Recommendation: The Art of Spiritual Writing by Vinita Hampton Wright

A guidebook packed with helpful insights for writers of fiction and non-fiction

Jul 27, 2024

For anyone whose writing touches on religious, spirituality, or devotional matters, whether in non-fiction, creative non-fiction, or fiction, I highly recommend Vinita Hampton Wright’s relatively short guide, The Art of Spiritual Writing: How to Craft Prose That Engages and Inspires Your Readers (Loyola Press, 2013). Her extensive experience certainly provides her with credibility on the subject. A prolific author in her own right—around eighteen non-fiction titles along with three novels and a novella—Hampton is also an editor with 30+ years’ experience working for both Protestant and Catholic publishers.

Hampton’s approach to the subject is clearly informed by Ignatian spirituality, a tradition rooted in practical and practiced faith, rather than belief, and in a personal relationship with God. St. Ignatius sought to integrate the sacred and the awareness of God’s presence with everyday life, which aligns with what I call here on Deus in Fabula as spiritual, devotional, and mystical realism. The tradition also encourages people everywhere to leave behind, as I wrote in my recent guest post on living in spiritual community, “the usual societal values built around ‘I gotta get mine!’ to embrace a life built upon transcendence of ego and selfish desire through prayer, meditation, discipleship, service, and devotion to God.”

Respect for all faith traditions

Just as the Ignatian way sees God as an infinitely loving and infinitely generous giver of gifts, Hampton is also very generous by acknowledging that God can come in many ways and in many forms. Respecting everyone’s right, regardless of the particulars of their faith, to share their stories, she passes no judgment on what people hope to share. Instead, she offers, in the best of the Ignatian tradition, practical guidance to help make one’s writing more effective and successful. I’m sure as an editor it pained her to see many books squander their potential through poor execution and an inattentiveness to the “art”—which is to say, the craft—of writing that’s part of the books’ title.

For example, in Chapter 8, “Simple Ways to Make Your Writing Better,” which addresses many areas of craft, she reminds us to properly research the faith traditions about which we’re writing.

You may not be writing theology, but it’s important that you understand the theology of the audience for which you are writing. That means that if you write for the Catholic market, you need to be able to get around in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and you need a working knowledge of everything that is important in that tradition. (Page 85 of the Kindle edition)

This comment also applies to settings and cultures that you might use in fiction. If you’re writing a story set in medieval Europe, as with the excerpt I share in The privilege of writing inner experience: part 2, then you need to understand how the people of that time related to and practiced their Catholic faith. Similarly, if you are writing a story about a modern-day Protestant who grew up in a conservative church, then you’d want to go study the resources on, say, the website of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.

Hampton shares an example of her own in this regard:

Back when I worked in Protestant publishing companies, I knew very little about saints because saints are not part of Protestant traditions. Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican traditions have a fairly robust relationship with the calendar of saints. So now I’m pretty handy with Butler’s Lives of the Saints and other sources, and I know the difference between someone who has been beatified but not canonized.
If you write for a broader spirituality market, there’s more you have to know. What is the difference between contemplation in the Buddhist tradition and that in the Jewish tradition? Does anyone still use the term New Age? In this instance, do you capitalize Orthodox or not? (84-85)

Part of the interior of a Greek Orthodox church near Kalambaka, Thessaly, in Greece, which my son and I visited in April 2023. I don’t remember the exact name and reverse image search isn’t helping. In any case, the entire interior of the church is adorned with icons of saints, with women saints in thsi particular section.

Use of religious jargon

Although she encourages authors to have knowledge of the appropriate faith traditions, she cautions against relying on any related clichés and jargon:

If you are using a term that’s familiar to the audience, expect people to assume that they already know what you’re going to say, which means they’ll skip this paragraph and go to one that seems to have new information.

Jargon, in other words, breaks reader engagement. In fiction, the problem is not so much that readers might skip the paragraph but rather that jargon and buzzwords are a form of “telling” rather than “showing.” Buzzwords, where I’ve encountered them, are clearly meant to trigger a memory or association in the minds of readers and thereby evoke certain feelings or emotions. The author, then, doesn’t have to make an effort to evoke those feelings through the writing itself, relying instead on what the reader brings to the story from their own existing experience.

If the reader’s experience happens to match the author’s, then this short-cut can work. If, however, the reader’s experience is different, then you risk a high probability of disconnect. An author, for example, might think very positively of a certain idea or concept; if a reader’s experience is negative or simply neutral, then the story won’t have the intended effect.1

Relying on jargon and what the reader brings to the table also cheats the reader out of what could be a deeply meaningful meditation on the experience of the story’s characters. As I wrote in The privilege of writing inner experiences: part 1, what might be only a few seconds of time in the story world could take two minutes to read on the page—and that slow-motion time is a real gift to readers, especially as they can re-read the passage to stretch the experience out even further. For example, look at my post entitled Wondrous, Chapter 1. I could have started that story by simply saying, “Eliza sits in meditation, wondering why she’s been stuck at a spiritual plateau.” To engage in such “telling” would assume the reader somehow shares my understanding of what the terms “meditation” and “a spiritual plateau” mean. By instead showing what I mean—which takes 1000 words instead of a single sentence—readers can engage in the experience from the inside out and thus arrive at an understanding through that experience.

What does it mean to write “spirituality”?

