What Fiction Writers Understand About Character That Every Preacher Should Know

The craft of literary fiction is, at its core, the craft of portraying human character with honesty and specificity — showing what people are actually like, why they do what they do, how they change or fail to change, and what their inner life looks like from the inside. This is a craft refined over centuries of narrative art, and the great fiction writers have thought more carefully and more specifically about human character than most academic disciplines that study it.

The preacher, whose primary task is the application of revealed truth to the actual conditions of actual human beings, has everything to learn from what the best fiction writers know about character. Not the theological framework for understanding human nature — Scripture provides that comprehensively — but the specific, granular, particular observation of how human beings actually present, think, deceive themselves, resist change, experience grace, and become gradually more or less than they were. This is the craft knowledge that makes the difference between the preacher who describes human experience in a way that rings true and the preacher who describes it in a way that sounds like a category rather than a person.

The Specificity That Creates Recognition

The great novelists create characters that readers recognize — not as generic humans, but as specific people who feel real in the precise, particular, non-interchangeable way that actual people feel real. Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov is not "a person struggling with guilt." He is a specific person struggling with a specific form of guilt in a specific social and psychological context, and the specificity is what makes the recognition possible. The reader encounters Raskolnikov and thinks: yes, I know this. Not in the abstract, but in the specific.

"The great novelist creates characters so specific that readers recognize them — and the preacher who achieves this specificity produces the same recognition."

What This Means for Preaching

The preacher who applies this insight to sermon illustration and application will describe human experience with more specificity than the generic — will name the specific texture of the particular temptation, the specific quality of the particular grief, the specific way that the particular form of self-deception sounds in the inner monologue of a real person. This specificity is what produces the moment of recognition in the congregation — the moment when the person in the third row thinks: the preacher is describing me, specifically, in a way I have never heard described before. That moment of recognition is also a moment of genuine encounter — with the text, with the truth it contains, with the God who knows the person being described.

Read fiction with the eye of a preacher. Note how the great writers handle the interior life of their characters, how they describe motivation, how they portray self-deception, how they show what grace and transformation and hardening of heart actually look like in the lived experience of a specific person. Marilynne Robinson, Flannery O'Connor, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Tolstoy — these writers are, among other things, some of the best teachers of human nature available, and their classroom is open to any pastor willing to read slowly and carefully.