Change Your Reader's Truth

We write to affect people. Whether writing sermon or story, we may enjoy nods from the choir, but we really aim to wake the dead. We set our pens to persuading people to open the gates of their souls to a Trojan horse filled with invasive, incriminating soldiers that will dismantle their native reality and leave a foreign occupier sitting on the throne. So how do we as writers, speakers, and directors approach the problem of persuasion? How do we build the horse and coax the gate open?

As with living the Christian life, if we follow Christ, we first recognize that the power to change another exceeds our capacity. The Spirit bids us try, however, as instruments of his agency. For the rest, we must rely on best practices of rhetoric: pick the right angle, understand relevance in your cultural moment, and lead through discovery.

Angle: Tell It Slant

As the legend goes, the Greeks tried and failed for ten years to break through Troy’s gate directly. Not until they took another approach—feigning defeat, sailing away to hide at a nearby island, leaving a wooden horse and young, escaped “victim,”—did they achieve success. Similarly, the best angle for persuasion is rarely the one that storms the gate, but instead is the one moving obliquely toward the audience you want to change.

In the parable of the vineyard in Mark 12:1–12,[1] Jesus likens the tenants of a vineyard to Israel[2] and depicts them killing the vineyard owner’s servants (God’s prophets) and even his son (Jesus himself). He tells the religious leaders that the owner will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others. Israel’s elite respond with outrage because they understand clearly that Jesus is saying, “God will take away your status as his favored nation and give it to others.” Does this outrage change their perception? No. Did Jesus mean it to and fail? No.

By this point in Mark’s retelling of Jesus’s ministry, Mark has already established that the religious leaders as a group have rejected Jesus as Messiah (3:5–6). So when Jesus tells them the parable, he no longer seeks that generation’s change of heart; he is cementing their opposition. They leave him and set out to do just what he predicted: kill the son (Matt. 22:15).

Yet this story has two levels. Not only is Jesus telling a story to Israel’s leaders, but Mark is telling us, the reader, a cautionary tale. Mark’s whole Gospel is an argument for the identity and authority of Jesus as the suffering servant, whom we are meant to follow. We are also implicated by Israel’s spiritual failure. If we, like them, have access to proof of Jesus’s true identity (we do), confirmation of his authority (we have that, too), and knowledge of our responsibility (yes), yet do anything other than respect the beloved son and pay him his due, we, too, will be thrown out.

Mark means to change our perspective, and he leaves room for us to make the connections rather than accuse us outright and provoke a defensive stance as Jesus did for the religious elite. He has, to use Emily Dickinson’s metaphor in “Tell All the Truth But Tell It Slant,” kindly explained the lightning bolt that could have frightened us (the enlightening truth), allowing us to see its brilliance gradually and from an angle so that we can avoid being made blind by looking right at it.

Who Is Your Audience?

Consider carefully who you want to persuade and who you want to push back. Some choices soften the opposition to another point of view; others cement opposition. Writers often mistakenly reverse this choice.

Relevance: Understand Your Cultural Moment

Famed basketball coach John Wooden has said, “Listen if you want to be heard!” All writers should listen hard—both to Wooden and to their audiences. If you want to pique interest (perhaps like a wooden horse left on an empty shore?) and lower defenses, you must show readers you empathize with them. You must move past surface actions to core needs and values.

One way to empathize is to avoid dressing up your characters in standards your audience won’t understand or accept. No matter how much you want to come across as nonjudgmental, “all stories, even the most seemingly neutral, depend, both in what they say and in their silences, on appeals to moral, political, and religious judgments.”[3] So ruthlessly strip out any extraneous moral, political, and religious standards not explicitly required for accepting your main premise as true. Do not “tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders” (Matt 23:4).

