10,000 Follower Goal—Part 2

To get you all excited about my manuscript I have posted my most current proposal letter:

Dear Editorial Department,

I attempted suicide twice in high school, and during my first week of college I was ready to finish the job.  The only reason I survived was my most trusted friend introduced me to a God who is, “near the broken hearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18).  Several months later, God put a fire in my bones to write my testimony.

That was almost seven years ago.  Now I am a twenty-six year old Fuller Theological Seminary student with a 67,000 word manuscript entitled: War For My Soul: Failed Nice Prayers, Shouting F*!#; A Spiritual Memoir.  I believe God intends to use my work to proclaim to my generation that He is in our midst despite our brokenness—our binge drinking, our drug use, our pornography addiction, our promiscuous sexual behavior, our broken homes, our eating disorders, our loneliness, our anger and our depression. 

Abstract

In prayer Evangelical Christians often approach God like He is a dangerous material—volatile, agitated, and ready to go off at any minute.  Hoping not to disturb God, they hide their true selves in hazardous material suits.  They tiptoe around with mundane prayers: “Help me with a test,” or “Help me with a co-worker I do not like.”  This works great when the world is nice.  But what happens when lives get contaminated with messy concerns?

Jonathan Barker’s high school experience was infected by romantic failure, broken dreams, unanswered prayers, binge drinking, drug use, and a couple of suicide attempts.  As he entered college, he knew that God could not be exposed to his real life.  However, when he meets Elizabeth, a recent convert to Christianity who was found by God amidst bulimia, divorced parents, male rejection and a suicide attempt of her own, Jonathan starts to wonder if maybe God could find him too.

The bold and often explicit writing style of Jonathan Barker is genuine, heart wrenching, and often obscene.  In a rare feat, he combines profanity, prayer, and graphic depictions of suicide.  His testimony is not for every Christian but every Christian knows someone who needs to be reminded, “The LORD is near the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18).

Audience

I wrote War for My Soul with a vision to introduce my relatives and friends to the God I know and love.  They all grew up Evangelical Christians but left the faith when youth group theology, and by extension God, failed to constructively address the reality of parental conflict, divorce, heartbreak, death, and the party scene full of sex, drugs and alcohol.  By analogy, I hope they realize if God loved me when I was on the verge of suicide and listened to me pray strings of profanity, then he also loves them amidst their suffering and sin and can hear their real prayers.

In the last several years I have met dozens of others from my generation, the Millenials, whose lives became too messy for the evangelical youth group God.  They are my primary audience.

Beyond my generation, I believe War for My Soul can also speak to contemporary teenagers.  In many ways their world is even darker than mine was.  Sex text messages and the exchange of pornographic self-pictures are just two examples of how the world has changed for the worse in the last decade.  Although my work does not speak directly to these new problems, once again by analogy, I hope contemporary teens conclude that God loves them even if they sex text message.

I have also come to realize there are several groups of adults over thirty who might read War for My Soul.  First, adults who are interested in teen culture—teachers, youth pastors, parents and others—will find my account eye opening.  Second, adults who are experiencing or have experienced heartbreak, loss, and frustration with God will be comforted by my work.  Third, adults who read books on Christian spirituality will find War for My Soul a penetrating look into honest prayer, intimacy with God and God’s character.

Competition

In the broadest category War for My Soul is creative non-fiction.  There have been a plethora of books written in this genre in the last forty years ranging from Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem to Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love.  More specifically, my work is a Christian testimony, putting it in a 1600-year tradition originating with Augustine’s Confessions and continuing into the new millennium with Lauren Winner’s Girl Meets God.

However, I am yet to come across creative non-fiction set in the context of American teen culture at the beginning of the 21^st century—especially a Christian testimony.  The only work I have found that deals with my world is Chap Clark’s Hurt.  In his cultural analysis of midadolescent culture, Clark describes a “world beneath” that adults rarely see that is saturated with loneliness, anxiety, and partying.  Although similar, our works are not in competition but rather nicely compliment one another.  Clark’s work goes to great lengths to describe the setting of my work, whereas my work shows the pain of living in that setting. 

In addition to a unique setting, War for My Soul has an eclectic style combining elements from a wide variety of film, literature, and philosophy.  I was influenced by the movies Pulp Fiction and Fight Club, films filled with irony, absurdity, and ambiguity; the literature Great Expectations and The Great Gatsby, books loaded with symbols, parallelism, and extended metaphors; and Plato’s philosophy with its dialogical style.  These diverse aspects give my work a textual richness missing from other creative non-fiction.  It would almost be better to coin a new phrase to describe War for My Soul like “epic non-fiction” or “literary non-fiction.”