ruins these days. It is almost entirely shaped by satisfying consumer tastes—giving people “what they want”—and measuring everything by size and numbers and celebrity. If you let that world infect your imagination, you will never be a writer, just a propagandist for Jesus (or maybe worse, a pornographer for Jesus—Jesus-marketed, with all the personal relationships and holy reverence deleted).

This is a holy work and requires long, slow patient entrance into the mystery and grace in all operations of the Trinity.

Obviously this is a broad generalization, but the exception proves the rule: pastors who DO write dang great works of literature either started with English majors or some sort of career in literary manuscripts. Brother Peterson spent a year “under the tutelage” of Dostoevsky’s fiction. Dostoevsky did his stint as a monk… and a writer of fiction. Chesterton operated well in both worlds. Lewis, Tolkien, MacDonald (who wrote less fiction, more mythology) all lived amphibious lives – at home with great literature and at home in the church. We could mention others like Updike, Berry, Coleridge, Chaucer (and more) who practiced varying degrees of involvement in one world or the other, but I’ve already made my point.

Am I saying every preacher should grow into literary genius? Well no.

Neither am I saying that only pastoral books with literary merit rise above the ranks. Obviously that’s false.

We can say this, though: literary merit can’t hurt your chances. That in mind, here are some things that I, a normal dude who enjoys a good sermon, learned from the wide world of fiction writing:

1. Refrain from refrain. Said in another way: don’t parent your reader. Remember, they have all of your words spread out before them, all the time. This ain’t no sermon or speech where you can come back to your dominant thought a billion times. Your reader will hit rewind, fast-forward, or skip chapters. They will also hit pause, mull over what you just said, and come back to you three days later – which is exactly what I did while reading Till We Have Faces.So don’t repeat yourself as often. If you must repeat a theme, dress it up. Great composers rework earlier themes into new movements. So do great fiction writers. Nothing bothers me more than a fiction author who recaps everything I just read. If I want a recap, I’ll reread earlier chapters or click over to Wikipedia.
2. “Know exactly what you want to say, and say exactly that” – C.S. Lewis. Most bad writing isn’t really bad writing, but bad thinking. Poets reflect more than any other writers, so if you need examples, go read poetry. “But Lance, I’m a Broncos fan, not a Bronte fan!” Fine, go watch the game and stop writing books.For those of you who want to write, spend some time honing your craft a little and read people who write coherent sentences based on coherent thoughts, rather than chums who write under the influence of multiple boxing-induced concussions. Mike Tyson makes a great interviewee, but a terrible autobiographer.
3. ‘He said’ is punctuation, not description. When you’re telling a personal story and dialog crops up, you don’t need ‘he retorted’ or ‘she inferred,’ just use ‘he said’ or ‘she said.’ Sometimes you don’t need anything at all, like the beginning of the ‘80s novel Fletch. Now there’s a master’s course in dialog. The exception? When you’re trying to capture the volume, pitch, or rhythm behind spoken words with a ‘he twittered’ or a ‘she moaned.’ Use sparingly like sweets and oils.
4. Clip talk. Also for dialog: dialog in stories isn’t conversation. Dialog in stories represents the soul of conversational conflict that drives characters toward decision points. Because of that, and because people seldom employ full sentences in real conversation, the following example seems stilted:”Hey Michael, are you going over to the Schaubert house tonight for our weekly game night?” I asked.
   “No,” John said, “the last time I went over to the Schaubert house, I got into that shouting match with Jack about whether Ryan Gosling was a great actor.”
   “Oh, okay. Well I guess I will have to see you later.”Problem number one: there’s no point to any of this exchange. But even cleaned up it reads truer:

   “You going to the Schauberts?” I asked. “Game night?”
   “No,” John said, “last time… I… that shouting match with Jack.”
   “Oh.”

   Missing information implies…

   Are you embellishing? Well no, be honest: have you ever remembered every single detail about any given event? No? Well then what’s the point of telling a story?

   Dig down to the essence of the truth behind what happened. If you’re true to the people and true to the overall event, then embellishments actually help your cause of truth. This is why the “fibber” and the “liar” stand eons apart on the morality scale. The former’s a good man trying to get people to feel the same emotions during the telling as were felt during the original experience. The latter’s a deceiver.

5. Wrong and strong, baby. Wrong and strong. You’ll never read a famous quote from a long-dead author that makes some passive, beat-around-the-bush remark about their topic. They riot emotions and soothe them as if wielding some dark netherworld allomancy. They say stuff that stirs us, and rarely in the passive voice. Is there no place for the passive voice?Obviously not, I just used it.However it’s grievously overused—especially in books by public speakers. Passivity works great in abstracts assigned by your seminary professor. They even work okay in many sermons and speeches. They work best when you’re showing a passive relationship between the subject and object, but most things in live happen as the effect of some intended cause. People verb. People ain’t verbless. Your passive prose will get you written off so fast, your potential reader won’t even know why they stopped read—
6. Say good, not not bad. Telling me what you don’t like or don’t believe gives me zero models to build my life upon. Basic Strunk and White:Instead of “not sure” use “unsure.”
   Instead of “not likely to indulge” use “abstain.”
   Instead of “not very able to grow up” use “stunted.”I know the objection – often the right word hides behind simpler words. Look, no one’s a natural at vocabulary. Heck my lowest ACT score was in writing. I’m just some moron armed with a dictionary. Be bold. Say you don’t know the meaning and look it or the synonym up. And if you find a synonym in the thesaurus, for all that’s good and holy, look it up in the dictionary too! Some people use a thesaurus to sound smart and then end up writing nonsense about their sterling familiar when they meant “good friend.”
7. Pick a form and stick to it. If it’s a formatting thing, especially a Shunn manuscript format thing, pick it and stay put. If it’s a sentence structure thing, pick it and stay put. If it’s a repeat of form thing, pick it and refuse to diverge. You’ll make your points way easier, way sooner. You might even save your local woods some trees and your style editor some headaches.

I could go on, but my editor’s going to kill me for going this long and I think some preachers are sleeping at their computers. Sorry guys, preacher’s habit.

If you found this helpful, we’ll dig into some new suggestions soon.

In the meantime go read some of Dostoevsky or O’Conner’s short stories. And read a Wendell Berry poem while you’re at it…

Them Broncos can wait.

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