Once Upon a Time: Discovering Our Forever After Story Read online

  Author and politician Bruce Barton said, “Sometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things, I am tempted to think there are no little things.”1

  RUNNING THE RACE

  When it comes to our mission, the important thing is the willingness to embrace it. Wayne and I recently helped sponsor Race for a Soldier, a half marathon. Our son Dale who died in the year preceding the race was a runner, and it seemed a fitting way to honor his memory.

  We stood at a watering station next to a milepost, and family and friends gathered to cheer on the runners. Soon Wayne and the grandkids were busy handing out water and juice to the runners as they sped past. I took my role of cheerleader seriously by applauding and shouting out encouragements.

  What I found interesting was the difference between the first runners who zoomed past and the late stragglers. The serious runners barely broke stride as they grabbed the water cups, gulped down the liquid, and tossed the cups aside. Those who came later cried out, “Water. Water,” as they staggered to the table and then lingered to drink it down, in no rush to continue running. I know without a doubt I would be in the latter group.

  But you know what? Both groups, those athletic die-hard runners and those struggling to simply finish the course, embraced the mission to support soldiers returning from the war. And it inspired me to run my own race—to fulfill my mission—whether I finish first or struggle across the finish line long after dark.

  CHRISTIAN OR SECULAR?

  When we talk about our work and pleasing God with our mission, many people think that means that our work needs to be distinctively Christian. I’ve had criticism of my own storytelling because I write my novels for the general market, not for the Christian book market. I work to write a book that would never shame me before the Lord, whether in content or in craft. C. S. Lewis said, “What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.”2 That’s what I try to do, allow my characters to display faith—or not—in a way that honors the story and honors God.

  A fellow novelist, Susan Meissner, who writes primarily for the Christian market, wrote this:

  I love Jesus and I love Story, just like the baker who loves Jesus loves bread. That doesn’t etch the Gospel into every loaf he bakes, but he bakes to the glory of his God and anyone who gets to know him personally will see that. He isn’t selling out to bake bread a non-Christian will eat. My writing is not my ministry, it’s my art form. My ministry is far bigger than my writing career. I am called to love and serve my neighbor. Writing stories is something I get to do in addition to that . . .

  So whether your mission is sacred or secular doesn’t matter, as long as you do it, as Eric Liddell would say, to give God pleasure.

  Storytelling Prompt

  What specific gifts, talents, skills, and powers have you been given for your journey through life? Why do you suppose you were gifted with these? How have you been able to use them?

  The Work of Our Hands

  So how do we discover the work of our hands? Frederick Buechner says, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”3

  There are so many voices calling us to many different kinds of work—our family, including parents who may have paid for our education; our mentors; our friends; even our spouses. How do we hear God’s voice in all that?

  If we look at our lives we’ll probably be able to find clues in our interests, passions, and skills. You should be able to find a thread that starts when you are very young and develops over time. Pay attention to those clues. They probably have God’s fingerprints all over them.

  Perhaps you love children, and nothing you do is as satisfying as music. Could God have called you to unlock the power and beauty of music—of worship—for children? Or what if, like me, you love to write? Does that necessarily mean you need to write for publication? Not at all. I know people who write letters to the lonely, the imprisoned, the hopeless. They change lives with their writing.

  So you look for the places you’ve been gifted and where you are passionate. Then you look for where the need is greatest. That’s the mission part. When those two things meet, you’ve probably found what God is calling you to do.

  I’ll tell you, there is no greater blessing than to do the work for which you’ve been called. It is pure joy.

  Ten

  AND THERE HE MET . . .

  As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.

  —PROVERBS 27:17

  What would a book be without characters? And what would our lives be without the people around us?

  One of the interview questions I’m almost always asked is how I create the characters in my books. The question that often follows is, “Do you pattern characters after people you know?” Because my gift is that of storytelling, creating characters comes naturally to me. Story ideas are all around us; life itself presents us with plenty of ideas every single day. It’s a matter of being open to them—and then fashioning them into a story with believable and compelling characters. And I think most writers find that the people around them provide the basis for the fictional characters they create. Ultimately, believable characters come from the writer’s observations about the people and situations around him or her. I never take a person from life and use him or her as a character in one of my stories. For one thing, that would be too constricting, and for another, the character needs to serve the story, not the other way around.

  It comes down to observation and honesty—which is true of all characters a writer creates.

  SECONDARY CHARACTERS

  One of the challenging things for me as I write my books is that when I introduce a secondary character, I need to watch her carefully. Because of the way my books are so interconnected, that character may just be biding her time until she takes center stage. It’s one of the reasons I try to be so mindful of each character that walks into my stories.

