One of my favorite books is called A Tangled Web by L.M. Montgomery. It tells the story of a family, any of whom could receive a priceless heirloom based on the decisions they make in the year following the reading of the family matriarch’s will. The decisions that follow are sweet, funny, and sad. In the end, everyone is surprised, yet satisfied, with how things turn out.

As I was coming up with the idea for Talents, I knew I wanted to write a book that intertwined the lives of seemingly unrelated characters toward a common goal in the same spirit as A Tangled Web.

I started thinking about this book sometime in 2012. Like any good story 😉 the plot evolved from the question “What if?”

What if several people were given a gift to invest in their community? How would it affect the community? How would it change their lives? What if the real gift wasn’t the money but the impetus to step out and instigate change around them?

Thus, Talents was taken from my imagination and put on paper. This didn’t actually happen until fall of 2013. The story wasn’t finished until January of 2015. (Hey, I’m a busy wife and mom! I don’t get a lot of time to write!)

I enjoyed developing the plots for each of the characters, but my favorites turned out to be Parker and Ed. The challenge with Parker was keeping it believable. I’d get ideas, then I’d think “would this work in real life?” I’d go looking for people in real life who’d done things similar to the idea I had. You can see an idea I had for the book come to life in the book trailer for Talents in the form of the graffiti art I found to photograph.

Ed’s was challenging, because it *needed* to be over-the-top, but not to the point of becoming unbelievable. Unfortunately, I knew of real-life situations that weren’t much different than what I was writing for my character though some of it came from my own imagination. Art imitating life or the other way around? I don’t know. You be the judge.

A few people have asked me about Jackson’s character – Why didn’t I expand his story further in the book? Two reasons: Talents wasn’t about Jackson and his story, though he did provide a springboard to the real story. Second, I might come back to Jackson another time. This is, after all, only book one.

Both the ebook and the paper book are available for purchase today on TouchPoint and Amazon. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

My novel releases on Friday and I thought I’d use the next couple days to share the “behind the scenes” of how the book came into being. Ideas come in all shapes and sizes, but this one was more than two years in the making.

When you plan a book as an author, you plan three parts — the characters, the setting, and the plot. Personally, I prefer a book with engaging characters over a book that is driven by plot, though you do need both.

I thought of the parable of the talents in the gospels. How would a person write a modern day spin on that? I started thinking about it. I thought about the characters, about how their lives could intertwine. Then, I planned the plot points for each character.

The interesting thing about this book is that it’s really a collection of four books I wrote, then combined. I wrote each character individually and then put them all together. The very first readers got a rather disjointed book as I smoothed out all the junctions.

Let me introduce you to the characters.

I started with Beatrice Sutherland. Hers was the first story I planned and wrote. Originally, she was to be the main character. However, I discovered as I wrote her that she was more of a supporting character. A widow, she has become almost reclusive in her grief. She desires to participate in her community, but doesn’t think she has the talent to do anything.

Then I wrote about Collin O’Neill. A lawyer in a big company, he knows he has plenty of talent, but he has no desire to do anything with it for the good of others. Then his friend, Justin, gets him to step outside his comfort zone and his life is changed. Collin ended up being a supporting character, too. (I plan to tell more of Collin’s story in another book in this series.)

Parker Wilson ended up being my main character. I started writing him and his story flowed. He sees the needs and longs to do something to help in his community, but lacks the resources to do anything. But, given the opportunity, he takes his talent and turns it into ten talents. (Parker and Alice appear in another book in this series as well.)

Finally, I wrote Ed Raines. Ed was the hardest to write because he was the one who made terrible life choices. He is also, quite possibly, the most realistic character in the book. It pained me to write his story, knowing that as the author, I could write anything I pleased about the character. That’s the myth anyway. Sometimes characters take on a life of their own and you just write it down as fast as you can lest you miss it.

Another supporting character in the book is Pastor William Conner. I love Pastor Conner. He will be making an appearance in every one of the books in this series. He’s a gentle, gracious man who has stuck it out in a difficult area against insurmountable odds. I know men like him in real life. No, I didn’t write these men into my book. but I knew I could write his character the way I did because real people had done the same things in real life.

Talents goes on sale on Friday, July 28. You can preorder it on TouchPoint and on Amazon. I hope you enjoy reading the characters as much as I enjoyed writing them!

My best friend, Rachel Miller, just released her second novel. She is prepping for the sequel to those books and blogged about it on her author blog. She finished her post with the questions: Are you an author? What plotting/outlining methods and tools do you use? I decided to answer her question in my own blog post.

My own plotting methods differ greatly from Rachel’s. This is not a bad thing. I would imagine there are as many methods as there are writers. I’ve read a few books about novel preparation and every author has his or her own ideas of how to do it. In my experience, we fall into one of three categories:

1. Plotter – A plotter plans their book from start to finish before they sit down to write the actual words and scenes. This might include an outline, historical research, character profiles, and back story. Tolkien wrote an entire language for his novel preparation. Stephen King (who claims to do as little research as possible, but wrote an 800 page book about the Kennedy assassination) has written entire novels from the back story he created for his characters. 
2. Pantser – Chris Baty coined this term in his book No Plot? No Problem! It refers to a novelist who does little to no preparation for their novel. They may have an idea of a character and a beginning plot device, but they “go where the story takes them” as they write it. This may be an over-simplification of the term, but you get the general idea. 
3. Plantser – This combination of the last two terms sums up where I fall into the novel plotting/outlining spectrum. It refers to basic plot/character/setting development, followed by “going where the story takes you” ;-). 

