The Gift of Words: Infusing love and charity into your writing

Do you believe that writers can subtly influence readers through their stories? If so, how can they do this without being didactic? Without being too preachy, how can writers infuse their stories with life-affirming messages showcasing virtues like love and charity? And why would writers want to showcase these virtues in the first place? Reading about these virtues will hopefully inspire and uplift readers.

In this blog, you will find some tips about how to do just that: how you can incorporate these values into your writing without being too obvious about it.

Five tips for incorporating good values in your writing:

1. The golden rule of good writing is to ‘Show’, not ‘Tell’. In this case, show your characters in action. Don’t tell us they are loving people, show that they are through their actions.
2. Remember your story. Craft a compelling plot. Include a ‘hook’ at the beginning of your story to draw your reader in, develop your plot, leading up to a climax, and make your story so fascinating and page-turning that your readers won’t be able to put your book down.
3. Create believable characters. Make your readers empathise with your characters so that they can experience what is happening to them. Don’t make them too ‘good’ or too ‘bad’ either. Even heroes/heroines have flaws, and villains have some redeeming features.
4. Allow one or two of your characters to show acts of kindness towards someone else. Whether these acts of kindness are appreciated by the other characters in your book doesn’t matter. What does matter is that your readers can appreciate these acts of kindness.
5. Weave themes of charity into your story, especially if you are writing for children and young adults.

Some examples of themes of charity and love in my writing

Although I don’t always deliberately set out to include themes of charity in my writing, as the characters interact with one another, and even with strangers, they demonstrate these qualities. I have, after all (since 2013), re-invented myself as a Christian writer, so I am subconsciously introducing ‘good seeds’ into my books. In my stories ‘Who Will Help’ and ‘The Provider’ (which appear in my short story anthology, Tapestries), the characters unselfishly decide to make sacrifices to help the hungry, the cold and the lonely. But their decisions to act in this way don’t detract from the stories. In ‘Violet Cupcakes’ (which appears in the anthology, Explorations), the girls act counter-intuitively by making cupcakes for Violet, who has been very nasty to them, an act that has surprising consequences. In the heart-warming story, ‘The Good Sheep’ (in Shine), the protagonist consciously tries to be kind to several different people because she is trying very hard to be one of Jesus’ sheep. Then there are two books which stand on their own: The Biggest Blessing and Modern Manna, the former about an individual act of kindness and the latter about a community act of kindness.

Sharing good values

There are so many dark stories out there in the world: crime stories, disturbing dystopian stories, ones about dysfunctional people, violence and explicit sex, some of them incorporating frequent swear words. I would like my stories to be infused with positive messages so that readers can enjoy learning about characters who genuinely make a difference in their small worlds. Hopefully, reading about love in action will motivate the readers to model some of this behaviour in their own lives, or at the very least, be inspired by the books and uplifted by their messages.