I'm a firm believer that to be a good writer, you must read, and read a lot. I don't read nearly as fast as many people do, but I manage to get in 60 - 70 books a year. 

Sometimes people ask what I read. Other times they assume what I read. Whenever I answer either side of the question, the person on the other side seems surprised. 

Some people assume I read only LDS fiction. That one surprises me. Why would I read only this market? Sure, there's a lot of great stuff in it, and a variety of genres, but I'm not sure why they think I don't read other things just because I publish in this market. More...

Last week a Deseret News reporters interviewed me about Band of Sisters and the Flat Daddy Project. I've done several interviews recently, but this particular reporter asked something no one had yet.

In my last post, I ranted (who, me? rant?) about writers who put a message before the story, how messages in books will come across more powerfully if they aren’t put there intentionally. How I hated people asking what message I put in Tower of Strength. (I didn't! Yes, there are messages and themes, but they developed on their own.)

Then I got an interview form for my upcoming Band of Sisters, which will be featured in Covenant's Book Worms newsletter. One question made me take a step back and rethink the whole message thing—had I done exactly what I professed to hate?

The question was something like: What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

That's almost a backhanded way of asking what message you put into it, and I was scared, because I had an answer.

But then I realized that in a sense, it's a different question altogether, because after a book is written, you can look back and see things differently than you did while writing it.

I realize that some people will still read Band of Sisters and assume I wrote it to "teach" readers what deployment is like. And then some readers might well think, "But she says she doesn't write with a message in mind. Yeah, right." I get that. But that's not how the book came about, and it's not why I wrote it. More...

I’m admitting upfront that I’m stealing this topic from J. Scott Bronson. His last post was titled, “There’s Always a Message,” and it struck a chord with me.

Back in my early teenage years, my older sister, then an English major, and I got into a friendly discussion/argument about whether a story could exist on its own without an underlying message.

I was firmly in the camp that yes, of course it could. Not everything is a fable or must end with a moral. Not every writer pens a story just to teach a lesson. Puh-leese. My sister disagreed, saying that every story has something to say and teach. At the time, I was too immature to get what she was saying.

Many, many years later, after my first novel came out, this same sister came to me after reading it. She had a bit of an, “I told you so” grin on her face. I had no idea what she was about to say. What came out stunned me.

“Your book has messages and themes and symbols.”

It . . . what?

She complimented me on how well I’d incorporated a particular theme into the narrative, teaching the reader a certain lesson. “Told ya,” she said.

I never did admit that I hadn’t meant to weave any theme or symbol into the book. After she pointed it out, I looked back and thought, “Cool. That’s actually kinda neat.” But I didn’t put it there on purpose. (That was 2002. I have yet to tell her.)

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I’ll be the first to admit that the body of literature written by Latter-day Saints hasn’t yet reached the classic prophecy of Orson F. Whitney that we’d have “Miltons and Shakespeares of our own.”

On the other hand, we’ve come a long, long way in the past few decades. I’d say that even in the last five years, the quality of LDS literature had grown by leaps and bounds. Sure, there’s still plenty of cheese on the shelves in all its varieties of cheddar and its cousins. You’ll still find less-than stellar writing, luck-luster editing, and otherwise low-quality books.

BUT (and that’s a big, enormous, but), a lot of good books are getting published, and they aren’t just from obscure, independent, “literary” publishers. Great genre novels—from mystery to romance to historical and more—are hitting shelves regularly. Each year the odds drop of picking up an LDS-authored book and finding it to be a totally lame conversion story that’s so poorly written it makes you want to gouge your eyeballs out.

I’m sure the reasons behind the increase in quality are numerous, but I attribute much of it to a couple of things. More...

I was glad to read Margaret Young's post encouraging international Mormon art and literature. I'm all for it -- the needed diversity, the enriching that happens as subcultures and individuals of deeply varied experience find ways of expressing their lives and their religious faith. Like so many, I look forward to an improving and expanding scope for Mormon arts and letters. But I also want to critique certain assumptions about cultural progress that I think are at work among us Mormons looking for those Miltons and Shakespeares (or Gabriel Gracia Marquezes or Stephen Spielbergs) of our own.

There is the growth of the kingdom of God and then there is the growth of Mormon culture. I'm personally very committed to one and very wary of the other. I worry that we may be looking at these as going hand in hand, following a very 19th century, unilineal approach to cultural progress that may have little relationship to God's influence spreading in the world. More...