It's long been a question of mine whether I'm writing my present novel for the Christian fiction market or the mainstream fiction market. I vacillate on whether I care. Some months I say I'm just writing my story--I'll figure out what market it best appeals to later! Then other months, I realize certain ways of telling the story block me from one market or the other. (In fact, my big problem is that I've often felt I'm going to have a hard time in either market, no matter how well I write or the quality of my story craft. I'm writing about marriage and infidelity, so the sex lives of characters are certainly at the center of the story, even if sex scenes per se are not. On the other hand, the more I write, the more I realize my Christian worldview colors everything I write, so that even if I try to write a novel that's not overtly "Christian," a Christian viewpoint oozes out nonetheless. And I'm not upset about that--I am who I am, and proudly so. But it's put an added dimension on possible trouble getting published. Then in my wisest moments, I remind myself none of this really matters, in a sense, because if I'm writing what I'm meant to write--if my writing is flowing out of the purpose God created me for and He wants me to tell this story, He's going to direct it getting where He wants it to get.)
A fellow member of my local writer's group, Craig Alan Loewen, is presenting a workshop at a conference I'm attending Saturday at the Lancaster Christian Writer's Group. I looked over his handout, and I see he says not to write for the market--just write the story and the right market will open up. Ironically, anther strong voice in my head, saying the contrary, is from a book he gave me--Penelope Stokes' book about how to write for the Christian market (she advises expressly writing to fit the market).
Last night I was working on the first number of chapters to cement who Ash, my novel's main character, is, and I already feel a question about editing some stuff out, or at least moving some details to further into the book. Stokes talks about how readers of Christian fiction are in the more conservative end of the continuum, (which I read as 'more conservative than me'). When I think women in my novel critique group might be offended or uncomfortable with my revelation of Ash's past and present, I realize it's at least a possible litmus test for the Christian market. There are a lot of unknowns, and certainly the Christian fiction market has been evolving. But enough to handle this story?
I write this blog as a warm up to working on the chapters of my novel, and I was hoping to write to an answer, so I'd know if I should spend my writing time today revising my opening chapters to make them less forthright about Ash's dating life, possibly saving some details for later in the novel where those details may be easier to read. Or if I should just keep writing, changing nothing just now.
Maybe I really shouldn't worry about it now--but later. Maybe I won't really know what my novel can handle until more is written. Some part of me thinks maybe it never can be reconciled to meet the more stringent guidelines governing Christina fiction; I may be stuck in limbo between being too controversial for Christian fiction but too Christian for mainstream. And maybe that's just where it's meant to be. I sometimes worry that the story cannot even be told if i try to do it in the confines of Christian fiction--and yet I have connections and guidance to get into that publishing world--but none to try the much larger market of mainstream fiction.
I guess for now I'll just makes notes of how I could alter what I've written, if I ever saw that's what I wanted to do. But i'll leave them as they are for now, and just write the story!
PS At the conference I'm attending Saturday, I'm hoping to get an appointment with a fiction novelist there, and maybe that's what I'll talk with her about and see what her experience has been like... If I bring my opening of the book, about Ash's parents, she'd get the picture pretty quickly whether or not the entire book premise is just too much on the edge of what is being published right now. I'd seen that a book on adultery has been published in the market, but if I remember correctly, the woman found out upon her husband's death. I should probably read it as research. I wonder how that affects the story too--with the husband dead... My story isn't so much about the act of infidelity as the effects of it and whether or not the characters can handle reconciliation.
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