I want to be clear what I don’t mean here—I don’t mean you can’t include characters with a worldview alien to the audiences’ view. Absolutely you must! I don’t mean create vague settings and story worlds without clear demarcation of moral, political, or religious allegiance. I do mean review your biases and assess the essentials for the truth statement you are making, and consider not what it means to be a Republican or a Democrat, a Christian or a Muslim, or even a man or a woman believing that truth; instead, consider what it means to be a human. Enter the reader’s worldview and glean what will mesh with yours. Avoid pushing unnecessarily against prejudices irrelevant to your major premise. Speak the audience’s language. Use their plausibility standards. Make it easy for your audience to meet you halfway by showing you have listened to what matters to them. You reader shouldn’t have to think church is a good thing or that miracles exist before adopting the premise, for instance, that true love leads to miracles.

The Greeks set up the Trojans to empathize with young Sinon, the boy they left behind. Leaving a regular soldier would have raised defenses; he would have been the enemy and entirely unlikable. But Sinon told the Trojans that the fleeing Greeks, obeying a prophet, had selected him as a sacrifice to the gods, yet he escaped. This story put him on outsider status with the Greeks, and thus likable status with the Trojans. They had a common enemy. Sinon bridged the gap and the Trojans let down their guard.

In a similar move, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) set up post-Civil-War Southern Christians to root for a derelict boy who helps a slave escape in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a contradiction to their cultural values. If Twain had said directly, “Your Christianity is nearsighted, even vile. You go on fighting a war that’s over, like the Hatfields and the McCoys, worried more about territory, honor, and revenge than preserving the life of your cousin and brother, and you worry more about the clothes and skin on the outside of a person that the heart that’s on his inside,” no one would have listened. Instead, he tells it slant. He makes Huck likable enough and draws on the readers’ tendency to act like the “dutiful Christian” Miss Watson who pities others she wants to make more like herself. With a twist, Twain then shows us, through a character that seemingly rejects the Christianity of the time, the Christian ideal of valuing human life and dignity. We root for Huck, stop defending our “Miss Watson” Christianity, and before we know it, we’ve adopted a new perception of truth.

Rooting for characters need not mean we would make them our close friend. As Wayne Booth writes in The Rhetoric of Fiction, “Since we are not in a position to profit from or be harmed by a fictional character, our judgment is disinterested, even in a sense irresponsible. We can easily find our interest magnetized by characters who would be intolerable in real life.”[4] We give characters leeway, but we must feel connected to them in some fashion. They must be likable for some reason that connects with our own values. Therefore, the best main character is probably not someone who entirely hates or pities your audiences’ point of view. We tend to root for these characters because we develop a “conviction that they are people who matter, people whose fate concerns us not simply because of its meaning or quality, but because we care about them as human beings.”[5] The more three-dimensional and complex your characters are—the more they are fully human and not straw people—the greater chance a reader will identify with them.

Rooting for characters does mean that the author’s choice of point of view matters immensely for persuasion. Neither authors nor readers come to a work of fiction fully as themselves. Instead we both put on masks. Booth explains, “the implied [masked] author of each novel is someone with whose beliefs on all subjects I must largely agree if I am to enjoy his work.”[6] The implied author shows up as the narrator and point of view character(s) and, generally, readers identify closest with the point of view character. As they see through that character’s eyes, they “become the self whose beliefs must coincide with the author's. Regardless of [their] real beliefs and practices, [they] must subordinate [their] mind and heart to the book if [they are] to enjoy it to the full.”[7]

They try on the mask and see how it fits. If this point of view character egregiously scorns, dismisses, or neglects target readers’ core values, authors risk a story

in whose “mock reader we discover a person we refuse to become, a mask we refuse to put on, a role we will not play.” We may exhort ourselves to read tolerantly . . . and still we will find many books that postulate readers we refuse to become, books that depend on “beliefs” or “attitudes” . . . that we cannot adopt even hypothetically as our own.[8]

Regardless of prose mastery or page-turning style, any book whose point of view character is someone the target audience refuses to become, even hypothetically, will fail at persuasion. 

Who Will Your Readers Root for in Your Stories?

