Author Brand and Ignoring Lines

Being an artist who is a Christian can seem like locking myself out of opportunities, but I have a different approach to my fiction. I consider this my author brand.

I’m personally not affected by what other artists who are Christian think they shouldn’t do.

“I can’t cross that line.”

“The gospel will be tarnished if I go too far.”

I don’t subscribe to that mindset. I’m not aiming to be a PG writer. The stories I want to tell will have depictions of violence, trauma, psychological deconstruction, and even some sparingly placed beach episodes.

I have certain lines I won’t cross (Stanzielle is only seventeen in the first five books) as far as depictions and manga paneling, but stepping on traditional Christian toes isn’t one of those lines.

I feel like we need to make art that competes with the secular on a quality, prose, and subject matter level.

The Bible is full of graphic violence, sexual escapades that might raise some eyebrows, and tackles hard subjects, so I won’t shy away from them.

I certainly invent words that are curse words in fictional worlds, but I won’t shy away from using real ones, either. If it makes sense for the characters.

I’m writing a twenty-book war story, and there’s no way that you can depict that without going into graphic trauma. It might be instruments playing that cause the damage, but they are no less deadly than a gun or scythe.

The attacks themselves are expressed in poetry and verse, rather than prose description (as in the characters are fighting, but the reader experiences the attack as a poem) in the Orchestrylus Odyssey, but the effects of those attacks are real and devastating.

Children will have lost their shoes, or a crib might be burned to a crisp in an abandoned home.

We can’t accurately depict things of this magnitude without crossing some PG lines.

I’m not afraid of doing things in unconventional ways—even if it seems against what others consider normal for the type of person I am and the beliefs that I have.

I don’t believe in using generative prompts and images in my finished works, so everything I do is based on my instincts as a writer, and my instincts tell me not to follow the “inspirational fiction” label for myself. My attempts at panels aren’t Eiichiro Oda-worthy, but I’d rather do things with some extra effort.

Of course, this means I’ll commission artists who must also be OK with bloody scenes or depictions of violence.

The world is not always kind, so neither should art ‌always show an idealized world. Conflict and clashing ideals lead to ugly things sometimes.

I’ve been experimenting with weird ways of doing things.

Poetry as an attack is something I feel is unique to my stories (not that ancient poems didn’t exist and describe wars in verse, but the medium of the attack being a poem is like a special effect in writing) in the way that I use them to have a physical battle, a mental battle, and extended reader participation. The poem is the flourish of the attack, not lyrically recounting a battle. Meaning a violin will be played with the magic system physically, but the poem might be about falling lilies in an aurora storm and the things of the soul in a call-and-response manner, though the characters aren’t aware of reciting anything. It’s for effect.

Having characters with actually feminine proportions is also something you might not see a typical Christian story handle, but I don’t want to be that. I want to stand out as someone who does things in their own way.

I won’t go super brutal with the violence, but the written word can be used in such a way as to evoke the emotion of the horrors of war in beautiful prose that haunts.

I want these types of distinctions when it comes to my author brand.

What might your personal brand look like?