Guest Post by Kellyn Roth: The Themes of the Chronicles of Alice and Ivy

In celebration of the launch of her novella Becoming Miss Knight, Kellyn Roth has written a wonderful post about the themes of her stories! Welcome, Kell, and thank you!

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Hello everyone! I’m Kellyn Roth, author of The Chronicles of Alice and Ivy, and I was given permission to guest post on this lovely blog. I recently published a novella, Becoming Miss Knight, and book 3 in my series will join it in July on Amazon!

Today I’m here to talk about the themes in my novels — specifically, in The Chronicles of Alice and Ivy. How I develop them, what they’re inspired by, and most importantly, why I feel like it’s important to include Christian themes in my books.

Since book 3 in my series, At Her Fingertips, will be coming out in July of this year, and because I just finished another draft of that book (!!), I’ll be focusing on those themes.

When I set out to rewrite At Her Fingertips, I knew one of the things I really wanted to improve was my handling of the themes. It’s a romance novel, but I didn’t want it to be just another silly love story.

I wanted to portray a romantic relationship (that develops out of a very close friend/confidante relationship) in a healthy way—and I also wanted to show some unhealthy relationships!

So I’m going to dive into three different themes I’m tackling in this novel. Let’s start with the obvious: what is love? What is marriage? How should we meld the two?

Marriage, Love, & Other Commitments

“Marriage will demand you deliberately choose the action of love, but the feelings of being in love can make us willing, eager, to commit to that sacrifice even if one should be able to, with God’s help, make it without involving the original emotion. If you look at a man, and you know that you would lay your life down for him, in whatever way it was required of you—that, that is the type of spark you need. It’s only a spark. That’s all being in love is—the beginning, the moment that ignites, the feeling. Everything else is hard work.”

This theme was an obvious one—I knew I was going to talk about love and marriage in my book about love and marriage!

However, how? I’ve never officially been in love, though I’ve been smitten, had crushes, and even dated. I’ve had a deep friendship with a boy & talked about marrying him, but that hardly qualifies me to write a romance!

Now, I’ve read enough romance novels, talked to enough married women, and studied marriage & love both enough to have a vague idea of where I was going with it. And, after all, this was the rewrite of At Her Fingertips—not the first draft.

But since I have dated now, and I have planned for a future marriage (now I’m single, but for a while, I wasn’t), and since friends of mine have dated, too … Well, overall, my thoughts on the subject had changed.

I turned to writers like C.S. Lewis for a lot of my thoughts on romance, and I also relied on years of observation. I could never sell romance as the end-all/be-all but neither could I say, less of a cynic now than I was at sixteen, that it is nothing.

To quote Lewis, “Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it.” (Mere Christianity) Yet later this author also notes (in The Four Loves): “The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to  reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive of our selfhood; […] Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (toward one person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves.”

These two seemingly contradictory ideas must exist together. Romantic love is something special—there is a denial of selfhood and therefore a purity to it—but it is not the only thing there is, and it certainly cannot last forever (as the quote from Mere Christianity notes—look up the whole thing if you want to read it in full!).

All this said, I wasn’t quite prepared to put my thoughts into the feelings writing a novel must require.

What gave me the final push? Talking to my best friend about her serious boyfriend who she is very much in love with at present. It gave me the last couple chapters of my novel.

That more obvious theme spoken about, let’s talk about Alice.

Relying on God—and allowing vulnerability

"She was doing it again—letting pride and stubbornness pull her away from those she loved. She’d rather appear strong and reject vulnerability than have a close relationship with her family. But she wasn’t strong; she was weak, and every time she failed to show her weakness, she became weaker."

This is something I personally struggle with. I hate showing weakness! I hate being weak. And yet I am weak because I’m human. I sin, I fail, I can’t do everything.