  That’s just one more way in which the stories I create are not unlike real life. How many times have we had a brief encounter with someone who later became a key player in our lives? I think of the young actor Anthony Quinn, who had a small role in the film The Plainsman, directed by the great Cecil B. DeMille. Quinn sensed that Mr. DeMille held him at arm’s length because of his Mexican roots. Who would have ever predicted that Cecil B. DeMille would become Anthony Quinn’s father-in-law?

  CHARACTERS WE DON’T WANT TO FIND IN A STORY

  There are a number of characters we hope we’ll not encounter when we open a book. Some of these are:

  The Perfect Character

  No one is ever going to pick up a book to follow the lives of perfect people living blissful existences. You’d put the book down before you’d finished the first chapter. We look for interesting characters. Flawed characters.

  The Stereotypical Character

  Nothing ruins a story as quickly as a stereotype. The wicked stepmother. The mad scientist. The quirky best friend. The evil landowner. It is so easy to come up with a stereotype. Because these types have been used so often in fiction, and now on the big screen and on television as well, they’re the first place our minds go. A good writer has to go to the second place, the third place, or the sixty-seventh place to find a character who is unique—not a type at all.

  The Cardboard Character

  A cardboard character is one that’s never fully fleshed out. He’s as thin as cardboard, obviously propped up in the novel to meet a particular need. Sadly, we never come to know anything about him. What does he want more than anything? We feel cheated when we find a one-dimensional character in a story. I’ve found that some of the characters that have become my favorites start out one-dimensional and grow from there. Like Bobby Polgar in the Cedar Cove books. When we first meet him, he’s a world-class chess champion and pretty much exactly as you’d expect a world-class chess champion to be, but when he meets the woman wh
o will become his wife, he changes. He softens. At one point he confesses to Terry that with her, for the first time in his life he doesn’t think. He feels.

  SO WHY DO WE LOOK FOR THESE CHARACTERS TO SHOW UP IN OUR OWN STORIES?

  We don’t want these characters to show up in our books—they ruin the story. But these are the very people we expect to walk into our lives:

  Perfect People

  I confess, there have been a few days when I’ve wished Wayne were perfect. (I’ll bet Wayne wishes I were as well.) It would be equally satisfying if all of our children were uniformly happy and satisfied, living blissful lives. And, of course, we’d prefer if the grandchildren never suffered so much as a bump in the road. I’ve heard so many friends wishing their lives would just “settle down.” The truth is none of us are perfect. And none of us will lead perfect lives. True growth comes from overcoming problems and weathering storms.

  Stereotypical People

  Another confession: sometimes it’s just easier to classify people by stereotypes. It’s far easier to look at a mother-in-law as an interfering biddy than to look deeper and connect with her love for our spouse. It’s easier to dismiss someone when we think about them as, say, street kids, rather than seeing them as God sees them and treating each one as a unique person with a history that brought him to the present. Good fiction digs deep below the surface to find the motivation and backstory, always anticipating the growth the character can make. Good life stories need to do the same.

  Cardboard People

  It’s sad that we have to leave so many people in our lives mere cardboard outlines. When I think of the people I meet and the people who intrigue me, one of the regrets of my life is that time will not allow me to get to know them all. Our world is so interconnected that we all come across far more people than we can ever flesh out as friends. That’s why I look forward to eternity. Can you imagine never having to say, “I don’t have time”?

  THE CHARACTERS THAT MAKE STORY COME ALIVE

  If it weren’t for these characters much of the story would be lost:

  Villains

  In most of my books I don’t have villains per se—at least not the mustache-twirling, dastardly types of characters. My villains are more often the people who keep my characters from finding what they seek, one way or another. And you know, more often than not, that’s the kind of antagonist you’ll meet in your own life. Chances are it will not be a Simon Legree, holding the past-due mortgage over your head. It will be the supervisor who keeps passing you over for promotion simply because he never seems to see you. Or the family member who tries to subtly poison your relationships with everyone else in the family.

  Without antagonists—villains—there is no story. They are the opposing force. If it were not for them, the hero would never have the opposition that leads to transformation. Guess what? It’s probably the same in your life, although it may be difficult to picture an antagonist as someone God is using to help you grow. Were it not for those opposing forces, we might never break out and become all God wants us to become.

  Sometimes the antagonist is not a person at all—both in fiction and in our lives. The real villain can be cancer, poverty, a string of misunderstandings, or ugly gossip. But those things can stop us dead in our tracks just as quickly as any flesh-and-blood bad guy.

  Flawed Characters

  Here’s a secret. All good characters are flawed characters. The Bible confirms this: “As it is written: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one’ ” (Rom. 3:10). If you expect to find anyone in your life besides wonderfully flawed characters, you will live a life of constant disappointment.

