My first published book, Story of a Girl, was the fourth book I wrote.
My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.
When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.
One of my favorite authors is Robert Cormier. He was a devout Catholic and a very nice man, which might not be the impression you get from reading his books.
My parents met in music school and my father was a music professor and conductor. Growing up, we always had classical and contemporary music playing. There was a lot of Mozart and the Beatles.
It’s hard to say when my interest in writing began, or how. My mother read to my sister and me every night, and we always loved playing make-believe games. I had a well-primed imagination. I didn’t start thinking about writing as a serious pursuit, a career I could have, until after college.
I’m always in a place that is sincere but conflicted about different things that come with being a Christian and being an active, churchgoing Christian.
I wouldn’t say I’m stuck in my adolescence, but I think, like a lot of people, I carry my teen years with me. I feel really in touch with those feelings, and how intense and complicated life seems in those years.
I wanted to be free to write the way I wanted to write, and my impression of Christian publishing, at least in fiction, was that there wasn’t room for what I wanted to write.
I do have a little bit more confidence in – or at least familiarity with – my process. For example, when it feels like it’s going badly or that I’m lost, I know I’ll eventually find my way because I’ve been through it before. But writing itself is still hard.
Family or love or romance, whatever it is, is not restricted to perfect people. If it were, it wouldn’t exist. All of that comes out in my work in some way.
The one reader I’m trying to please as I write is me, and I’m pretty difficult to please.
I’m not really a plot writer – I’m more interested in the characters and sort of small events that propel the story forward.
The Lord doesn’t give a person more than he knows they can bear.
Try a little tenderness...
What brings two people together anyway?
And he left. I watched him walk out – he didn’t say good-bye, he didn’t even look back. It scared me, how easy it was for him to do that.
I lived too much in my head instead of the real world.
The one thing that could never die or be buried was my loyalty to Cameron for everything he’d done for me and what we’d been through together, even if that loyalty was a ghost.
A know a place called New Beginnings, but I don’t think it works quite like that. You can’t just erase everything that came before.