The niches we don’t choose . . .

When I began this Blog, I decided to focus on writing as a craft as well as those areas in which I’ve both written a significant number of articles and really enjoy writing about and would like to develop more in terms of web content and copywriting niches:  with the occasional ‘tips to those who need to write in business’ post. 

I had defined seven types of services or products that represented those niches, and some sub-categories of those. 

While some of those categories implicitly touch on another topic area I enjoy writing about, and I’ve done one blog post about the craft of writing that more explicitly touches on that, it’s interesting that a topic area I didn’t identify for myself as a niche area is that of heritage.

The Spirit of Place post did explore that, and I’m sure in other ways I’ll touch on it at another time.

But, this is a topic that not only interests me but in terms of my personal and literary heritage, it’s an area I’m always redefining.  The writings of contemporary Christian authors has, for example, become a much larger element in my heritage as a writer over the last few years than it had been before that. 

In one way or another, I learn something from any author I read:  both fiction and nonfiction.  It may not involve, for the nonfiction authors, greater awareness of crafting a writing project:  although it typically does for fiction authors.

So that, in a sense, brings this post back around to the topic of this blog:  a shared heritage for writers involves that they begin as readers.  And, indeed, one of my product niche areas involves books and reading.

I find it interesting that the general concept of heritage is enjoying a kind of heyday in Christian publishing today.  Historical fiction enjoys a great deal of popularity just now.  There’s a generally wider selection of historical Christian romance than there is contemporary Christian romance.  While this may have its genesis in the preferences of the authors, certainly agents and publishers would have less interest in publishing if it didn’t sell.

Historical Christian fiction, generally, and historical Christian romance, in particular seems to break down into two overall epochs.  One epoch involves what I’ll loosely call “frontier fiction.”  That is, per Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, any region within the United States qualified as “frontier” for approximately the first generation or so after initial settlers arrived.

Many of these historical Christian romances are set in areas that qualify as true frontier areas even now that Jackson Turner’s thesis has fallen out of favor among historians. 

The other epoch that has held an interest for authors, and readers, of Christian fiction involves the days surrounding the development of the New Testament itself.

At least two sets of collaborators have written series novels set around the time of Jesus and the early Church:  Janette Oke and Davis Bunn, and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.

I find it interesting indeed that, although historical fiction because it involves considerably more research that contemporary fiction poses a greater challenge to the author to write well, for the most part I have found the historical Christian fiction . . . and particularly historical Christian romance . . . better constructed fiction than the contemporary Christian fiction published around the same time.

There are, of course, exceptions going in both directions but as a rule, that is what I have found in my reading of Christian fiction over the past few years.

I’m not so up on secular fiction [there’s only so much time in a day and one can’t read anything] and have to wonder if this is a Christian fiction specific phenomenon, or if there is a wider society-wide sense of getting back to roots, and recalling bygone ways of life?