Rachel Starr Thomson

Recently I pitched an idea for an article to Boundless: I wanted to write about Amy Carmichael, a missionary woman who sailed to India in 1895 and stayed there until her death in 1951. I didn’t want to write about her as a missionary but as a writer; in her lifetime Amy wrote some 37 books, and in my opinion her work doesn’t get nearly enough attention.

I discovered Amy’s writing through a little anthology (it’s a good thing it’s thin, as Amy didn’t like thick books; she told her publisher they looked “stodgy”) called Learning of God. It had a huge impact on my spiritual life, but also on my writing life, as it turns out. Amy’s style is natural and flowing and steeped in scripture; it’s funny and salty and mystical. All things I’d like my own writing to be.

Today I finished drafting that article, tentatively titled “Fire-Words,” and I really look forward to introducing more people to this aspect of Amy’s legacy.

Question for you today: are there any little-known authors who’ve impacted you? Authors you’d like to introduce others to? Or even well-known authors who are falling out of favour in this age of twenty-second attention spans and shock value?

Jim Cox of the Midwest Book Review, a publication which gives special consideration to small presses and self-publishers, sends out a monthly e-mail report. Last week, he recorded one of the strongest Februarys ever in the number of new books submitted for review. Seem strange, considering that we’re going through an economic recession? In Jim’s words, “How to explain this seemingly contradictory phenomena of the worse the economy gets the more small press books are getting published?”

Here are some of his thoughts:

Firstly, the publishing lists of the New York conglomerate publishers (the Simon & Schusters of the publishing world) are reducing their lists making it harder than ever for first time writers and mid-list authors to get published. So they are turning to smaller, regional, academic, and even POD
companies to get their works into print …. people getting laid off of white collar jobs are turning to writing and publishing as a means of making money because they now have the enforced leisure time to do so — and the already present computers and word processing softwares associated with ‘desk top publishing’ that make it fairly easy to carry out.

Add to that the proliferation of POD subsidy presses which are making it extremely easy for anyone to get into print, along with the comparatively low costs of publishing these days, and you have some good reasons for writers to write — and publish — in this day and age.

But what about readers? Will readers keep buying books, in print or electronically, when their wallets are tighter than usual? As a self-published author, this is a question of some importance to me. My own experience is encouraging, as my book sales so far are higher than they’ve ever been. But it’s still early to tell.

Last Tuesday I had the fun of going on JoJo Tabares’s Grace Talk Soup podcast and talking about writing and reading, among other things. Some of our discussion played off the “At Home with Christian Fiction”  interview she’d done the week before. We talked about reading as an escape — fiction as a place where readers can go to escape from the pressures of life, and hopefully come away ministered to in some way and made stronger. (You can still hear the both episodes — just scroll down and check out the “Past Episodes” list.)

I’m wondering if that need for escape — which increases when life is difficult, as during a recession — is good news for writers and publishers who are looking to reach new readers. What do you think?

This week I did something I haven’t done in quite a while: I plunged into a fantasy world. Obeying my sudden urge to actually read the book I was supposed to review for the CSFF Blog Tour (that’s Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy, if you were wondering), I bought two fantasy novels on a whim and then ploughed through them in three days. If you read as fast as I did as a teenager, that probably sounds like an intolerably long time, but I’ve slowed down since I started editing — and I still have work to do. So reading like that meant staying up really late at night and eating all my meals while buried in pages.

I am, for the most part, glad I did it. I’ll give a disclaimer here: as several other bloggers remarked, these books are for mature teens and adults — they deal with some adult themes and have their very violent moments. But they’re also rich in theme and imagery, with taut, skillfull writing of the kind that lends itself to being quoted in my writing lessons.

The thing about plunging into a fictional world, though, is that eventually you have to come back up. If the book was a good one, it will leave marks. My vocabulary is always a little altered after I’ve been reading, and I’ll be hearing character voices in my head for weeks. Catch me thinking, and I may well be thinking about some place that doesn’t really exist. But ideally, good fiction will do more than leave marks. It will actually influence the ways we live our real lives.

When I read, I want to come away with a more profound understanding of who I am, what this world is, who God is. I want to come away loving my family and friends more, hating evil with a greater passion, longing for beauty with a sharp edge. In general, fiction affects me this way far more than nonfiction does. That’s the power of story.

Judging from the comments on my Cyndere’s Midnight posts, I’m guessing that some of you have come away from fiction in some measure changed. I hope so. And as you write, may God bless your work with the power to change others as well.

See you next week!