I write fiction because I need a break from the world around me.
I suspect readers sometimes need one, too.
Being in the publishing business for a long time means I’ve come to know a lot of authors and a lot of people in the industry. And one of the things I find fascinating is how differently we all approach the work.
There are pantsers and plotters and those who fall somewhere between the two—plantsers, apparently, because writers will invent a word for anything.
I know authors who create an entire story bible before they write word one. Character histories. Lore. Backstory. Every major plot point and character beat. If they’re writing a series, they may have things mapped out that won’t happen for another three books.
And then there are writers like me.
A lot of that stuff is either locked away in my brain or deliberately left loose. I want room to make discoveries. I don’t necessarily want to nail down every detail of the lore until I’ve spent enough time with the characters to know who they are.
The process can be radically different from writer to writer.
But the goal is pretty much the same.
We want to tell you a story.
That’s goal number one.
Where we differ again is in what we hope those stories do.
Some writers use fiction to hold up a mirror to the world around us—to confront what’s broken, push at uncomfortable questions, or imagine where our worst impulses might take us.
Me? I usually come to fiction looking for a little relief from all of that.
There’s plenty of dystopian fiction out there, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s just not what I want to write.
I think the world is dark enough without me adding to it.
That doesn’t mean everything I write is happy. I’ve written scary horror stories. I’ve written about grief and loss. I’ve given characters I care about sad endings. I go where the story takes me, and sometimes the story takes me somewhere painful.
But I’m never trying to put more misery into the world.
I’m trying to offer a break from it.
I want to entertain you. Engage you. Maybe make you think. But mostly, I want to tell you a story worth reading.
And yet, inevitably, the things that matter to me find their way into the stories I tell.
Hope. Grace. Mercy. Forgiveness. Repentance. Reconciliation. Friendship. Sacrifice.
Those things have mattered in my own life. They’ve shaped my story. So naturally, they shape the stories I tell.
I want to write about what genuine friendship looks like. I want to explore what happens when someone chooses to sacrifice something for another person. I want to write about broken people discovering that broken doesn’t necessarily mean finished.
Usually, I don’t even know everything a story has to say when I begin writing it.
Most of the time, I step into the story with characters I’ve come to know and let things unfold around them. Then I watch how they respond.
My three primary recurring characters (Darke, Azael the Sly, and Dylan Drake) are very different people. They approach life differently. They approach other people differently. Put all three in the same situation and you’re likely to get three very different responses.
I understand that because I’m not always consistent either.
I sometimes struggle with the distance between what I believe and what I feel. Between what I know and what I think. Between the person I hope I’ll be in a particular moment and the person I am when that moment arrives.
So I write about it.
My hope is always that I’m the one who chooses compassion.
And maybe my work can encourage you to choose compassion, too.
Most of us who write books will never get to sit down and have a cup of coffee with the people who read them. We won’t sit across a dinner table from one another and talk about what matters to me or to you.
The work has that conversation for us.
And once I put a story into the world, that conversation isn’t entirely mine anymore.
You bring your own story to it. Your own experiences. Your own wounds and difficulties and peculiarities. Your own beliefs. Your own questions.
Maybe it’s a little like several people standing on different corners when something happens in the middle of an intersection. We all witnessed the same event, but none of us saw it from exactly the same place.
Stories work that way, too.
I may have written something from a deeply spiritual place while you encounter it as something philosophical. You may connect with a character for reasons completely different from mine. You may even find something in the story I never consciously put there.
As a man of faith, I understand hope through the lens of faith. You may be standing somewhere different.
And that’s okay.
That’s part of the beauty of the written word.
We come to a story carrying our own backstory. We see it through our own lenses. We recognize the things that speak most directly to wherever we happen to be standing.
And somehow, through all that difference, a connection happens.
I think, more than anything else, that’s what I keep writing about.
Our wounds don’t have to get the final word. Our failures don’t have to be the end of the story. Broken doesn’t necessarily mean finished.
Any story can be salvaged.
There is hope enough for all of us.
I believe that.
But I can only carry that idea so far.
Eventually, I must hand it to you.
And pray that you’ll carry it a little farther.
