I’ve written fifteen novels, and although their stories and characters differ, I’ve come to recognize something they have in common.
They begin, in one way or another, with questions I can’t quite leave alone.
Some come from things I’ve experienced. Others from something I’ve read, witnessed, or heard someone say. Sometimes the beginning is no more than a passing observation that troubles me enough to keep thinking about it.
Recently, I read about people who believed God had personally guided them to a particular place and continued to direct their lives. Their certainty caught my attention.
Not because I doubted their sincerity. But because I wondered how anyone could know such a thing.
Around the same time, I watched a documentary depicting the lives of Haitian sugarcane workers in the Dominican Republic. The poverty, exploitation, and suffering were difficult to watch.
I found myself thinking about those two very different circumstances. People enjoying lives they understand as blessings from God. Other people enduring hardships that seem almost beyond comprehension.
Why these lives? Why such different circumstances? And how can anyone claim to know what God is doing in either?
For much of my life, I accepted religious beliefs that I eventually came to question. That experience left me with a lasting concern about certainty—particularly our willingness to claim knowledge of things we cannot demonstrate.
But the questions extend well beyond religion.
Why do we accept some things without questioning them? How much of what we believe comes from our upbringing, our circumstances, and the people around us? What happens when experience challenges convictions we’ve held for most of our lives?
And perhaps most troubling, how do we become comfortable with suffering when it belongs to someone else?
I’m not interested in turning these questions into sermons. I’m interested in what happens when ordinary people confront them.
That’s where fiction comes in.
A novel gives me the opportunity to place a character in circumstances where an important belief is challenged, where an uncomfortable truth becomes impossible to ignore, or where doing what seems right carries a substantial personal cost.
The character doesn’t have to agree with me. In fact, the story may be more interesting when he doesn’t.
I want to understand how he thinks, why he believes what he believes, and what he does when life refuses to cooperate with those beliefs.
My current novel in progress, The Boaz Slaughterhouse, has grown from questions about animals, suffering, responsibility, and the things human beings have learned to regard as ordinary.
I don’t yet know everything the story will reveal.
But I know why I’m writing it.
There are questions I haven’t finished asking.
And for me, writing novels is one way to keep asking them.