When I’m planning a novel, I think of the basic plot premise, beginning, middle and end. I make mental notes for myself, high points – or plot points if you want to call them that, scenes I want to include in the book. I know I need 20-25 of these in a 50,000 word novel, though this number is flexible, depending on how long it takes to write each point and how many perspectives I’m using. (Talents has 4 main characters and each section was 12,000-20,000 words long. I didn’t need as many plot points for each character since I was intertwining the stories of 4 different people.)

Then, I think through the characters. I name them. (This is my biggest struggle. The main character names come easily but the supporting characters are harder.) I think about who they are, how they would respond to different situations and to each other. I’ll work through sample conversations in my head before I ever write a word. I picture what they look like. 

This is how I resemble a pantser:  I don’t write anything down. It’s like watching a movie in my head so I just write down what I see. Sometimes an additional scene will present itself, so I’ll write that into the book. Sometimes I decide I don’t like where it’s going, so I’ll change it as I go. It’s more fluid than an outline but more planned than just winging it.

So far, I’ve never struggled with the dreaded writer’s block. There have been a few times when I had scenes I didn’t really feel like writing, maybe they were painful or included events I’d rather avoid. I’ve even put off writing those for days. A couple times I wasn’t sure how to get the protagonist from where I had him to where I wanted him without using an obvious plot device. (Other times I embraced and flaunted their use! Hah! Sometimes you just need a good plot device in a book!)

My rather loosy-goosy method has produced 8 novels so far. It’s by no means an exact science, but I don’t care as long as it gets the job done. Now I just need to buckle down and get those books edited.

When my kids were all little I got away from reading real live adult chapter books. I wished I could read them. I even started a few. But after weeks of not reading them, I’d have to start over again to remember what was going on (I have a terrible memory!) and I normally just gave up.

In 2012 I set a goal to read one book a month out loud to my kids. That was the beginning. We made our way through classics like Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, A Christmas Carol, and The Secret Garden among others.

In 2013, on our first furlough, I signed the kids up for the Library Summer Reading Program. We’d done our own version of the program the previous two summers but we were limited to the books in our personal library in Africa. All of the kids finished the reading program that summer!

In the process of getting books to and from the library, I picked up some of the books the kids were reading (the Percy Jackson series, specifically). I was hooked. For the first time in years I was sucked into books, finishing them soon enough to be able to remember the beginning when I got to the end. After that, I read “adult” books – in other words, books you’d find in sections other than the children’s section of the library. Bigger words. More complex plots. I felt like a grownup again.

2014 was the first year I set a personal goal for reading, but I made one grave error. I didn’t make a plan for keeping track of what I’d read. I probably came close to reading 52 books that year, but I couldn’t remember everything I’d read at the end of the year.

(Have I ever mentioned I have the *worst* memory? I can remember meaningless details and forget other more important things. Non-essential? Right out of the brain! Essential? Well, we’ll get rid of that, too! Make room for more of that meaningless stuff!)

So, in 2015 and 2016 I started a list at the beginning of the year. I also participated in a challenge with some online friends for accountability.

This goal has been a great way for me to stretch beyond what I would normally read and try new things. 

I started reading Stephen King novels — not his creepy horror books, but some of the ones that would fall into the Science Fiction or Fantasy category. His book, On Writing, has been a huge help.

I explored and discovered new authors. One of my favorites has been Jeff Wheeler. He writes youth/YA fantasy. It’s clean and always gripping. The first series I read of his, I could see the plot devices coming a mile away. The second series was better and contained some surprises. The last series I read of his, some of the plot developments made me so angry, I almost stopped reading the books. (But I’m thankful I didn’t!) I’ve watched him grow as a writer through these books.

I read Unbroken. That book was so powerful. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. It moved me in ways a book hasn’t in a long time. We were going through a rough time when I read it and the way God used people in that book gave me hope and healing in our struggles. 

There have been series I never thought I’d read, yet found that I enjoyed them and they were nothing like I’d imagined (Harry Potter). There have been books that helped me with my own writing. Other books made me see things from a different perspective. Still others were pure fluff and fun.

This year, one of my goals is to read 52 books in 52 weeks yet again. I already have a reading list going for the first books I’m going to tackle. The book I’m working on now is a collection of essays and articles by a St. Louis reporter all published in Al-Jezeera between 2012-2014 (an ebook not pictured above). Her perspective of events that took place during that time is refreshing and very Mid-western, even if I don’t agree with her 100% on everything. If nothing else, I can understand her perspective better than I do most of what I read in the main-stream news media.

Maybe you can’t set a specific goal for a number of books read in a year. Maybe all you can do is go get a book and set a goal to start and finish it. Maybe you could read a book a month or try to read through a particular series of books. Whatever you do, I encourage you to make a plan to read this year. You’ll get farther than you’d ever get if you never set a goal at all.