Why is it that anyone who can string a sentence together (and even those who can’t) feel they must subject other people to their writing?

Now I know I’m on thin ice here (being one who not only subjects people to her writing but expects to be paid for it too!) but bear with me. Through this article I hope to save some deluded people from the pain of rejection and encourage those with real talent to venture out from under their bushel.

I used to run a Christian music and theatre company with my husband. Every so often we would hold auditions. Sadly, 90% of the hopefuls were never asked back. Many of those were outraged at being rejected, telling us that ‘everyone at church thought they could sing’ or worse that ‘God had told them’. Perhaps He had, but surely a God of love would not force the rest of us to listen to a tuneless prima donna murdering Shine Jesus Shine for the sake of the Kingdom.

Of those 90%, a handful actually did have some talent, but hadn’t properly developed it. We were not an arts training college. We only took on people who were ready to perform. We would tell the promising hopefuls to go away and get guitar, singing or acting lessons and then try again next year. To my knowledge, none of them did.

Lack of Training

It’s the same with writing. Plain Truth’s managing editor Mary Hammond tells me that she receives about a dozen articles a month that are unsuitable for publication. Some are just badly written, others show some promise but illustrate a lack of training in how to write a proper article for a professional magazine.

There are many correspondence courses available that will teach you how to write for publication, so like those talented but untrained performers, I suggest you sign up for one. Yes, they cost money, but if you are serious about your writing, you need to invest in it. If God had called you to be a witness in the motor industry you would probably do a course in mechanics, so why can’t you do a course in writing if you believe you have been called to ‘witness’ in this way?

If you prefer a more unstructured approach, there is a lot of information freely available on the Web that can help you with various aspects of writing. Here’s some info on feature writing and writing for children from my other site, The Crafty Writer. Or use your favourite search engine as a starting point.

As a writing tutor I see two broad problems: either the writer has the right target audience in mind but is producing the wrong kind of writing, or they are producing good writing for the wrong audience. The key, of course, is to match the writing with the target audience. One of the first things I teach my students is how to do market research. This sounds very complicated, but is simply a matter of finding out what a magazine publishes before you send stuff off.

A Living Word

If you ask most people why they want to write they will say it’s because they have ‘something to share’. And it’s not surprising, because that’s how God made us. God himself had something to share when the Word became Flesh (John 1:1) in the form of Jesus. It’s no coincidence, I believe, that the Word in this case is a translation of the Greek word Logos that means ‘living word’. This is the ‘word’ that created all life when it was spoken by God in the beginning (Genesis 1:1).

So the use of words, whether spoken or written, is a creative force. Ideas are spread through them, relationships are forged with them and our personalities are manifest through them. The corollary is also true. Words can bring death so they need to be used wisely. And all the more so when those words are given permanence on the printed page. A spoken word may soon be forgotten, but a written word may be there forever, multiplied every time it is reprinted.

So you should ask yourself: who is this word to be shared with? I have kept a spiritual journal since I was 15. There are now probably hundreds of thousands of words scrawled in ballpoint. Most of those words will never leave the pages of the book. They are God’s words to me and my words to God.

Target audience

Sometimes I write something in my journal that I think may have relevance to a friend or relative. If so, I transcribe those words and share them. Sometimes the words may be relevant to my Bible study group, or my whole church. Only on the rarest occasion do I feel the words need to be shared with readers of magazines. And if I do, I never simply transcribe them. I use the words as a kernel to craft a professional article around. In that process the original words may be replaced with more appropriate words – words that suitably address the target audience.

That all sounds terribly complicated. Well the process can be complicated, but the product must always be simple. In the words of John Halford, editor of Plain Truth magazine: ‘We desperately need writers who can communicate at the ordinary person’s level – identifying with their fears and their needs. Not a holier than thou approach, but a just as unholy as thou approach.’

An arrogant person will be an arrogant writer. This is the type who refuses to be edited. A writer should never be above editing. I have been writing professionally for 16 years and still get edited. A wise editor will do it gently.

Now let’s move outside the covers of religious publications and ask: What is the role of the Christian writer in the world?

A few years ago I attended an Association of Christian Writers conference at the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. One of the speakers was Brian Draper, a Christian writer and editor. He spoke of writers and artists as being positioned on the periphery of the church. Our role, he said, was to interpret the church to the world, and in turn, the world to the church. The danger of this positioning, of course, is that we may face rejection from both camps. I have not met a single Christian artist who is truly fulfilling his or her calling who has not been ‘misunderstood’ by others in the Church. It’s a hard place to be, but we must stay here at all costs.