Pay attention as you choose your narrator and point of view characters. Are they dressed as Greek soldiers or prepared to play the role of Sinon? Make sure these characters are three-dimensional people your audience can root for, someone that embodies or discovers a core value of the reader and the moral premise you want the reader to adopt.[9]

Discovery: Lead Readers to the Dots

Your job as writer is to lay the groundwork of dots. If you want your audience to own the conclusion, they must be the ones to connect them.

 Celebrated professor of Bible study, teaching methods, and creativity, Howard Hendricks says “The difficulty of learning” and “the art of teaching,” is that the cycle of learning starts with “unconscious incompetence,” where we don’t know what we don’t know. And people have “to place themselves at the beginning of that cycle, to plunge to the bottom, so they can start the learning process.”[10] It is through the process of dot connecting that readers discover they have been blind to something of vital importance and become motivated to pursue understanding and conscious competence.

From the appearance of the horse on the shore to their bringing it inside the closed gates for the night, the Trojans make their judgments based on unchallenged assumptions: the Greeks have fled because they are beaten; Athena is willing to change sides; the horse is merely an offering. The power of the moment when the horse’s belly opens is that the Trojans have to conclude their preconceived ideas were false. They then must ask, “What else do we not know?”

Japanese Catholic author Shūsako Endō, in his brilliant novel, Silence, recently adapted to the screen by Marin Scorsese, plays on the reader’s preconceived ideas before revealing a startling conclusion that makes the reader reconnect all the dots.

It’s the 1600s, and Father Sebastien Rodrigues cannot believe the rumors that his role model and mentor, Father Ferreira, who went to Japan to convert and teach the Japanese, has apostatized from the church. Rodrigues sets his course for Japan and goes to great lengths to discover the truth and vindicate Father Ferreira. Along the way, he crosses paths with a wretched, contemptible Japanese man, Kichijiro, a man he must trust to lead him to the persecuted Christians Ferreira had been serving. As we see Kichijiro through Rodrigues’s point of view, we agree that the creature—dare we even see him as fully human?—is despicable. He is only capable of betrayal and groveling, continually making choices to protect himself at the expense of others, and then asking for mercy and absolution for his deeds.

As the story continues, [spoiler alert] Rodrigues discovers that not only has his beloved mentor truly declared his apostasy, but Rodrigues also has neither the will nor constitution to avoid betraying Christ when faced with the same circumstances Ferreira faced. Even more shocking, we, as readers, who have all along identified with the heroic martyr, discover along with Rodrigues that Kichijiro, the Judas character, is the character we most closely resemble and the one to whom we realize we need and want to offer grace.  

What dots are you leaving for your reader to connect?

You come to your story with something burning in your heart, something you want to explore through the very human experience of narrative. How are you leaving a trail that draws readers in but then allows them to make the connection that the horse was hollow? What makes them gasp and ask, “What else do I not know?”

The power of persuasion comes not from me shaking my finger at you until you understand my argument, nor illustrating for you the ideal, hoping you’ll want it. Persuasion that brings change comes from me entering into your pain with you, in my weakness, and leading us both to find a better way. Story has the power to give us unconventional eyes, so we can see an even brighter gospel.

[1] Also found in Matthew 21:33–46 and Luke 20:9–19.

[2] Compare with Isaiah 5:1–7.

[3] Wayne C. Booth, afterward to The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) 416.

[4] Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 130-31.

[5] Booth, 131.

[6] Booth, 137.

[7] Booth, 138.

[8] Booth, 138, quoting Walker Gibson in “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers,” College English, XI (February 1950), 265–69.

[9] In a tragedy, the author still asks the reader to adopt the moral premise embodied the tragic hero, such as “Greed leads to destruction.”

[10] Howard G Hendricks, Teaching to Change Lives: Seven Proven Ways to Make Your Teaching Come Alive (Colorado Springs: Multnomah Press, 1987) 41.