The Writing Life
I never took a writing class. No MFA. No workshop. No mentor who sat across from me with a red pen and a theory about structure. I learned to write the way I learned everything else that mattered — by paying attention to people who were already doing it well and figuring out what they...
The Writing Life
There was no single lightning bolt moment. It was more like a slow accumulation. Peretti. LaHaye and Jenkins. Dekker. Book after book building something in me that eventually had nowhere to go but out. I had been consuming stories for years and somewhere in that consumption a pressure built up. A need to make something...
The Writing Life
What got me about Dekker’s Black was not just the story. It was the structure. Thomas Hunter lived in two worlds simultaneously. The modern world — our world, recognizable and grounded. And an ancient world that felt prehistoric and elemental and completely different in every way. When he was in one world the other was...
The Writing Life
Ted Dekker did something to me at the end of Black that I had never experienced before. He let his main character make the unthinkable choice. Thomas Hunter encountered the black water and he went in. And that was the end of the book. Not a resolution. Not a safe landing. The character I had...
The Writing Life
I came to the Left Behind series after Peretti and I never looked back. Twelve books. Twelve full length novels following the same cast of characters through the tribulation period, the rise of the Antichrist, the bowl judgments, the battle of Armageddon, and ultimately the return of Christ. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins built...
The Writing Life
I want to talk about what it means to finish a book you did not think you could read. This Present Darkness was five hundred pages. For a teenager who had never voluntarily read anything longer than a school assignment that number was significant. It was a wall. The kind of wall that makes you...
The Writing Life
Before Frank Peretti I did not know a book could do that. I did not know a story could make you feel like the walls of the room you were sitting in were thinner than you thought. Like something was operating just on the other side of what your eyes could see. Like the spiritual...
The Writing Life
I was not a reader. Let me be clear about that before anything else. I was not the kid in the corner with his nose in a book. I was outside. Street hockey, hanging with friends, doing whatever teenage boys do when the summer stretches out in front of them like it will never end....