I’m not like Alice in every way (she’s a natural phenomenon, and I never will be quite that—I’m a lot more laid-back than she is), but in some ways, I am. In some ways, I hate showing weakness …

And boy, do I need control! I long for it. I fight for it. But will I ever have it? No, never. Only God has control, and all of us mortals flailing for it cannot do anything but fail.

Alice’s entire character arc took me a lot less research than the element of love, but it did take some suavity. I’m not entirely sure I’ve learned the lessons she has, and therefore, it was challenging for me to write them.

I get her completely immaturity—I get her reaching for what she cannot have. In many ways, on this rewrite, I’d experienced a bit more of what she had … and had my hand slapped in a similar manner.

So I was ready to write it—and at the same time not ready! However, I’m quite happy about how it turned out, and I think I grew as a person while writing it.

The final theme I want to talk about today is one that’s also very close to my heart. I want to talk about taking risks—in this case, in romance, but it applies to every situation in life!

God requires risk-takers

“You’re not just humble at this point. You are a coward. So is any man who doesn’t come out and tell his intentions to a woman he’s interested in—and hang all this ‘I’m not ready.’ God doesn’t work with ready people, people who refuse to take a risk, people who wait for the perfect circumstances to align before every forward step—you’re the one who taught me that.”

I didn’t originally intend this when I began writing the book—but Peter’s character arc needed to experience this call to risk. He’s a lovely character who I can’t wait for y’all to meet, but simply put … he’s a man of God who struggles with fear of rejection.

He doesn’t want to take a risk. He doesn’t want to open his heart, even though his personality practically requires him to—he refuses to confess his feelings, to approach a woman and ask to court her.

This wasn’t a common problem back in the day, so I’d always considered Peter a special case. However, in the modern day world? I can’t count the number of young men I’ve known—who have approached me, even!—who were unwilling to take a risk.

So, as I wove Peter’s theme into the novel, I began to think not so much about the historical side (in which Peter was probably an outlier; men were braver back then; they weren’t given an easy way out)—but about the message I was leaving with my readers.

Honestly, I’m close to arguing that the most romantic thing a man in the modern day world can do it step outside his comfort zone, stop waiting until he’s perfectly prepared for a wife, and relentlessly pursue the woman God guides him to.

But all that aside, this was an awesome theme to explore! I know so many people who struggle with taking the next step forward (I am sadly not one of them—I could use a lot more self-restraint at times!), and I want them to know that God will take care of the rest … if you’ll just step forward into Him.

Which brings me to my wrapup:

Why all the themes?

I write Christian fiction, so obviously I had to write Christian themes. ;-)

But seriously, I can’t help myself. I enjoy talking about all these subjects, and writing novels gives me an outlet to explore the reality of Biblical truths.

I don’t have any grand illusions of influencing people for good, though I do hope that people will be able to take something away from my novels, even if that is just a cool way of stating truths they already knew.

Christian fiction has certainly been encouraging to me, so I must believe that, potentially, my novels could have a positive effect on people. I’ll certainly do all I can to make sure they don’t have a negative effect!

However, that is God’s responsibility, not mine! All I do is write the books.

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About the Author

Kellyn Roth is a Christian historical women’s fiction & romance author from North-Eastern Oregon who has independently published multiple novels, the most notable being The Chronicles of Alice and Ivy series. You should definitely call her Kell.

Kell lives on family-owned property outside an unmemorable but historical town with her parents, two little brothers, arbitrary cat, precious border collies, a dozen cows, and lots of chickens. She also possesses a classic, vintage aesthetic which does not at all speak to her country girl side, but such is life.

When not writing, Kell likes to blog, teach writing to her various students, have day jobs which allow her to keep her car properly insured, and spend lavish amounts of money on Dairy Queen french fries. She also likes to talk about Keira Knightley and her own books just … way too much.

Website: https://kellynrothauthor.com/

Blog: https://kellynroth.blog/

What are some of the most important themes in the stories you're writing, or in some of your favorite stories? Have you read any of Kell's books?