Hampton opens her book with this question, stating right away that she isn’t going to worry about definitions because “spirituality is as diverse as the people who try to practice it, and writing manifests in almost as many styles.” (1) Her focus, then, is to identify “the qualities that mark both fiction and nonfiction writing as spiritual—as relevant to interior, intentional development”: (1)

Spiritual writing is true, as opposed to fabricated or based on an untested belief.
Spiritual writing is courageous rather than pandering to prevailing opinions.
Spiritual writing is hopeful in that “life is worth writing about.”
Spiritual writing is engaging, and boldly so, because “the spiritual life is an ongoing engagement with reality…an experience, not an idea or belief.”

She goes on to say that a writer “takes on the task of exploring the world of spirit,” whether in fiction or non-fiction, and must necessarily struggle to “discover the names of things…to provide vocabulary by which the rest of us can name what God—that lovely, terrifying Divine—is doing to us, for us, around us, and right inside us.” (4) This again reflects what I wrote in The privilege of writing inner experiences: part 1 (and part 2).

“Save teaching for the classroom and preaching for the pulpit”

This heading, which I’ve taken directly from Chapter 2 of The Art of Spiritual Writing, is of course important for non-fiction but even more so for fiction. Readers of fiction want an engaging story through which they share the inner experience of another, rather than a theology or doctrinal lesson masquerading as a story. Another section in Chapter 2 goes on to distinguish the storytelling of fiction from teaching:

Some of our most spiritual literature exists in the form of novels and short stories. Any good novel or short story teaches us something, but the way we learn from fiction is different from the way we learn a subject or a skill. … Any work of fiction that is structured to teach will fail as fiction—that is, as a work of art. Any work of fiction that is driven by a message or an agenda will fail as good storytelling. Fiction is not meant to teach, drive an agenda, or deliver a message. (10-11)

That is, whereas non-fiction works well by making a structured argument, fiction works by placing characters—to which readers form vicarious emotional attachments—into settings and situations in which they must make choices and bear the consequences. When those situations and choices are realistic—that is, they ring true and authentic—readers find the story applicable to their own lives because it gives them a safe space in which to feel and reflect upon the choices they might make in similar circumstances. Without trying to teach or preach, good fiction provides a meditation on possibilities, a visualization in which the reader can rehearse, in a sense, their own future behavior.

a woman sitting on a couch holding a dog — Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

“This is not about you”

Another very important point in The Art of Spiritual Writing is that although writing about your particular experience might be helpful to you, don’t assume it’ll be helpful to anyone else:

People often need to process their lives by writing about their experiences, but needing to write is not the same as writing something that should be published. (17)

To be useful, your writing has to be universalized, “shaped for the readers,” as Hampton says—and that going to take a lot of rewriting and editing and chopping out a lot of stuff you think is really important. All of Chapter 4, called “How to Make Your Story a Story for Others,” provides specific guidance for this process. Chapter 7, similarly, speaks to “What You Can Learn from Other Spiritual Writers,” including a good section on the importance of humility.

She also advises that even though you might have been inspired by various quotes from scripture or other sources during the writing process, those quotes often just clutter the final version meant for readers. I think this is an important point because an over-reliance on scriptural quotations strikes me as little more than exploiting scriptural authority for one’s own agenda. I’ve heard speeches and sermons in which the speaker cherry-picks passages from all over the Bible as if the authors of those books had no purpose other than to stand in the wings and voice their support on cue. To me, taking singular passages out of context disrespects what the scriptural authors themselves were trying to say, which is usually much more important (and time-tested!) than the speaker’s particular message.

The Codex Sinaiticus in the British Library, London, which I visited in 2023. The codex is a circa 4th century manuscript that contains the oldest complete version of the New Testament and some of the best copies of some books of the Greek version of the Old Testament. It was kept in the monastery of St. Catherine at the foot of Mount Sinai until the 19th century.

Fiction-specific advice

Although The Art of Spiritual Writing is primarily gauged to non-fiction writers, there’s plenty that’s applicable to both along with some fiction-specific advice. One list, in particular, warns against “favorite author ‘tics’” or habitual devices (83-84):

Are you in love with flashbacks?
Does your fiction neglect dialogue, or is it almost entirely dialogue?
Are you overly fond of run-on sentences?
Have you fallen into the habit of trying to manufacture drama by using too many one-sentence paragraphs, or exclamation points, or excessive italics? Usually when we must rely on such devices, we are trying to make up for weak writing.2

To guard against these habits, she recommends occasionally putting on your “editorial hat” to challenge every paragraph and every sentence. Also observe what your favorite novels do well, and why other novels don’t engage you.

And, whether for fiction or non-fiction, admit that you can’t control the process:

The creative process is a lot bigger and wiser than you are. Don’t try to force your will on it. For instance, you may write fiction, and your idea about fiction writing is to start at the beginning and write to the end. But the process leads you back and forth and brings scenes into your mind completely out of chronological sequence. If you refuse to write anything that’s out of sequence, then you will likely end up with a whopping case of writer’s block. One key to understanding process is paying attention to where the energy is. If certain material bubbles up—if that’s where the energy is—then just write it and worry later about where it will fit and why. (92)

A closing note

There’s much more in the book than I’ve written about here, of course. In addition to the practical guidance on craft, the latter part of the book includes a chapter on creativity (including the role of prayer), two chapters on publishing and otherwise putting your work out, one on dealing with trends and any notoriety you might achieve, and another on self-care.

The book then concludes with a chapter entitled, “Where is God in all this?” Her short answer is, “Everywhere,” but she to not end on a vague note, she deliberately “belabors the point and breaks it all down” into a two-page “grand finale bullet list of where you might notice the Divine in your writing life.” Those areas include the wonderful parts and the sucky parts of writing, the flow of inspiration and the tedium of revision, the nasty critiques and the support of everyone who believes in you…through all of which “God sees you already fully formed and your work accomplished in all its beauty and glory.”