  Each character I create needs to be real, which means that they are all flawed. If they were not flawed, how could they ever change and grow as the story progresses?

  Walk-On Characters

  These characters are fun, and sometimes unexpected. Writers often talk about having a story all planned out until an intriguing character walks onto the page. Then, without the writer ever meaning for it to happen, this new force threatens to take over the story. Sometimes it’s like that in our life stories as well. Think of the number of friends who admit that when they first met their spouses, their immediate response was, “No way!” And then somehow they end up at the altar, and twenty-five years later they have a great story to tell.

  That’s what happened with Wayne and me. I remember when we first met. We are so different that after our first date I thought he was probably the last person I should ever marry. And yet here we are, four children and all these years later.

  A few weeks ago, I had time to ponder many of the “secondary characters” in my own life. That Sunday I flew into Washington, DC, to sign one thousand books (yes, one thousand!) at a huge warehouse in nearby Maryland for my fiction publisher, Random House. Then I ended the week in Colville, Washington, for Wayne’s family reunion. I spent time with two families, my professional family—the good people in publishing—and my real-life family—my husband, my children, and a huge assortment of cousins and their children and their children’s children. It brought to mind how we are all connected in one way or another. The people I met in Maryland started out as strangers when I first arrived, and I left feeling as though I had made good friends. Wayne’s family is filled with aunts, uncles, cousins, fun, food, and laughter. We knew some better than others, but after a day of shared memories and deepened relationships, we left with strengthened cords of love.

  If you are the hero—the protagonist—in your own story, you probably have ever-widening circles of characters in your life. You’ll have close family and friends. Coworkers. Extended family. Neighbors. Acquaintances. The list of larger and larger circles could go on for a long time. All of these are the characters in your story. Some will be featured, while others may just be walk-ons.

  As you continue to think about your own story, your job is the same as mine—to observe, to try to figure out why they do what they do. To love them in Jesus’s name. The more you scratch the surface, the more you understand them, the richer your story will be, whether you are writing it down or just living with your eyes wide open.

  Storytelling Prompt

  Make a list of some of the secondary characters in your life—those unforgettable people who played smaller parts. Write or tell about one of them. How would your life have been different if you hadn’t met this person?

  Silence the Inner Critic

  As soon as you decide to tell your own story, an unwelcome visitor shows up—the inner critic. You’ll recognize his voice right away. As you start to put words on paper, it’s as if he’s sitting beside you. You’ll write the words, “We grew up in a modest home on a nondescript street in . . . ,” and immediately you’ll sense him saying, “If you call it modest, you’ll hurt Mom’s feelings. She was so proud of that house.”

  Or, if you start to tell an anecdote from your childhood, he’ll say, “It didn’t really happen that way. You’ve romanticized it.”

  Sometimes the voice sounds like that of one of the characters in your own story. Brothers and sisters are great naysayers, and if you are telling your story you may hear them in your imagination saying, “Where in the world did you get that?” As Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

  As you get rolling on the story, you might look at it one day through the eyes of the inner critic and say, “This is garbage. Why did I ever think I could write this stuff?” Or maybe halfway through, you’ll just decide that the story is unimportant. After all, other people have stories that are so much more interesting.

  Sound familiar?

  The inner critic is not just there for people who are writing their stories. If you are telling your story through scrapbooking, you’ll see someone else’s world-class scrapbook and decide yours is just not up to snuff. Or if you are telling your sto
ry through photography, you’ll start critiquing your technique. Why did you think you could capture life in photographs anyway?

  It’s important to recognize whose voice it is. It’s not the voice of the Creator. We know His voice. The inner critic is the voice of the destroyer. That voice strips us of every shred of creativity God gave us.

  It takes real resolve to learn to ignore that voice. Sometimes we have to do what Jesus did. In Matthew 16:21–23, he is trying to explain to his disciples what is going to happen to him. When he predicts his death, Peter stops him and says, “Never, Lord! This shall never happen to you!”

  Jesus recognizes that even though Peter said the words, the message was actually coming from the destroyer. The Lord turns to Peter and says, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

  We need to say the same thing to our inner critic. “Get behind me! You are a stumbling block to me.” It’s important that we not let our inner critic steal the joy of telling our story.

  And if your inner critic sounds like a sibling? The fear that all the characters in your story won’t agree on every detail will paralyze your telling. The truth is that if each child in a family wrote the story of his or her childhood, none of the stories would look alike. Each of us sees events through his or her own filter. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt tells the story of the author’s poverty-stricken upbringing in Limerick, Ireland, including his struggles with his father’s drinking and his mother’s attempts to feed the family. His brothers, Malachy and Alphie, both wrote memoirs about the same childhood, and each tells a distinctively different story in his own voice.