How to Write Theology Books that Readers Actually Read and Retain

Bible study, doctrine, prophecy, and Christian living

In the 1980s a neurologist named Antonio Damasio treated a patient he called Elliot. A tumor had been removed from Elliot’s brain, and afterward his intelligence was intact, his memory was intact, his reasoning was intact. He could list the pros and cons of any decision for as long as you cared to listen. What he could no longer do was decide. Which pen to use. Which appointment to schedule. Which restaurant. The surgery had cut him off from his emotions, and without emotion, as Lisa Cron tells the story, every option weighed exactly the same: “everything really was six of one, half a dozen of the other.”¹

Elliot is the reader of most theology manuscripts.

Not because the reader is damaged, but because the manuscript has given him nothing to feel. It has given him the pros and cons. It has given him the proof texts, the Greek, the history of the doctrine, and the conclusion, usually in chapter one, followed by two hundred pages defending it. The reader can follow all of it and decide nothing, retain nothing, and recommend nothing. He puts it down somewhere around page forty, and if you asked him a month later what it argued, he would tell you the title.

This page is about writing the other kind of theology book: the kind a reader finishes, remembers, and hands to a friend. The principles come from the best books ever written on story, and they apply to doctrine for a reason that research has now measured. In 2021 a team of psychologists pooled seventy-eight studies with more than 33,000 participants comparing how well people understand and remember narrative text versus expository text. The result was not close. In the authors’ words, “stories were more easily understood and better recalled than essays,” and the advantage for memory was the larger of the two.²

That does not mean a doctrine book becomes a novel. It means the tools of story, used honestly, are how a doctrine gets into a reader and stays there. Here they are.

Start with the question that hurts, not the answer

Cron’s first principle is that a story opens with something already in motion and a question the reader cannot help asking. Her examples are everyday: “Joe left without his usual morning coffee; I wonder why?” “Betty is always on time; how come she’s half an hour late?”³ A broken pattern is a hook. The brain cannot leave it alone.

Doctrinal first drafts commonly open with definitions, a survey of positions, or the methodology. That is the opposite of a hook. The hook for a Bible study is the textual anomaly, the verse that does not fit, the question the reader has carried for years and never heard answered. Why does Hebrews say “sacrifices,” plural, where one sacrifice would do? Why does Leviticus 16 call it the Day of Atonements? Put that in chapter one, and let the survey of the literature wait until the reader wants it.

Anne Lamott has a picture for the book that opens with its conclusion. You cannot just announce that there is cake. The reader has to be brought to the wedding before the cake means anything.⁴ The doctrine book that states its thesis on page one and defends it for two hundred pages has served the cake before the wedding, and the reader has nowhere to go.

One question, one sentence

If you cannot summarize your book in a sentence or two, the book does not yet know what it is about. Robert McKee calls that sentence the Controlling Idea, and it is not a topic (“grace,” “the sanctuary”) but a claim with a cause attached.⁵ A one-word theme is a subject. A sentence is an argument.

Write the question your book answers. Write the one-sentence answer. Tape both above your desk. Every chapter either moves the reader toward the answer or comes out. Larry Brooks’s warning is that a book written from a conviction with no question “produces essays or editorials,”⁶ and editorials are what most readers skip.

Give the other side its full strength

This is the principle our editors find most often missing from doctrinal manuscripts, and the one that does the most for a book when it is added.

McKee: “When a story is weak, the inevitable cause is that forces of antagonism are weak.”⁷ John Truby adds that the opponent needs “a strong but flawed moral argument,” and that a two-sided opposition, good against evil, “will always be simplistic.”⁸ In a theology book the opposition is not a person. It is the other interpretation. And a straw man is a weak villain.

Paul did this on Mars’ Hill. He did not open by telling the Athenians they were wrong. He opened with their own altar: “I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you” (Acts 17:23). He began inside their understanding and argued outward from it.

State the opposing reading at its strongest, in its proponents’ own terms, before you answer it. Show why the reader’s current understanding is attractive and what it would cost to leave it. A reader who sees her own objection stated better than she could state it will follow you anywhere after that. A reader who sees her objection waved away in a paragraph stops trusting you and stops reading.

One caution, which every craft book repeats in its own way: never vilify other Christians. The opposing reading gets a fair hearing and a fair answer. The people who hold it get respect.

The reader is the hero. Your book is her journey.

