Losing My Religion

The religious aspect of Perilous has been an issue of debate from the moment I got my contract. Not so much debate as in, my editor and I fought over it, but as in, debating how much it really fit my novel.

As my novel became less and less of a coming-of-age, inspirational Christian novel, and more and more of a high-stakes thriller, the religion felt like it belonged to a different novel. We started making changes a long time ago. One of the first comments from my editor about the religion was this:

One of the ideas I threw out in my notes was the option of having only two of the girls be

LDS, Jaci and Callie is what I'm thinking. This is just a thought. See what you think as you go

over your revisions. I am looking at ways of making this appeal to a broad YA audience. It is definitely a YA thriller, and yet I don't see it appealing to the LDS YA audience. Therefore, we need to take out much of the religion, or it won't appeal to a non LDS audience either, and then we have problems!

So right away, we realized we had to tone down the religious aspect because we wanted to appeal to a mainstream audience. Still, we kept the LDS domination as an ever-present part of the novel for two reasons: a) to appeal to an LDS audience b) to appease my desire to have a mainstream novel with an LDS main character.

I made the changes. I went from four LDS characters to two. Instead of having prayers and religious talks, we went to a general sense of normal girls who have moral upbringing. Everything seemed to be going well, when we became aware of a change in marketing. Or rather, a change in the economy that affected LDS books: the closing of LDS bookstores. From my editor:

The LDS bookstores are struggling in a major way right now. Even Deseret Book has closed down stores and been pickier about taking on books at their stores. As a result, WiDo is moving away from the LDS market as it's not economically feasible in today's climate. In fact, one novel under editing has the LDS character changed to Methodist, because it complicated things too much making her LDS, yet she meets a guy at church and she doesn't smoke or drink so we wanted her to have a church background.

I desperately wanted to argue the point and say that there are plenty of LDS readers out there buying LDS fiction. But the truth is, there isn't. Just that day I had spoken with several ladies from church who said they preferred to read mainstream fiction over LDS fiction. So unfortunately, what my editor said rang true to me.

However, it felt like a betrayal and even fraudulent for me to make my main character a different religion. So instead, we've taken out all direct domination references and just left her a Christian. In my mind, she is still LDS. I hope many young teenagers pick up on that and relate to Jaci even more because of her religious background. But perhaps young people of all religions will assume she goes to their church.

In all, as difficult as it was to let go of the idea of putting a strong LDS character out into the world, I have high expectations that the book will come across as a thriller with a moral main character, whose unidentified religious background will make her relate-able to many people.

In your WIP or published book, what have you had to give up to make the publication become a reality?