Three Reasons to Consider Christian Screenwriting
With people reading less and streaming more, should Christian authors be adapting their novels as screenplays? Three reasons suggest it is time to consider adapting your fiction for the screen: to reach a wider audience, to score a bigger payday, and to enhance your craft. Christian screenwriting continues a tradition of capitalizing on innovations in communication arts to enhance evangelism and church growth.
The Audience
Although overall media usage has been increasing, the time spent with traditional media, such as books, has declined (Guttman, 2024). Meanwhile, the number of new books published each year is estimated to be as much as four million new titles annually. The implication is that each year we see less time spent reading books with more books being published. Authors are being squeezed by opposing trends in readership and competing titles.
This squeeze has especially hurt Christian fiction. In his book, Reading Evangelicals, Daniel Silliman (2021) pointed to Christian fiction as playing an important role in defining the Evangelical movement and in the growth of Christian bookstores. The key demographic for both was the stay-at-home mom who could, for example, see herself as alone in that little house on the prairie. With many women being forced by hard times to work outside the home, church attendance and time to read Christian fiction have both been eclipsed.
While growth in non-traditional media—think cell-phones and streaming video—is getting most the attention, reading among young people has actually increased in recent years. Another important point is that video is the primary manner in which men consume fiction, much more so than women who tend to be the typical ardent readers. This implies that screenwriting reaches two groups—young people and men—who relate better to video than to novels.
The Payday
Willie Sutton, one of the first fugitives to make the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted list (1950), was once asked why he robbed banks. His answer: “Because that’s where the money is” (Sutton and Linn, 1976). An important reason to consider screenwriting is because it is well paid.
Christian films have made a comeback in recent years in Hollywood. Nine of the top ten grossing Christian films have been produced since 2014,[1] suggesting a trend not unlike the 1950s period when many of the famous Christian films, such as The Ten Commandments (1956) and The Robe (1953), were produced. Movies like Ordinary Angels (2024) and I Can Only Imagine (2018) have broken out of Christian ghettos, while series like The Chosen (2017–present) have served to place high-quality video in service of the faith.
While pay certainly gets people’s attention, screenwriting is also an evangelist tool. In my case, I came to Christ at an early showing of the film, The Cross and the Switchblade (1967). The only outreach to my mother-in-law, who spoke only Persian, was a Persian-language edition of the Jesus movie (1979).
Enhancing Craft
Because screenwriting is well-paid, it also attracts the most attention from writing instructors. A couple of good examples are Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat (2005) and Karl Iglesias’s Writing for Emotional Impact (2005).
The hero’s journey became famous with Star Wars (1977), which was a coming-of-age story sold as a space cowboys movie. The fame and fortune that followed made the hero’s journey a writing staple far beyond the theatre, but the point is that screenwriters set the stage.
In a similar vein, most literary types probably don’t know that William Falkner, the novelist, worked for years as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Falkner’s novel As I Lay Dying (1930) was one of the first books to employ the head-hopping techniques now so common in discussions of multiple characters’ points of view.
From a simple craft perspective, compared with your typical novel, screenplays do a lot more showing than telling because video is a visional and spoken medium. Actors earning seven-figure salaries don’t want to look stupid or mouth incoherent speeches.
Two particular areas where screenwriting techniques can improve your craft are in writing dialog and scenes.
In dialog, focus on the conflicting motivations among your characters. No conflict; no story. The minimalist descriptions and hard page limits (no more than 120 pages) in screenplays make it more obvious when the dialog lags or contains too much exposition.
In scenes, make sure that when the timeframe, location, or characters change, you have a new scene. If you do not, you may have sloppy transitions, which may confuse your reader. The headers in screenplays force the author to write clear scenes that recognize these changes.
Pathbreaking Tradition
The Christian church has been built historically on innovations in the communication arts.
The New Testament was one of the first books to replace scrolls in the ancient world. No other ancient manuscripts outnumber copies of the New Testament to survive from ancient times. Why? Books could be carried on evangelistic journeys; scrolls could not. Western Civilization is thought by some to have begun when Saint Augustine wrote his confessions, which suggested that God was interested in the daily lives of ordinary believers.
In a similar manner, the Protestant Revolution accompanied the introduction of the first printed book—The Gutenberg Bible (1450s). For several hundred years, the only book that most English-speaking people owned was a Bible, usually the King James Version. Many modern languages—think English and German—took their current form following the usage found in a Bible translated into that language.
Video is now the critical medium through which people learn about their world and consume their fiction. This makes screenwriting a culture-altering, interesting genre for Christian authors to learn and perfect.
Think about it. In Mexican telenovelas, people still consult their priests and pastors about important life choices, while in American films people consult their bartenders. Australian love stories end in marriage, while the same films are released in American theatres with the couples shacking up. Who’s to blame for these outcomes?
Christian screenwriters are fighting some important battles. You can become one of them.
The Author
Stephen W. Hiemstra (MDiv, PhD) blogs four times weekly (https://t2pneuma.net) with a theme of online pastor, which includes a Monday podcast. He is currently writing a new novella, Jeez and the Gentile, and translating Image of God in the Parables into Spanish (Imagen de Dios en las Paróbolas). Stephen began writing fiction during the pandemic, has registered three screenplays adapted from his Masquerade novella series, and translates his work into Spanish and German. Check out his books at https://t2pneuma.com.
References
Guttmann, A. 2024. “Time spent with digital vs. traditional media in the U.S. 2011-2025.”
Silliman, Daniel. 2021. Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
Sutton, Willie and Edward Linn, 1976. Where the Money Was: The Memoirs of a Bank Robber. New York: Viking.
Snyder, Blake. 2005. Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting that You’ll Ever Need. Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_film_industry.