How to Write for the Nonbeliever Audience Type, Part Two
Original photo by Anher on Pixabay
In last week’s article, “How to Write for the Nonbeliever Audience Type, Part One,” I expanded on the writer-reader paradigm, how it compares to Dramatica’s defining principle, and identified what takes priority when writing for this audience type.
I also addressed important considerations you’ll want to keep in mind as you develop and place your faith content, nonfiction message, or sales material in your book.
Today, we’re picking up right where we left off in the last article so you can successfully write to those who don’t want to listen to what you have to say.
You’ll learn how to create an environment for genuine reader connection as well as how to avoid coming across as pushy. I’ll also break down what you need to include in your book to help these readers process what you’re saying and how to shape the very language you use with this audience type.
Let’s dive in!
Focus on Genuine Connection
One of the reasons people like to read is because they see themselves in the main character or they can relate to the fictional person. Remember, effectively writing for the nonbeliever audience requires creating a story that the reader becomes so highly invested in they want to keep reading even when faith content is gently introduced. This speaks to your readers’ value-place, satisfying their desire for escapism and entertainment.
For Christian fiction authors, this means writing a main character the nonbeliever reader can identify with, which demonstrates that you get the time-perspective and an even deeper understanding of the value-place they have. Since this audience type has walls and aversions to anything about faith, creating a character who has the same or similar experiences and behavioral traits as them helps them feel especially heard and understood.
Creating a character who is relatable, on the other hand, will limit the nonbeliever audience’s ability to authentically connect. Relatability means you understand how someone thinks, feels, or acts, but you don’t really have the same experiences. It’s an off-centered connection. Instead of I see you, it’s I’m pretty sure I get you, I think.
While it’s impossible to write a character with a universal experience, crafting a character with a plausible worldview and behavior as to how a nonbeliever in real life would be creates a solid foundation for connection. Then simply refine that character’s skills and mannerisms in light of your plot and setting. The character should be someone who is interesting to read about with ample room to grow. But they shouldn’t be “so far gone” at the start of the story that the range of growth they experience during the story time frame lacks plausibility or is unrealistic.
Nonfiction authors also need to show this audience type they understand the time-perspective and value-place of their readers—where they’re coming from. Sharing a level of detail about your thoughts and experiences to the degree that is appropriate for your genre, subject, and audience’s background will help this audience feel confident you understand why they believe what they believe. Memoirs and self-help books allow for sharing more of your thoughts and feelings than those that are about thought leadership or philosophy.
Instead of aiming for relatability, focus on authenticity and vulnerability in your anecdotes. This will encourage the right readers to identify and connect with you so they will be more open to hearing the hard stuff you have to say. But be mindful about the level of detail you include in what you share. While you want to show readers you understand them, you still need to position yourself as an authority figure on your book’s subject.
For example, a self-help book about confidence requires more emotional vulnerability than one about gardening for bug-averse newbies. An author writing about ways to practice confidence (Y) can share pulled-back summaries of their struggles to accept themselves (X) instead of spelling out the actual thoughts they had, which could distract readers from the point the author is trying to make. The gardening book, on the other hand, might include playful snapshots of the author’s gardening mishaps and bug-based disasters along the way.
Prevent Authorial Intrusion
Authorial intrusion is most often talked about with regard to fiction. An obvious no-no, it sometimes happens in faith- and moral-based books when an author overrides their narrator or even starts speaking for the characters in their story.
This also happens in general fiction, as well as nonfiction, when an author just wants to rant or is zealous about driving home a point they hold dear. The underlying reasons for this type of overstepping is failing to trust readers they got the point the first time around, not keeping the story or subject first, and sometimes, simply just not respecting their readers’ investment in them. These issues are all breakdowns in the writer-reader paradigm.
In Christian fiction, authorial intrusion is preachy writing. Instead of allowing faith content to arise organically from the plot and characters, the author mutes the narrator and characters to share the author’s own beliefs directly with their readers, breaking the fourth (invisible) wall between the two of them in a bad way. When faith content stays between the characters, the directionality of that faith content is between them only and the reading experience is nonthreatening. But breaking the fourth wall to share your beliefs changes that direction, aiming them directly at your reader.
