The beauty of Historical Fiction is that it can breathe new, storytelling life into Christian heroes, martyrs, and figures from long ago…

Whether the mystery involves big, dramatic life-or-death situations, intense bureaucratic or corporate politics, serial murders, theft, or the more mundane mysteries of life, such as secret admirers or missing pies, the genre provides its audience with an intellectual hook to keep them engaged.

To be transparent, this article is going to talk about a topic that is often uncomfortable and awkward for the Christian creative: what should we do about romantically (and graphically) intimate scenes in fiction?

While Romance is often relegated to the shallow end of the storytelling pool, it is actually one of the easiest genres for Christian storytellers to incorporate good, Godly, and even theologically deep messages.

Contemporary Fiction is delineated by its similarity to the current world, be that in character archetypes, worldbuilding, or plot.

To steal from biological taxonomy, under the domain of fiction are the two widely accepted kingdoms: Realistic and Speculative, both of which will be covered briefly in this article.

For those that are new, Theology of Storytelling is the Brainy Blog’s deep dive into how to tell Christian stories. Everything from overt and covert messaging, character archetypes, literary devices, symbolism, to deeper questions including “does all Christian fiction have to be kid-friendly?” and “are Christian stories even necessary?”. All these are covered in Theology of Storytelling!