Setting the agenda

In my last article on the media I outlined how our worldview is shaped by the written and broadcast word and argued that it was essential for Christians to begin ‘setting the agenda’. Now this doesn’t necessarily mean producing programmes about Christianity or even writing Christian novels (though both have a role to play) I’m talking about presenting a Christian worldview of ‘secular’ things.

None have said it better than CS Lewis, so I’ll shut up now, and let him talk for a while:

‘While we are on the subject of science, let me digress for a moment. I believe any Christian who is qualified to write a good popular book on science may do much more by that than by any directly apologetic work. The difficulty we are up against is this. We can make people (often) attend to a Christian point of view for half an hour or so, but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible.

‘We must attack the enemy’s line of communication. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects – with their Christianity latent. …. it is not the books written on Materialism that make the modern man a Materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all other books. In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian.’ (from God in the Dock)

A Christian writer?

This is perhaps a good point to say that I never describe myself as a Christian writer, rather as a writer who is a Christian. I write for the secular press as well. One of my clients is an international sporting magazine for whom I do interviews of expat sportsmen in the UK. Most of the articles I do for them never mention God, but this does not mean that my writing is no longer ‘Christian’.

Sportsmen, like most personalities are suspicious of the media. As a Christian I need to have integrity in the way I deal with these people and their private lives. I will never write something to deliberately humiliate them and always honour any requests that comments remain ‘off the record’. From my editor’s perspective, I present well-written, professional work on time. For me, it’s an issue of character, Christian character.

You may have noticed I said most of my articles never mention God. But some of them do. If I can mention God or Christians in a positive light without it sounding forced or preachy, I do. For example, I interviewed the captain of a premier league rugby club who is also a committed Christian. While interviewing him about his life in London, I asked him what he does on weekends when he’s not playing, knowing he goes to church. This gave him an opportunity to speak about his faith. I put his comments in the article and the editor left them in. And all this in a magazine with a bare-breasted babe and a strategically placed hockey stick on the cover!

Secular media

Another way to set the agenda is to give the Christian perspective on issues, whether it is the law, the economy, ecology or education. That is one of the roles of Plain Truth. John Halford agrees: ‘Those of us who can do it must use the media. It needs Christians to say “hey, there is another way of looking at this, and another way of thinking that leads to different decisions and opens up the door to other possibilities.”‘

Christians need to go into the secular media. I listen to Radio 2 and have been impressed at the opportunities given for Christians to give their viewpoint on the Jeremy Vine Show. I only recently discovered that he actually is a Christian. Vine has not attempted to hijack the show and gives equal time to all religions, but equal time is all we need when the truth can set people free.

Christian writing on the web

For some thought-provoking Christian writing check out Methodist minister, Dave Faulkner’s blog.

For more information on the Christian writing scene visit the comprehensive Christian Writer.

First appeared in Plain Truth as ‘Sit Down and Be Counted’, April 2006

Last night I watched The Day After Tomorrow on DVD. Yikes! Did you know we’re all going to freeze to death because of global warming? OK, so it’s only a film, but a film based on a scientific theory. As far as I understand it, because the earth is overheating due to unsustainable industrial development, the polar caps are beginning to melt, pouring fresh water into salty oceans. This ‘desalination’ of the oceans may lead to massive climate change, which will result in a new ice age.

Now the only reason I’m not stocking up on thermal underwear is that I recently read State of Fear by Michael Crichton (Harper Collins, 2004) in which the author of Jurassic Park puts forward the opposite theory: the earth’s not warming up at all, at least no more than it would naturally do without the intervention of man. This manifesto of the anti-global warming lobby, thinly disguised as a novel, points the finger at the media for a disinformation campaign on behalf of shady, unscrupulous figures trying to make a fast buck in the name of environmentalism.

Global Warming

So who am I to believe? On the one hand we have (reportedly) the majority of the world’s scientists and on the other, jovial botanist David Bellamy, Michael Crichton and the American government. (OK, so that’s a bit mean: there are quite a few scientists who don’t tow the global warming line, but they’re still vastly in the minority.)

