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 one of the most ambitious long-form fiction projects in Christian publishing history and I read every single volume.

Not because someone assigned them. Because I could not stop.

At the time I was just a reader who had found his lane. I did not know I was being educated. I did not know that every page I turned was teaching me something about how to build a story that holds a reader across hundreds of thousands of words and multiple volumes. I was just enjoying it. But looking back I can see exactly what those twelve books deposited in me.

The first thing was scale. LaHaye and Jenkins were not afraid of a big story. They were telling the end of the world. Every geopolitical system. Every major world religion. Every prophetic timeline in the book of Revelation rendered in real time with real characters making real decisions. The ambition of that was staggering. And they pulled it off. Not perfectly. But they pulled it off in a way that kept millions of readers buying the next book.

The second thing was character continuity. Across twelve books the characters aged and changed and suffered real consequences. Rayford Steele was not the same man in book twelve that he was in book one. He had been through things. He had lost people. He had made mistakes that cost him. The characters felt earned because Jenkins had put them through enough that you actually knew them by the end.

The third thing was urgency. Every book ended with something unresolved. Every chapter pushed toward a next moment. There was always something at stake and Jenkins never let you forget it. I did not know the word pacing at that point in my life but I was experiencing it on every page.

By the time I finished the twelfth book I did not just want to read more. I wanted to build something like that. A world. A cast. A story big enough to carry multiple volumes and leave a reader hungry for the next one.

That ambition did not come from a writing class. It came from twelve books on a shelf that I read because I loved them.

Stephon Rudd