Here is the frame that turns a lecture into a story. In a novel the hero starts the book believing something that once served her and now holds her back; K. M. Weiland calls it the Lie, Cron calls it the misbelief. The plot is the sequence of events that forces her to face it and replace it with the truth.⁹

Your reader arrives with a reading of the text that once served her. Your book is the sequence of chapters that moves her from that reading to a better one. Name both in a sentence: what she believes now, what she will believe when she finishes. Then order the chapters as the steps of that journey, each chapter’s conclusion forcing the next chapter’s question.

Cron has a test for whether two chapters are a story or merely a sequence. Join them with “and then” and you have a list. Join them with “and so” and you have a story.¹⁰ Read your table of contents aloud with “and so” between the chapters. Where it does not work, the book is listing proof texts instead of building an argument.

Deliver information inside a live question

The central problem of a doctrine book is exposition. The reader needs the history of the term, the parallel passages, the Hebrew. How much, and when?

McKee’s rule: convert exposition to ammunition.¹¹ Information that answers a question the reader is already asking is never dull. Information that arrives before the question is a lecture. John Yorke, who ran drama at the BBC, puts it as a proportion: “The greater the conflict, the less visible the exposition.”¹²

Blake Snyder has the funniest version. In a screenplay called The Plot to Kill the Pope, the writers had a mountain of plot to explain, so they staged the briefing while the Pope swam laps in the Vatican pool. The audience was so busy watching the Pope in his swimming trunks that it absorbed the whole backstory without noticing.¹³ Snyder called the technique the Pope in the Pool. Every stretch of pure explanation in your book needs a Pope in the pool: a case, a historical scene, a conversation, a live question the reader is already asking.

Then pace it. Least important first. The decisive text last. Cron’s word for the brain’s filter is need-to-know: when a car is speeding toward you, your brain does not note the color of the hubcaps.¹⁴ A reader in the grip of a question does not want the third illustration of a point already made, and if you give it to her she concludes the point was not important.

Show why, and let the reader get there first

Cron’s rule for emotion is the rule for argument, too: “Don’t tell me John is sad, show me why he’s sad.”¹⁵ Set two texts side by side and let the reader see the relation before you state it. Yorke borrows the formula from Pixar’s Andrew Stanton: “Good story telling never gives you four, it gives you two plus two.”¹⁶

Matthew’s summary of the Teacher’s method is one sentence: “without a parable spake he not unto them” (Matthew 13:34). He gave them two plus two.

A reader who reaches the conclusion a half-step before you state it owns that conclusion. A reader who is handed it owns nothing. Cron says it with a wink: “We’re putty in your hands as long as you let us think we’re making up our own mind.”¹⁷

The same rule governs illustrations. A biblical narrative retold without a turn is a paraphrase, not an illustration. Tell the story of the two goats, or of Peter on the rooftop, with its steps and its reversal, and the reader draws the lesson. Summarize it and announce the lesson, and the reader skims.

Come down the ladder

Cron again: “The bigger the word, the less emotion it conveys.”¹⁸ Theological vocabulary is almost all big words, and almost all of them live at the top of what Jack Hart calls the ladder of abstraction. Emotion lives on the bottom rungs, in the concrete. Meaning lives on the top, in the abstract. Good writing climbs the ladder on purpose and comes back down before the reader loses her footing.¹⁹

Ezra’s Levites were the first expositors on record, and Nehemiah tells us exactly what they did: “they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading” (Nehemiah 8:8). Distinctly. The sense. Understanding. Paul’s warning to the Corinthians is the other side of the same coin: “except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? for ye shall speak into the air” (1 Corinthians 14:9).

“Righteousness by faith” is the top rung. Abraham, old, counting stars he cannot number, is the bottom. Natalie Goldberg’s instruction is to “Give things the dignity of their names”:²⁰ the specific verse, the specific term in the original language, the specific historical actor, not “the Bible says.” She also has a line that every writer of prophecy should keep on a card: “It is very deep to have a cup of tea.”²¹ Tell the extraordinary with ordinary, concrete detail, and let the reader supply the wonder. Inflate it with superlatives and the reader deflates it for you.

Ellen White said the same thing about Christ’s own teaching: “Christ did not deal in abstract theories, but in that which is essential to the development of character, that which will enlarge man’s capacity for knowing God, and increase his efficiency to do good. He spoke to men of those truths that relate to the conduct of life, and that take hold upon eternity.”³² The bottom rung is where He taught.

Stephen King’s method is to send a few exact particulars and let the reader’s mind build the rest. He proves it with a rabbit: a table, a red cloth, a cage, a white rabbit with a pink nose, and on its back, in blue ink, the numeral 8. Every reader sees it, and every reader notices the 8.²² One concrete image of the sanctuary (the veil, the lamb, the two goats) does what a paragraph of definition cannot.

