The Christian Stories I'd Love to Write

Today we visit my Ask.fm page for a blog request:

If you had to write a story in the "Christian" genre (like The Quest for Skye or God's Not Dead), what would the plot be?

I have actually attempted to do this a couple times for NaNoWriMo, but it turns out I do not write drama well while winging it. So sometimes I'm going to plan this out and do something for real. But since I get really serious about quality in Christian stories, I want it to be genuinely excellent before I do anything about it -- so I might never get around to putting any of these together the way I want them to be.

Most of the stories I write or want to write are not particularly Christian-centric. They're just stories about people. When I do want to write something that's explicitly about Christians, it's often because I see a Christian story done wrong (like, yeah, The Quest for Skye or God's Not Dead) and I want to do it right -- or because I want to write about something that Christian fiction doesn't typically touch on.

These are a few of the ideas I've tossed around in the past -- some have been written more than others:

1. A fictionalized version of my year at NLDC. It changed my life, and I wish I could find a way to capture some of that on page.
2. A story about a girl trying to be a Christian musician, focusing on her finding her mission statement, so to speak, of God and art and commercialism. (I wrote part of this for NaNo a few years ago. It was horrendously boring. Whoops.)
3. An anti-God's Not Dead. A sheltered youth group kid goes to college expecting that she'll have to defend her faith all over the place. It almost never happens -- and when it does, it goes horribly wrong in ways she didn't expect. She's more than a little shaken up and her faith falls apart a little bit because she feels like everyone was lying to her, and has to figure out how to rebuild her faith.
4. An anti-Left Behind. People start disappearing off the planet and one Christian is convinced they know what's going on (it's the rapture, and they must not have been truly saved) and starts leading other people during what they think is the apocalypse. (I actually wrote a chunk of this last NaNo after I tried writing #3 and abandoned it.)

There have been other stories that I've toyed with the idea of. Frankly, I'd just like to see more Christian stories with nerdy characters. Then maybe I'd have someone to relate to...