I don’t mind stating up front that I’m not with Bellamy et al, but I doubt that I could win a debate with any of them – I’m not an expert on global warming and neither, I doubt, are the majority of you. But there’s one point with which I agree wholeheartedly with Crichton: I only know what I think I know because I’ve read, seen or heard it through the media. The question is: how do these media-induced perceptions line up with reality?

SARS

And what about SARS or the dreaded human mutation of Avian Flu? The only SARS I’ve ever had close contact with is the South African Revenue Services. I still remember the expression on the postman’s face when he delivered a letter emblazoned with the tax service’s logo to my British home at the height of the last ‘crisis’!

But I must admit, despite being usually levelheaded about such things, I did think of going online to acquire the Tamiflu vaccine. A 10-second Internet search revealed that I could get ‘essential protection against Bird Flu’ for only 620 euros. At that point my level headedness returned.

The more eagle-eyed of you may have picked up that I’m incorrectly using SARS and Avian Flu interchangeably. And you probably aren’t virologists. SARS, of course, stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and is a human disease, caught, in the most publicised instance, from poultry. Avian Flu, as the name suggests, is a disease in birds. The mediated fear is that it may mutate and become a threat. Some scientists think it’s inevitable; others that it isn’t.

But how do I know this? I’m no brighter than most of you; I don’t have a science degree or even a subscription to New Scientist. I simply did an Internet search and clicked on the most official looking website I could find. The fact that it happened to be at the top of my favourite search engine list and I didn’t have much time to put this article together, also contributed to my choice of site.

Checking facts

Most journalists, like me, work to deadline. We don’t have all the time in the world to check and triple check facts. We don’t deliberately mislead the public, but sometimes errors creep in. I worked for a daily paper in South Africa that sometimes got things wrong in their morning edition then corrected them for the afternoon one as soon as the error came to their attention. Sometimes it wasn’t that they’d simply got their facts wrong, but that another source emerged during the morning shedding new light on the first story. But what if someone only read the morning edition?

Before we leave sarswatch let’s take a closer look at the site. If you scroll right down to the bottom of the home page you’ll see that all material is copyrighted to someone called Tim Bishop. There’s a link to his website. If you follow it you will discover that he’s not an expert at all, just an ‘entrepreneur, writer, and product manager and project manager, living in Berkeley, California.’ A quick read of the site (note quick, there could have been something I missed) tells me that Tim set up this non-profit site as a public service. It’s good to know, however, that it was named ‘site of the week’ by the British Medical Journal, so my faith is not completely shaken. When I follow the link to the BMJ it appears legit.

But how many members of the 12.9 million British households that have access to the Internet (National Statistics Omnibus Survey July 2005) would have bothered following the trail? Even worse, how many of the 36 million British newspaper readers (National Marketing Agency) would have taken the trouble to find a computer, go online then check out everything they’d been told? Or the TV news viewers? Or the radio news listeners? And how many of you bothered to check out my statistics despite me giving you the links?

Credible sources

As a young journalist I was taught to weigh the credibility of information against the known or perceived credibility of the source. In other words, who said it was just as important as what was said. The ‘official’ version of events was always sought although this was not always considered the most credible. For example, in the apartheid era, a human rights activist’s version of racially fuelled events was sought to bring balance to the obviously biased government version.

This doesn’t mean that the official version of everything is ‘wrong’ just that the motives behind the given version need to be examined. Is there an economic motive? An ethical motive? A political motive? In this media directed world, there are people who believe everything, and those who believe nothing. I have an avowed Tory friend who refuses to believe any official government statement because she doesn’t trust Tony Blair! More seriously, there are millions of people dying of HIV infection in Africa, many of whom simply just don’t believe what health officials tell them.

The furore around the MMR vaccine is another prime example. My primary source, if you would like to know, is BBC Online. The BBC is widely perceived as being one of the most accurate sources of news and information around. I say perceived, because this may or may not be true, but people believe that it is. The BBC has worked hard to create an image of unbiased, factually based reporting. But this image was somewhat tarnished as a result of the Andrew Gilligan interview with David Kelly concerning WMDs – I won’t bother spelling this one out; like SARS and HIV you all know what I mean thanks to the media.

Despite this blip, I still rate the BBC over most other news agencies. Not that I think it’s infallible, just that they get it right more often than they get it wrong.