And watch your dialogue tags. King parodies the writer who cannot trust the word “said” with a single line: “Put down the gun, Utterson!” Jekyll grated.²³ In a theology book the same sin looks like this: “the apostle thunders,” “the prophet solemnly declares.” Paul wrote. The prophet said. The reader will supply the thunder.

Say it once, and prove it

Preaching in a theology book is a strange failure to name, because the book is supposed to teach. But there is a difference between a thesis that is earned and a thesis that is repeated. King’s warning is that a book which begins with its theme and works backward produces a sermon with illustrations attached.²⁴ McKee’s is sharper: “Master storytellers never explain. They do the hard, painfully creative thing—they dramatize.”²⁵ And a line Truby borrowed from old Hollywood has a lesson for pulpit writers: “If you want to send a message, try Western Union.”²⁶

The thesis gets stated plainly, once, at the moment the argument has earned it. Everything else shows it. Our editors’ finding is that repetition is the genre’s chief fault: authors restate the thesis chapter after chapter, and each restatement weakens it. Cut “the second and third illustrations of a point already made.” End each chapter with the answer in one line and a picture of the changed reader, not a recap.

Be a person, not a committee

Lamott asked the novelist Ethan Canin for his most valuable piece of advice. “Nothing is as important as a likable narrator,” he said. Lamott added that she could watch John Cleese do dishes for an hour without needing much else to happen.²⁷ The expositor must be good company: humility, clarity, hope, and no contempt for anyone who disagrees. Mary Karr’s test is that the reader must hear a person, not a committee.²⁸

The fastest way to find that person is King’s Ideal Reader. He writes every second draft for one specific person.²⁹ Name yours: a Sabbath School member, a new believer, an honest doubter. Then write the hardest chapter as a letter to that person, answering that person’s objections in order.

If the plain voice feels beneath the subject, consider how the subject itself was given. “The Bible is not given to us in grand superhuman language,” Ellen White wrote. “Jesus, in order to reach man where he is, took humanity. The Bible must be given in the language of men.”³³ A doctrine book written in the language of men is in good company.

And confess your stakes. Karr: “Unless you confess your own emotional stakes in a project, why should a reader have any?”³⁰ What changed in your own life, worship, or hope when you saw this? That belongs early, and it belongs in a scene.

Plant it, then pay it off

Cron: “To your reader, everything is either a setup, a payoff, or the road in between.”³¹ Every text you introduce early should return. Every text you rely on late should have been planted. A claim raised and never resolved is a setup the reader is still waiting on when the book ends, and it feels like a broken promise.

The conclusion answers the opening question, in the opening’s own terms. It does not summarize the chapters, and it does not introduce a new proof. If your last chapter has a new argument in it, that argument belongs in chapter six.

One more thing craft cannot touch

Every principle on this page governs how doctrine is told. None of them governs what Scripture says. Quotations of Scripture and of Ellen White stay exactly as written. A retold Bible scene adds nothing to the text and must never contradict it, and any imaginative reconstruction is labeled as such. Our editors, including a master’s-level theology editor on any manuscript that needs one, hold that line. Craft serves the Word. It does not revise it.

Before you send it

• Can I state the question my book answers, and the answer, in two sentences?
• Does chapter one open with the question, the anomaly, or a scene, and not with definitions or the conclusion?
• Have I stated the strongest opposing reading in its own terms before answering it?
• Does each chapter’s conclusion force the next chapter’s question? Does “and so” work between them?
• Is every stretch of explanation riding on a live question, a case, or a scene?
• Where have I told the reader the conclusion instead of letting her see it?
• Have I stated the thesis once, where the argument earned it, and cut the restatements?
• Can the reader hear one person, with a stake in the subject?
• Does the conclusion answer the opening, with no new proof?

This is the shape our editors read for. When a manuscript is missing a stage, we do not write it; we ask the author for it. That is what four editors and three designers do with every manuscript in our Professional, Advanced, and Premium packages, and it is a large part of why 60% of the books in those packages sell more than 150 copies, four times the rate for self-published books (the full table is on our Writer’s Tips and Guidelines page).

Books worth reading

Lisa Cron, Wired for Story (2012) and Story Genius (2016). Robert McKee, Story (1997). John Truby, The Anatomy of Story (2007). John Yorke, Into the Woods (2014). Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones (1986). Stephen King, On Writing (2000). They are written for novelists and screenwriters, and a few of them use language that does not belong in a theology book. Read them for the shape of how a reader’s mind takes hold of an idea, which is the same whether the idea is a plot or a doctrine.

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.

Mike Brazington, Publisher