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> I'm not really sure how church is affecting my writing. It seems to be making me more... deliberate, you might say.

Not sure if this is along the lines of what you mean, but one thing I've found is that church attendance/theological reflection affects the themes of my story, and also the symbolism I use. For instance one thing I sometimes do is look at the symbolism used in medieval Christian art and try to envision how to express the same thing in literary form. I have a theory--inspired somewhat by Tolkien's subcreator theory of comparative mythology--that there are certain archetypal Christian symbols which appear in Scripture that are to Christian spiritual/psychological experience as Jung's symbols are to secular psychological experience. Got a number of other ideas like that I try to work into my writing--or at least into the stories I plan in my head to write, LOL!

> And I'm actually working with predestination to some extent in my story though I still haven't figured it out entirely (one of my main characters is mildly precognitive - this is the magic/SF story - and I'm trying to figure out how she handles it).

Sounds interesting--hadn't thought to relate predestination to precognition before, but that makes sense. I have some characters like that in my story, with precognition as well as other stuff along those lines. I try to approach it from a SF perspective by developing a "mechanics" of how such things work. Of course this raises the problem of how to work the explanation into the story without too much expositional digression--that's one of the things I'm finding challenging.

> Also I want my writing to have Meaning and Depth and stuff, but I don't know how to do that so it's probably best I don't even try.

I'd have to think about how to define how one goes about doing that, but I think one of the keys is to make your characters/settings/plot conflicts symbolize the psychological/spiritual meaning you're trying to convey. For instance in LOTR, you can think of the ring as symbolizing sin, and the struggle between sin and the forces of good is symbolized by dichotomies between good characters and "fallen" characters--the Orcs are fallen Elves, the Wraiths are fallen Men, the Trolls are fallen Ents, and Gollum is a fallen Hobbit. The main characters are all Christ figures--Frodo is the priestly function of the Messiah in that he sacrifices himself, Gandalf is the prophetic function of the Messiah, Aragon is the kingly function of the Messiah, and Sam is the suffering servant--and each of these characters goes through a sort of "resurrection": Frodo almost dies twice, at Rivendell and at Shelob's pass, Gandalf dies at Moria, Aragon goes through the Paths of the Dead, Sam almost drowns but Frodo saves him. There's a lot more stuff like that, but anyway, I think LOTR is a good example of how to go about building meaning and depth into fiction through the use of symbolism. When all else fails, copy Tolkien, LOL!