Author Archive

Only by Patient Devotion

“I’ll go and I’ll finish this book. I have to. My whole damned life is tied up. Most people would like it tied up. And maybe I do. My many weaknesses are beginning to show their heads. I simply must get this thing out of my system. I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people. I wish
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The Beauty of Writing Friends

They don’t teach you how to be a friend in college. But they should. Hopefully, at some point, you do learn. Probably it takes root in childhood and begins sprouting as we learn to care for each other. It took me a while to learn and value friends. As a kid, I had trouble connecting for the usual selfish reasons. But
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Why We’ve Got to Learn to Say No

“There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.” Saul Below, The Living Novel: A Symposium, 1957 I think no matter who you are, no matter how you grew up, every Christian writer struggles to say no to others. Some may learn to
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Those Who Can, Do. Those Who Don’t Want to, Teach.

Writing a book is hard work. Everyone knows that. But what most people don’t realize is that it’s also a skill. And if that’s true, it can be learned. That’s why I love teaching my story course. You have to admit, the fact that it’s so easy to email a lesson, show how to apply it, and then evaluate what someone
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When Telling Stories Makes You a Liar

I’ve been collecting quotes for my upcoming story course. Some are fairly alarming. First, from Nabokov: “Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no
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