Faith content should only ever be handled by the characters, through their beliefs, their perspectives, their dialogue, and their interactions. This ensures that the story stays first and keeps the reading environment free from evangelizing.
In nonfiction, authorial intrusion can present as heavy-handed messaging or hard-sell writing that says I don’t care about meeting your needs. I just want something from you. While you are intentionally addressing your reader in nonfiction (breaking the fourth wall), focusing on the purpose for each chapter and section will help keep your priorities in the right order, regardless of whether you’re writing from a biblical worldview or hoping to get more business from readers.
Think about why the nonbeliever audience would be buying your book and aim to deliver high-value information that these readers will be pleasantly not expecting. Then go back through your draft, looking for a few natural openings to professionally create awareness about your other offerings.
Include an Understanding of the Process
If you’re writing Christian fiction, it’s important to remember that the nonbeliever audience type does not willingly bring up religion. They don’t talk about it with anyone and they don’t google it, so they have no support system to dialogue with about certain thoughts, beliefs, or feelings.
Common themes for the nonbeliever audience type include hope, forgiveness, acceptance, and salvation. As a main character written for this audience type starts learning and experiencing what one of those themes looks like, they’ll probably start to experience conviction. A healthy but uncomfortable feeling, it can easily turn into condemnation, shame, or guilt.
Including a spiritual adviser in the story, one the main character has come to respect, will allow the main character to learn conviction’s purpose and that anything more is of human or even demonic origin. Conversations between these two characters must be a natural part of the storyline and should reflect their individual worldviews and beliefs. This will ensure the interactions between them, as well as the main character’s growth, are authentic.
Introducing a support system like this for the main character also closes the gap in the writer-reader paradigm by aiding the nonbeliever reader, who is also experiencing conviction because they identified with the main character. Without another character to explain what’s happening and why to the main character, essentially serving as a pseudo-support system for the nonbeliever reader, they will most likely toss the book aside so the uncomfortable feeling inside of them will go away.
In nonfiction, the author serves in the “adviser” role when creating understanding about processes. Most of the time you can navigate this intuitively, but when you know you’re going to lead up to a big ask, such as signing up for a program, it can be tempting to withhold too much detail throughout the entire book in an attempt to incentive the reader to purchase something else. There is a balance to this so you don’t end up with a misalignment in the writer-reader paradigm. You must give enough detail to create trust, reinforce your authority, and establish credibility while also not giving away so much detail that you give away business.
Sometimes being very specific is required, say with a skills-based book. The nonbeliever reader expects to learn about Y, and the author should shape the content to reflect all that’s required. But because this type of reader is often skills-sufficient, further offerings by the author may be an automatic decline. And that’s okay. Some, though, will practice their newfound skills on their own, only to slowly come to the realization they need more help. They’ll remember you had a page in the back of your book about your on-demand classes (X) and be more inclined to consider reaching out.
Other times the amount of content you need to cover in your book will require you to maintain a macro level of detail (but not too pulled back) about steps and processes, such as with how to launch a product (Y). A book like this might cover everything from marketing principles and copywriting sales letters to prelaunch activities, types of launches, and the sequencing of it all. The breadth of content compensates for the lack of nitty-gritty specificity, so trust and authority remain intact. As with the first example, this reader is also skills-sufficient. But due to the eye-opening experience of seeing the sheer range of areas that they’ll need to learn in order to successfully launch a product, they may be more apt to consider your product launch classes (X) so they don’t have to figure out all the details by themselves.
Limit Insider Language
Every industry, generation, culture, and interest-based group has insider language. Even families have it. When you’re writing to the nonbeliever audience type, you must think of them as outsiders who aren’t familiar with the lingo you know and love.