MMR

So back to MMR. The intro paragraph in an article entitled MMR Research Timeline states: ‘Despite continued attempts by the Department of Health and doctors (to persuade people) that the vaccine is safe, some parents still have doubts about its safety.’ The article was written in June 2003. This parental doubt has continued despite the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, who published the original article that started the panic, recanting. And despite the massive media coverage of the so-called discrediting of Dr Andrew Wakefield, the author of the report, and his theory that MMR is linked to autism.

For those of you who might have been on Mars for the last seven years (by the way, did you spot the Beagle?) I’ll briefly recap. In 1998 Dr Wakefield, a transplant surgeon who had done research into inflammatory bowel disease, published the results of a study of 12 children, which suggested that their bowel troubles might be linked to measles. As all these children had received the Measles Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine in their second year, he considered that there might be a further link to the combined vaccine. It was later revealed that Wakefield had been paid to study whether or not some children had developed autism because of the MMR. Some children appeared in both studies. The Lancet claimed that it didn’t know of this conflict of interest at the time and would never have published the initial article if it had done so.

In November 2004 Channel 4 flighted a documentary by researcher Brian Deer that suggested that Wakefield had profited from the worldwide MMR scare by providing single jabs of the three vaccines. The single jabs could not be accessed on the NHS and had to be imported. However, many parents found the cost prohibitive and simply did not have their children vaccinated. The result has been localised outbreaks of measles, a potentially fatal disease that had almost been eradicated in the UK by the MMR vaccine.

Who’s to blame?

So what portion of blame can be attributed to the media? Dr Wakefield’s initial findings were never presented as conclusive. In the Lancet article he called for ‘further research’. In response, the Medical Research Council reviewed the study and concluded that there was ‘no evidence to indicate any link’. But when the story hit the popular media, pandemonium broke out. Week after week readers and viewers were presented with families of autistic children who believed they had been damaged by the MMR. Parents began to panic and no matter how many articles were run discounting the theory, an increasing number of worried parents joined Internet forums and support groups, which shared information about ‘what the authorities aren’t telling you’.

The furore seems to have finally subsided with a recent study in Japan proving ‘conclusively’ that there is no link between MMR and autism, but I still know of some parents who are not convinced. Why not? The media may have started the scare by reporting something that should not have been presented to the unscientifically trained masses at such an early stage, but they have also done their best to correct it by publishing the other side of the debate. People make their own choices. When presented with two sides to an argument they will probably choose to believe the one that backs up their own views anyway. Yes, the way an issue is presented (tear jerking testimonies by the parents of autistic children vs the bland testimony of a scientist, for example) can influence a reader or viewer’s perception of a story, but in the end, it’s our decision.

Personal choices

I’m the mother of a 10-month-old baby and in the next six months she will need to get the MMR. I’ve read whatever I can find in the media and have come to the conclusion that the majority of the world’s scientists back the MMR and only a few appear not to. So we’ll go for the MMR. I may be wrong and my daughter’s life will be affected, but I can only trust what better-informed people tell me. And how do they tell me? Through the biased, sensationalist, over-simplified mode of communication known as the media.

But what if the media had never covered the MMR story? I would never have known about Dr Wakefield’s theory, nor would the majority of you. It would never have been exposed to public scrutiny and we would never have known that it’s something we should think about. The same with global warming. This is called ‘setting the agenda’ and it has an enormous impact on the way we view our world.

For example, do we ever hear about the daily persecution of Christians around the globe? At a recent workshop participants were asked to tell the group three things about themselves. One of them had to be a ‘cause, political or otherwise’ that we felt strongly about. When I said the worldwide persecution of Christians, one person responded: ‘but that doesn’t happen anymore.’ How could she have such a view? Simply because she’d never been exposed to another.

Christian media

And it is only because I peruse the Christian media that I do. The Christian media make a point of setting a Christian agenda. And publications, like the Plain Truth, have an important role to play in informing people who don’t necessarily go to church that there is an alternative worldview.

Another publication that did that, The Christian Herald, has sadly closed down after 130 years. Its witness will be sorely missed. In Cape Town I taught briefly at a Christian college called Media Village. One of its aims is to train students to industry standard so they can get jobs in the secular media and help put Christianity back on the agenda.

Some years ago I met a Belgian man who was amazed to find out I was a Christian. ‘But no one believes that stuff any more. Not educated people anyway,’ he said. ‘How do you know?’ I asked. ‘It’s just what I’ve read in the media,’ he answered.

All of which goes to prove that, at the end of the day, perception is reality.

First appeared in Plain Truth as ‘Mediating Reality, February 2006