A delicate touch is best for this audience type. If you want to hold their attention, using jargon isn’t the way to go. It’ll only widen the gap in the writer-reader paradigm between you and your readers. To prevent this and even close the gap, blend the language and style of the nonbeliever audience you’re trying to reach with your own style. This requires thinking about what they prefer reading, their education level, and their priorities when absorbing information. Find examples of reading materials they would be drawn to and look at the structure of the writing, the sentence structures, and the literal word choices to figure out where to make tweaks in your own writing. Be cautious in how much insider language you use. If it’s necessary to use jargon, make sure to also explain or contextualize it. When these principles aren’t followed, you run a critically high risk of your writing being ignored as jargon can give the impression of superiority or conditional acceptance. And sometimes it can even outright alienate this audience type.
For Christian fiction authors, this means using extreme care with Christianese—all the theologically-loaded terms, religious phrases and idioms, and names for Christian denominations and practices. The nonbeliever reader here is literally a nonbeliever with no religious inclination and no support group, so terms like born again, sin nature, saved, quiet time, body of Christ, lay hands on, and tithing sound like nonsense or can even be threatening. Denominational terms like Baptist and Evangelical can send cliquish or right-wrong vibes unless used for a very specific purpose and accompanied with a contextual explanation in the story. This audience type might also not be familiar with the citation format for Scripture or why authors tend to practice reverential capitalization.
Christian characters in your novel, such as the spiritual adviser, should use language that is natural to their style but still be understood by the main character. If using Christian terminology is necessary, it must always be made clear by the adviser or the context of the scene. Characters quoting the Bible should mimic how people do it in real life—referring to a book in the Bible and paraphrasing it. And if a character preaches a sermon, use snippets here and there so you keep the story moving and prevent unintentional preachiness.1
For nonfiction authors, this means being careful about how you use the insider language from your educational and professional backgrounds. If you have an advanced degree, you’ve read textbooks and research papers for years. Your classmates and colleagues also read the same materials, so you talk and write to each other in the same way as your reading material. It’s natural. But what you might not realize is that academic, corporate, and scientific writing styles use formal, distancing vocabulary; uncommon excessively large words; and overly complicated sentence structures.
If your book is aimed at nonbelievers, blending your ingrained style with the language of your readers is essential if you want to be understood and seen as an authority figure. It can be tempting to say that readers should look up such terms or be able to figure it out, but that causes readers to first stop reading and then do something else just so they can understand you. This pushes readers out of and away from a book, which doesn’t inspire confidence in the author’s authority or their intentions toward the reader. While everyone has moments of imperfect writing, if an author consistently demonstrates that they can only explain something in complicated language, that author may not actually know their subject as well as they think.
Earning the right to be heard by this audience means balancing insider language with layman’s terms. It also requires you to explain what you mean. As appropriate, mix in the language of your target nonbeliever audience or use more commonly known words (use important or notable compared to salient). Individual sentences that are 1–3 lines in length increase reader comprehension and make navigating back to where a reader lost their place much easier. These techniques are actually a part of plain language, which focuses on creating a reading environment that aids confident reader comprehension.
Adopting these practices will simultaneously allow you to honor your natural style while strengthening your authority. Remember, the nonbeliever audience type will only give you their attention if you can show them you understand how they think and speak.
Wrapping Up
The nonbeliever audience type responds best to authors who’ve taken the time to show they truly understand what these readers want and why they aren’t interested in giving you their attention. Keeping the story or subject of your book first and your specialty content second is crucial to showing you care.
Other ways of connecting with this audience type require creating identifiable characters or being willing to be vulnerable and authentic in your book, as well as developing a spiritual adviser character the main character can feel safe with and ask questions. For nonfiction authors, this means anticipating this audience’s questions and providing thorough explanations to create understanding.
It’s also important to keep in mind the causes of authorial intrusion when writing about your faith, special thematic message, or the products you sell. Preachy, pushy writing is the fastest way to permanently lose this audience’s attention. And using faith- or subject-related jargon can have an isolating effect on top of this, so blending your style with your nonbeliever audience’s style is key.
At the end of the day, writing for the nonbeliever audience type is about being willing to step into this audience’s shoes and look at things from their perspective and walk of life.
In the next article in the series, we’ll look at a whole new set of considerations for the believer audience type.
References
1. Burns, Terry, and Linda W. Yezak. 2014. Writing in Obedience – A Primer for Christian Fiction Writers. Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas.