I will no longer be publishing new work at Notes from the Story Desk.
My writing continues at The Pencil-Driven Life, where I am bringing together my novels, reflections, writing practice, Story Coaching, and the continuing work of learning to live with greater honesty and attention.
You can find me here: http://www.thepencildrivenlife.com.
Thank you for subscribing, reading, and spending time with me at the Story Desk. I hope you will join me at this new home.
People sometimes ask why I keep returning to Boaz.
After all, there are countless small towns across America. Why this one?
The easy answer is that Boaz is familiar. I know its streets, its schools, its churches, its neighborhoods, and the rhythms of everyday life. But familiarity has never been enough reason to write a novel.
The real reason lies deeper.
Every novel I have written begins with a question that has very little to do with plot.
It begins when I wonder what story someone has been living without ever realizing it.
Not the story everyone else sees.
The quieter one beneath it.
A person may think they are protecting their family, when in reality they are protecting a secret that has shaped generations.
Someone may believe they are defending their faith, when they are actually defending an identity they inherited long before they were old enough to question it.
Another may spend years chasing success only to discover they have been pursuing someone else’s definition of a life well lived.
Those are the stories that interest me.
The mystery in my novels is rarely the deepest mystery.
The greater mystery is how ordinary people become so accustomed to the stories surrounding them that they no longer recognize those stories at all.
That is why Boaz matters.
Not because it is unique.
Because it is ordinary.
Small towns have a way of preserving stories. Families hand them down. Churches reinforce them. Schools repeat them. Businesses become part of them. Before long, an entire community begins to assume that life simply works this way because it always has.
Of course, this isn’t unique to small towns.
It happens everywhere.
Boaz simply allows me to watch it up close.
As a novelist, I’m less interested in proving someone wrong than in asking a quieter question:
Who told you this was the only story you could live?
Sometimes the answer changes everything.
I’ve come to realize that this question has quietly followed me through every Boaz novel. The crimes, the secrets, the courtroom testimony, the church conflicts, the family histories—those are not the destination. They are the circumstances that force people to stop long enough to see themselves more honestly.
When that happens, the story changes.
Not because someone else rewrites it.
Because the character finally recognizes the story they have been living all along.
Perhaps that’s why I keep returning to Boaz.
Not because it is a place filled with extraordinary people.
But because it is filled with ordinary people whose lives matter.
People very much like us.
And I suspect that’s why stories matter in the first place.
A good novel doesn’t simply entertain us for a few hours.
It quietly interrupts the story we’re already living.
When we close the book, we return to our own lives carrying a different question than the one we had when we began.
Sometimes that question stays with us.
Sometimes it changes us.
And occasionally, it helps us recognize the story beneath the story.
One of the most common problems in a beginning novel has nothing to do with grammar, dialogue, or point of view. The problem is often simpler than that: the main character does not seem to want anything.
The writer may know the character’s history, personality, fears, family, occupation, and childhood. The character may even be interesting. But interesting is not the same as compelling, because readers are most naturally drawn to people who are moving toward something.
That “something” does not have to be dramatic. A detective may want to solve a murder. A widow may want one peaceful day without everyone telling her how to grieve. A teenage boy may want to impress his father. An older man may want to understand something that happened forty years ago. A young woman may want to leave town. A pastor may want to keep his church together. A child may simply want someone to believe him.
The desires differ in size, but they all accomplish the same thing: they give the story direction because they give the character direction.
Movement is what pulls the reader from one page to the next.
Beginning novelists sometimes believe conflict alone creates story. Conflict is certainly important, but conflict only matters because it interferes with something the character wants.
Imagine reading about a man whose tire goes flat. That is not automatically interesting. Now imagine the same man is driving to the hospital because his daughter has been injured. The flat tire has not changed, but the desire has. Suddenly, the obstacle carries weight because the goal carries weight.
That relationship between desire and obstacle sits near the heart of storytelling. When I work with writers, I often ask a simple question: What does this character want right now?
Not eventually. Not somewhere near the end of the novel. Right now.
The answer should usually be clear. If the writer cannot answer that question, the reader probably cannot either.
Sometimes the answer I hear is broad: “He wants to be happy,” “She wants to find herself,” or “He wants a better life.” Those answers may be true, but they are usually too vague to guide a scene. Readers cannot watch someone “find himself.” They can watch him decide whether to sign divorce papers. They can watch him choose whether to tell the sheriff what he knows. They can watch him knock on a door he has avoided for twenty years.
Specific desire creates specific scenes. General desire often produces general writing.
One of the pleasures of writing a novel is that desire changes. What a character wants in Chapter Two is rarely what he wants in Chapter Twenty. Sometimes he discovers that he has been chasing the wrong thing. Sometimes he loses what he thought mattered most. Sometimes he finally wants the one thing he spent the whole novel avoiding.
That change is part of character growth. But growth cannot happen if the character begins by drifting.
Too many beginning novels open with characters simply living their lives. They wake up, go to work, remember childhood, think about their marriage, notice the weather, and perhaps have a long conversation over coffee. The writing may be graceful, but nothing is pulling the pieces together.
Story begins when desire enters the room.
That does not mean every protagonist should become loud, ambitious, or larger than life. Quiet people want things too. A shy teacher may want to survive one difficult parent conference. An elderly woman may want to keep her home. A grieving husband may want one honest conversation with his son. A preacher may want to finish Sunday’s sermon without admitting he no longer believes every word.
The size of the desire matters much less than its reality. Readers recognize genuine desire because they know what it feels like to want something themselves.
Another mistake beginning writers sometimes make is confusing biography with motivation. Knowing where your character grew up can be useful. Knowing what his father did for a living may deepen the story. Knowing his favorite baseball team may add texture. But none of those facts automatically create movement.
The question remains: What does he want today? What decision is in front of him? What obstacle stands in the way? Why can he not simply walk away?
Those questions move a novel forward.
As a story coach, I have found that many manuscripts become stronger when the writer stops asking, “What happens next?” and begins asking, “What does my character want next?”
That small shift can change almost everything. Scenes become easier to build. Dialogue becomes more focused. Conflict becomes more natural. Endings become more satisfying. The story begins to organize itself around human desire instead of random events.
Desire also gives meaning to restraint. A character may say very little, but the scene can still carry tremendous tension if the reader understands what the character wants and why he cannot ask for it directly. Silence only becomes powerful when something is pressing against it.
The same is true of hesitation. A pause matters when the reader knows what choice the character is afraid to make. A closed door matters when someone desperately wants to open it. A family dinner matters when one person has arrived determined to tell the truth and everyone else is determined to preserve the peace.
The surface action may be quiet. The desire underneath is what makes it story.
This is why passive characters are difficult to follow. A passive character may be thoughtful, wounded, intelligent, observant, or sympathetic, but if he only receives events, the story begins to feel as though it is happening around him rather than through him.
That does not mean a character must always make wise or decisive choices. In fact, some of the best stories are built around people who choose badly. But even a bad choice is movement. It reveals what the character values, fears, misunderstands, or refuses to face.
A character can fail to get what he wants. He can pursue the wrong thing. He can want two incompatible things at once. He can lie to himself about what he wants. Any of those possibilities can create a strong novel.
What weakens the story is not failure.
It is absence.
If the character wants nothing clearly enough to act, resist, avoid, pursue, or choose, the reader has little reason to lean forward.
If your manuscript feels as though it is wandering, do not begin by rewriting every sentence. Begin with the protagonist. Ask what this person wants today, in this chapter, in this scene, and in this moment.
Then ask what stands in the way.
The answer may change your next chapter. It may also reveal why the earlier ones never quite came alive.
If you want to understand the Boaz novels, pay attention to what people do with secrets.
Not only the secrets themselves.
What matters most is the pressure they create.
That is one of the forces moving through The Boaz Secrets. A secret in that world is not simply hidden information waiting to be revealed near the end of the story. It is something that has already shaped lives before the reader arrives. It has affected what people say, what they avoid, whom they trust, whom they fear, and which version of the past they have learned to live with.
That kind of secret does not sit quietly.
It works on people.
It changes rooms.
It changes families.
It changes churches.
It changes the public story a town tells about itself.
That is the kind of pressure I keep returning to in the Boaz novels. A secret may begin with one event, one choice, one sin, one crime, one betrayal, one lie, or one moment of cowardice. But in a small town, the thing hidden rarely belongs to only one person for long.
Other people become involved.
Some know the truth.
Some suspect it.
Some repeat a safer version.
Some decide it is better not to ask.
Some benefit from the silence.
Some pay for it.
That is where story begins to deepen.
A secret may give a novel suspense, but the pressure of the secret gives it weight. The reader wants to know what happened, of course. But the more important question may be this:
What has this hidden thing done to the people who kept living around it?
That question matters in The Boaz Secrets. It also matters in The Boaz Safecracker, though in a different way. In that novel, Jimmy Fred Martin opens an old safe and discovers more than valuables. He finds a letter that points toward a hidden moral history. The letter does not explain everything. It does not solve the story. It simply reveals that someone’s past has been locked away, preserved, and protected by silence.
That is enough.
In fiction, a small object can carry a great deal of pressure. A letter. A photograph. A newspaper clipping. A key. A Bible. A safe. A family story repeated so often that nobody remembers who first edited it.
The object matters because it points beyond itself.
It tells the reader there is another story underneath the visible one.
That is often how the Boaz novels work. The public story is rarely the whole story. A family may have one version. A church may have another. A town may preserve the version that protects the people it has already decided to respect. But underneath those public versions are older wounds, private bargains, quiet fears, and truths that did not disappear simply because no one said them aloud.
A small town intensifies this.
In a larger place, a person may be able to escape a secret by moving across town, changing circles, changing churches, changing schools, changing names, or disappearing into the crowd. But fictional Boaz does not offer that kind of distance. People overlap. Families are connected by marriage, church, school, work, property, memory, and old obligation.
Someone knows your parents.
Someone remembers your grandparents.
Someone knows where you sat in church.
Someone remembers who your friends were in high school.
Someone remembers what happened, or thinks he does.
That closeness can be beautiful. It can create belonging. It can create loyalty. It can feed the grieving, surround the sick, help the struggling, and keep people from disappearing.
But closeness can also trap the truth.
When a secret threatens the accepted version of a family, a church, or a respected person, the town may not need an official agreement to protect it. Silence can become communal without ever being voted on. People learn what not to ask. They learn which names make the room change. They learn which old event is always described too quickly.
That is pressure.
Not action in the obvious sense.
Pressure.
It is present when a character pauses before answering a simple question. It is present when a mother changes the subject. It is present when a pastor’s language becomes too smooth. It is present when a family meal feels normal on the surface but charged underneath. It is present when everyone knows a story has missing pieces, but no one wants the responsibility of finding them.
Those are the moments I am drawn to as a novelist.
A secret is not only a plot device. It is a test of character.
What will a person do to keep it hidden?
What will a person risk to bring it into the light?
Who is protected by silence?
Who is punished by it?
Who gets to call secrecy “mercy”?
Who gets to call exposure “truth”?
In the Boaz novels, those questions often move through families and churches because those are two of the places where people learn what matters, what is forgivable, what is shameful, and what must be defended. A church can offer real comfort. A family can offer real love. But both can also teach people to protect a version of the past that is easier to live with than the truth.
That does not make every character a villain.
It makes the story human.
Most people do not think of themselves as protecting lies. They think they are protecting peace. Protecting a child. Protecting a mother. Protecting the dead. Protecting the church. Protecting a family name. Protecting someone from pain.
Sometimes that may even be partly true.
But the secret still works on the living.
That is where the moral complication comes from. A person can keep a secret out of love and still cause harm. A person can tell the truth and still damage someone innocent. A town can think it is preserving decency while actually preserving power. A church can speak of forgiveness while avoiding accountability. A family can call silence loyalty because the other word would be fear.
This is the kind of pressure I hope readers feel when they enter the Boaz novels.
Not just the question of what happened.
The question of what what happened has been doing ever since.
That is why secrets matter in these stories. They bend lives. They distort memory. They assign roles. They decide who is believed and who is dismissed. They teach people how to behave in rooms where everyone knows more than they are saying.
In The Boaz Secrets, the title itself points toward that buried pressure. In The Boaz Safecracker, the safe makes the idea physical. But the concern reaches beyond any one book. Again and again, the Boaz novels return to the same kind of fictional territory: a town where the past is not gone, faith is not simple, family is not always safe, and memory is never neutral.
That may sound dark, but I do not think of these novels as bleak.
I think of them as attentive.
They pay attention to the pressure ordinary people live under. They pay attention to how long the past can remain active. They pay attention to the difference between a secret being hidden and a secret being harmless.
Those are not the same thing.
A hidden secret may still govern a life.
It may still decide who gets invited, who gets blamed, who gets pitied, who gets protected, and who is left carrying shame that never belonged to them.
That is why the pressure has to be felt before the secret is fully revealed. If the secret only surprises the reader, it may create a twist. But if the secret has already shaped the characters, then its revelation does more than surprise.
It explains the weather they have been living in.
That is what I want from the Boaz novels.
I want readers to feel that the town has weather. Not merely scenery. Not merely names and streets and churches and houses. Weather. The kind created by memory, belief, silence, affection, judgment, and fear.
A secret changes that weather.
Sometimes it darkens it.
Sometimes it thickens it.
Sometimes it waits for years until someone finally asks the question everyone else learned to avoid.
Then the story begins to speak.
A novelist can be too close to the story to see what is missing.
That is not a weakness.
It is part of the work.
When you have lived with a story for months or years, you know more than the page knows. You know what the character meant to say. You know why the family is strained. You know what happened ten years before chapter one. You know the secret, the grief, the betrayal, the fear, the old wound, and the ending you hope the reader will feel.
But the reader does not know all of that.
The reader only has the page.
That difference creates one of the most common manuscript problems for beginning novelists. The writer feels the story’s pressure, but the reader does not yet feel it strongly enough.
The writer knows what is at stake.
The reader may still be waiting to find out.
The writer knows why a conversation matters.
The reader may experience it as pleasant but unnecessary.
The writer knows why a memory is painful.
The reader may see only backstory.
The writer knows why a character hesitates.
The reader may simply think the scene is moving slowly.
This is where outside eyes can help.
A thoughtful outside reader does not bring the writer’s private knowledge to the manuscript. That reader enters the story through the actual words, scenes, choices, and consequences on the page. This makes the reader less informed in one sense, but more useful in another.
The reader can feel where the pressure drops.
The writer may not notice because the pressure is still alive in his own mind.
Story pressure is what makes a reader continue.
It may come from danger, desire, secrecy, conflict, grief, shame, hope, guilt, love, fear, or a question that has not yet been answered. It does not have to be loud. A quiet scene can carry tremendous pressure if the reader understands what might change, what might be lost, or what can no longer remain hidden.
But if the pressure is not on the page, the reader cannot feel it.
That is the hard truth.
The writer may have imagined a powerful story. The writer may understand the emotional history of every character. The writer may have built an entire world behind the scenes. But a novel is not judged by what the writer knows. It is experienced through what the reader can perceive.
This does not mean every secret must be explained early.
It does not mean every scene must announce its purpose.
It does not mean mystery should be removed.
Mystery is valuable.
Confusion is not.
There is a difference between a reader wondering and a reader drifting.
Wondering pulls the reader forward.
Drifting lets the reader go.
A reader who wonders is asking, “What happened?” or “What will she do?” or “Why did he lie?” or “What is this family avoiding?” or “How will this choice change everything?”
A reader who drifts is asking something else: “Why am I reading this scene?”
That second question is dangerous.
It may appear in the middle of a well-written chapter. The prose may be clean. The setting may be vivid. The dialogue may sound natural. The character may have an interesting inner life. But if the scene does not create, reveal, increase, or turn pressure, the reader may begin to feel unmoored.
The writer may not see it because the writer is emotionally invested in the material.
That family meal may be based on memory.
That porch conversation may contain beautiful details.
That flashback may explain something the writer cares deeply about.
That quiet chapter may feel necessary because the writer knows what it means.
But the story question remains: what is this doing for the reader now?
Outside eyes can ask that without the same attachment.
Not cruelly.
Not dismissively.
Not as someone trying to take over the book.
A good story coach or careful reader does not say, “This does not matter,” simply because a scene is quiet. The better question is, “How can we make the reader feel why this matters?”
Sometimes the answer is simple.
Move the scene later.
Cut the first three paragraphs.
Let the character want something more clearly.
Bring the conflict closer to the surface.
Let the memory appear after the reader has a reason to need it.
End the chapter before the explanation drains the tension.
Make the consequence sharper.
Clarify what changes.
Other times, the answer is deeper.
The story may not yet have a strong enough central pressure. The protagonist may be observing more than acting. A secret may be too vague. A relationship may be emotionally important to the writer but underdeveloped on the page. The middle may contain events without escalation. The ending may be powerful in the writer’s imagination but not yet earned by the scenes that precede it.
These are not sentence-level problems.
They are story problems.
That is why a manuscript can contain good writing and still feel loose.
The beginning novelist may respond by polishing sentences. That is understandable. Sentences are visible. They can be fixed one by one. A stronger verb can be chosen. A repeated word can be removed. A paragraph can be tightened.
Those things matter.
But polishing a low-pressure scene does not solve the pressure problem.
It may only make the wandering more graceful.
Story coaching looks beneath the polish. It asks how the manuscript is working as a story. What does the protagonist want? What stands in the way? What changes from scene to scene? Where does the pressure increase? Where does the reader begin to care? Where does the story slow down because information has replaced movement?
This kind of attention can be uncomfortable.
Most writers want encouragement, and encouragement matters. A beginning novelist needs someone to notice what is alive in the manuscript. The strong character. The promising premise. The vivid setting. The scene that already works. The line that reveals voice. The emotional truth waiting underneath the rough draft.
But encouragement alone is not enough.
A writer also needs clarity.
Not vague criticism.
Not “I liked it” or “I got bored.”
Clarity.
This is where I felt pressure.
This is where I lost it.
This is where I wanted to know more.
This is where I did not yet understand what was at stake.
This is where the character seemed to avoid the choice the story needed.
This is where the scene ended before it changed anything.
This is where the manuscript may be trying to become something stronger than the current draft allows.
That kind of feedback can help a writer see the story again.
A manuscript often becomes overwhelming because the writer is trying to fix everything at once. Grammar. Voice. Plot. Character. Timeline. Theme. Pacing. Backstory. Dialogue. Ending. All of it crowds into the room.
Outside eyes can help separate the problems.
This is a sentence issue.
This is a scene issue.
This is a structure issue.
This is a character-motivation issue.
This is a pressure issue.
That separation can bring relief. Not because the work disappears, but because the work becomes visible. A visible problem can be addressed. A vague sense that “something is wrong” can paralyze a writer for months.
Story pressure is especially important because it connects so many parts of the novel.
When pressure is missing, scenes may feel flat.
When pressure is unclear, characters may feel passive.
When pressure does not increase, the middle may sag.
When pressure is not tied to consequence, the ending may feel unearned.
When pressure is strong, even quiet scenes can hold a reader.
That is why outside eyes matter.
The writer has lived inside the story.
The reader is trying to enter it.
Those are different positions.
A good outside reader stands near the doorway and says, “Here is where I came in easily. Here is where I hesitated. Here is where the path disappeared. Here is where I wanted to keep going.”
That is useful information.
It does not mean the reader owns the story.
It does not mean the writer must obey every suggestion.
It means the writer now has a clearer view of the distance between the imagined novel and the experienced novel.
That distance is where revision begins.
A beginning novelist does not need to be ashamed of needing outside eyes. Every serious writer eventually needs some form of response. Not because the writer lacks talent, but because story lives in the exchange between page and reader.
You cannot fully test that exchange alone.
You can draft alone.
You can revise alone.
You can sit with the story for as long as needed.
But at some point, the question becomes:
Is the pressure I feel actually reaching the reader?
That is a question worth asking.
And sometimes, the answer becomes clearer when another set of eyes enters the room.
I have been rereading some of my earlier Boaz novels.
That is not as simple as it sounds.
A reader can open a novel and enter the story. A writer brings more baggage to the page. I see the story, but I also see the sentences. I see what I was trying to do. I see what I did not yet know how to do. I see places where I would revise, tighten, cut, or simply trust the scene more.
Recently, I reread The Boaz Secrets.
I loved the story again.
That surprised me a little because I also noticed problems. Some grammar issues bothered me. A few sentences needed more care. There were places where the prose could have moved more cleanly. The editor in me did not disappear simply because the author in me wanted to enjoy the book.
But even with those flaws, the story held me.
That matters.
A few nights later, I started rereading The Boaz Safecracker. Again, I expected to notice defects first. And I did notice some. But before long, I was no longer merely inspecting the pages. I was reading.
At one point, I caught myself thinking, “This is an awesome story.”
That may sound strange coming from the author. Maybe even a little too pleased with myself. But that is not how it felt. It felt more like rediscovery. It felt like finding something alive in a room I had not entered in a while.
That is what I mean by pulse.
A novel has a pulse when it still makes you want to turn the page.
Not because every sentence is perfect. Not because the author would make every same choice again. Not because the book has escaped the need for revision. But because something in the story still moves.
A character wants something.
A question has not been answered.
A secret presses against the surface.
A scene creates trouble.
A life has been disturbed.
A reader keeps going.
That is the part of the earlier novels I am trying to pay attention to now.
It is easy, as a writer, to become embarrassed by old work. The mistakes seem obvious. The habits stand out. The repetitions announce themselves. The sentences that once seemed fine now ask for a pencil. Time can make a writer harsher toward his own pages.
Some of that harshness is useful.
It means I have learned.
But if I only see the flaws, I miss something equally important. I miss the fact that those earlier books were doing real story work. They had movement. They had pressure. They had characters carrying trouble. They had questions I wanted answered even though I already knew the plot.
That is not nothing.
A novel does not survive by polish alone.
A polished page can still be dead. A flawed page can still be alive. The best work, of course, has both life and polish. But if I had to choose the first necessity, I would choose life.
Life is what makes a reader forgive a rough edge.
Life is what makes a fictional world feel inhabited rather than arranged.
Life is what makes a person say, “I’ll read one more chapter,” when he meant to turn off the light ten minutes earlier.
Rereading The Boaz Secrets reminded me of that. I did not love it because it was flawless. I loved it because the story still had force. It still carried me into the trouble. It still made me care about what had been hidden, what had been damaged, and what might finally be brought into view.
Rereading The Boaz Safecracker gave me a similar feeling, though in a different way. That novel has a strong story engine from the beginning: an older man, a safe, a crime, an old history, and consequences he cannot fully control. But what interested me most on rereading was not only the plot. It was the feeling that the story had roots.
Some of those roots were fictional.
Some came from memory.
That is true of much of my Boaz fiction. It is not autobiography in any direct or literal sense. The names are fictional. The events are reshaped. The characters are invented. But fiction often grows from remembered pressure. A place. A fear. A tone of voice. A school hallway. A family meal. A church sentence. A moment from youth that stayed alive long after the facts became less important than the feeling.
A novelist takes those fragments and changes them.
He has to.
Life does not usually arrive in story shape. Fiction gives it shape. It compresses, rearranges, disguises, sharpens, and imagines. It takes what might have been private or scattered and turns it into scenes, choices, consequences, and characters who begin to breathe on their own.
That is why rereading earlier work can feel so strange.
You are not only meeting the old book.
You are meeting the earlier self who made it.
I can see now that I was already circling certain concerns before I had fully named them. I was drawn to hidden histories. I was drawn to the difference between what people say publicly and what they carry privately. I was drawn to the way family, belief, reputation, grief, and old loyalty can shape a person long after he thinks he has moved on.
I might describe those concerns more clearly now.
But they were already there.
That encourages me.
It means the books were not empty exercises. They were attempts to pay attention. Imperfect attempts, yes, but real ones.
A writer grows partly by learning what to change. But he also grows by learning what to honor. If I returned to these earlier novels only with a red pen, I would miss the living thing inside them. If I returned only with affection, I would miss the ways I have changed. The better posture is honesty.
The books have flaws.
The books have life.
Both things are true.
That may be worth saying because readers do not experience novels the way writers do. Most readers are not measuring every sentence against what the author might have done twenty drafts later. They are asking more human questions.
Do I care?
Am I curious?
Do I believe these people enough to follow them?
Is something at stake?
Does the world of the book feel real while I am inside it?
Will I turn the page?
Those questions matter more than a writer’s private embarrassment.
When I reread The Boaz Secrets and The Boaz Safecracker, I found myself answering yes often enough to feel grateful. Yes, I cared. Yes, I was curious. Yes, I saw flaws. But yes, the stories still moved.
That does not make them perfect.
It makes them alive.
And maybe that is the invitation I would offer to readers now. Do not come to the earlier Boaz novels expecting museum pieces or polished monuments. Come expecting stories with a pulse. Stories shaped by place, memory, trouble, secrecy, doubt, grief, belief, and the long pressure of things left unresolved.
Come for the movement.
Come for the questions.
Come for the people who are trying, sometimes badly, to live with what they know and what they have hidden from themselves.
The older I get, the more I value fiction that feels lived in. Not flawless. Not sterile. Not sanded so smooth that no human hand remains visible. I want stories that carry weather. Stories where the past is close enough to touch. Stories where ordinary people are more complicated than they first appear.
That is what I found again in these earlier novels.
I found mistakes, yes.
But I also found weather.
I found movement.
I found a pulse.
And when an earlier novel still has a pulse, the writer ought to be honest enough to feel it.
A chapter can contain good writing and still wander.
That is hard for a beginning novelist to see.
The sentences may be clean. The setting may be vivid. The characters may sound real. The backstory may be interesting. The dialogue may even have energy. But after three or four pages, the reader may begin to feel something the writer did not intend.
The chapter is moving, but the story is not.
That difference matters.
A novel is not simply a collection of well-written pages. It is a chain of pressure, choice, consequence, discovery, and change. A chapter may slow down. It may breathe. It may contain quiet moments. It does not have to be loud or dramatic on every page.
But it does need direction.
One of the simplest ways to find that direction is to ask a scene question.
Not a theme question.
Not a message question.
Not “What am I trying to say about life?”
A scene question is smaller and more practical:
What is this scene making the reader want to know?
That question can save a chapter from wandering.
If the reader is not being invited to wonder about anything, the scene may become static. The writer may be explaining, describing, remembering, or arranging information, but the story may not be applying pressure.
The scene question gives the reader a reason to keep going.
Will she tell the truth?
Will he open the letter?
Will the son confront his father?
Will the detective notice the contradiction?
Will the widow admit what she knows?
Will the character stay silent when silence now has a cost?
Will the old friend betray him?
Will the protagonist make the wrong choice for understandable reasons?
These questions do not have to be stated directly. In fact, they usually work better when they are felt rather than announced. But somewhere beneath the scene, the question should be alive.
A reader keeps reading because something is unresolved.
That unresolved thing may be external. A crime. A threat. A deadline. A missing person. A secret document. A decision that must be made before morning.
Or it may be internal. Shame. doubt. grief. resentment. desire. fear. loyalty. guilt. A character may be sitting at a kitchen table saying very little, and the scene may still carry strong pressure if the reader senses the real question:
Will she finally say what this family has avoided for twenty years?
That is story movement.
Movement does not always mean action. Movement means change under pressure.
A scene without a question often becomes a container for material the writer likes. A memory. A room. A conversation. A description of town history. A character’s thoughts. A piece of research. A clever exchange. A paragraph the writer does not want to cut.
Any of those things may belong in the novel.
But they do not belong merely because they are well written.
They belong if they serve the pressure of the story.
This is where many chapters begin to wander. The writer knows a great deal about the character, the family, the town, the past, or the situation, and tries to place too much of that knowledge on the page before the reader has a reason to need it.
Information by itself rarely creates momentum.
Pressure creates momentum.
A scene question helps the writer decide which information the reader needs now and which information can wait.
Suppose a character returns to his hometown after thirty years away. The writer may want to describe the old streets, the changed storefronts, the high school, the church, the cemetery, the family house, and the memory of leaving town.
All of that may matter.
But the scene will be stronger if the writer first knows the pressure.
Why has he returned?
What does he want in this moment?
What is he afraid of finding?
Who does he not want to see?
What question should the reader be carrying as he drives into town?
If the scene question is, “Will he go inside the house where his brother died?” then the details of town should be filtered through that pressure. The house matters. The street matters. The church may matter if it intensifies the memory. The old grocery store may not matter yet, unless it connects to the question alive in the scene.
The question does not narrow the story in a bad way.
It focuses it.
Without the question, the chapter may become a tour.
With the question, the chapter becomes a scene.
This is one of the most useful distinctions a novelist can learn. A scene is not just a location where characters appear. A scene is a unit of story pressure. Something is wanted. Something resists. Something changes, even if the change is small.
The scene question helps the writer find that pressure.
A scene question might be obvious:
Will the safe open?
Will the witness identify the killer?
Will the protagonist escape the burning house?
But it can also be subtle:
Will the daughter admit she no longer believes what her family believes?
Will the old man recognize that his anger is grief?
Will the pastor avoid the one question he cannot answer?
Will the mother protect the family story or tell the truth?
Will the character notice the detail that changes everything?
In quieter fiction, the scene question may be emotional or moral rather than physical. But it still needs to exist.
The reader may not consciously name it. Most readers do not stop and say, “Ah, the scene question is functioning well.” They simply feel pulled forward. They sense that something is at stake. They understand that the conversation, memory, object, or silence matters because it is pressing against an unresolved question.
That feeling is one of the novelist’s most important tools.
A scene question also helps with endings.
If a chapter wanders, it often has trouble ending. The writer keeps circling, adding thoughts, explaining the moment, restating the meaning, or drifting into another topic because there is no clear turn. The chapter stops only because the writer decides it is long enough.
But if the scene has a question, the ending can do real work.
The answer may be yes.
The answer may be no.
The answer may be not yet.
The answer may be worse than the character expected.
The answer may create a new question.
That last possibility is especially powerful. A scene can end by resolving one question and opening another. The safe opens, but inside is a letter. The conversation ends, but now the character knows her father lied. The witness refuses to talk, but his refusal reveals fear. The protagonist gets what he wanted, but the cost is higher than he imagined.
That is how scenes connect.
One pressure leads to another.
One question opens the next.
This does not mean a novelist should reduce every chapter to a mechanical formula. Fiction needs mystery, texture, rhythm, atmosphere, surprise, and room for discovery. But discovery still benefits from direction. A writer can leave space for life on the page without letting the scene dissolve into shapelessness.
The scene question is not a cage.
It is a compass.
When a chapter feels dull, ask:
What is the reader waiting to learn?
When a scene feels busy but not alive, ask:
What pressure is operating here?
When a conversation feels realistic but flat, ask:
What does someone want and what happens if they do not get it?
When a chapter refuses to end, ask:
What question has this scene answered, complicated, or replaced?
These questions do not solve every problem, but they usually reveal the next useful problem.
That is often enough.
A beginning novelist does not need to master everything at once. But learning to ask one clear scene question can change the way a manuscript feels. The work becomes less like filling pages and more like building movement.
A chapter does not have to shout.
It does not have to rush.
It does not have to explain itself.
But it does need to make the reader lean forward.
The scene question is often what makes that happen.
In The Boaz Safecracker, a man opens an old safe and finds more than coins and jewelry.
That is the moment that still interests me.
The safe itself matters. It is old, heavy, hidden, and difficult to move. It belongs to a house with history, a house that has passed from one generation to another, carrying with it the weight of former owners, former stories, and former silences.
But the real discovery is not the money.
It is a letter.
A short letter. A strange letter. A letter preserved for decades. A letter written to a woman named Rebecca Rawlins and signed by a former pastor.
“Your sins are forgiven and your secret is safe with me.”
That sentence does what a good fictional object should do. It opens a door.
A reader does not yet know the secret. The character does not yet know the secret. But the sentence carries pressure. It suggests a past event, a private wound, a religious authority, a moral judgment, and a promise of silence. It also raises the question that almost always matters in the Boaz novels:
What has this town agreed not to say?
That question appears in different forms throughout my fiction.
Sometimes it is tied to a crime. Sometimes to a family. Sometimes to a church. Sometimes to an old rumor, a death, a disappearance, a betrayal, or a version of the past that respectable people have learned to repeat because the real version would cost too much.
Small-town fiction often depends on place, but place is not merely scenery.
In the Boaz novels, the town is not just where the story happens. It is one of the forces acting on the story. Boaz remembers. Boaz watches. Boaz blesses and judges. Boaz feeds the grieving and whispers about them afterward. Boaz protects some people and exposes others. Boaz can make a person feel known and trapped at the same time.
That double nature matters to me.
A small town can be loving. It can also be merciless. It can know your parents, your grandparents, your church, your reputation, your mistakes, and your place in the invisible order of things. It can hold memory with tenderness. It can also hold memory like evidence.
A secret in a place like that rarely belongs to one person.
That is why the letter in the safe matters. It is addressed to Rebecca, but it implicates more than Rebecca. It suggests a pastor who knew something. It suggests a church culture where sin, forgiveness, reputation, and control may have been tangled together. It suggests that whatever happened did not simply disappear because someone put it behind a locked door.
Locked doors are useful in fiction.
So are safes.
A safe says there is something worth protecting. It also says there is something worth hiding. The same object can hold treasure, evidence, guilt, inheritance, history, and fear. It can be practical and symbolic at the same time. A person may lock away coins, deeds, jewelry, letters, photographs, or documents. But underneath the physical contents is the deeper question:
Why did this have to be hidden?
That question is one of the engines of The Boaz Safecracker.
Jimmy Fred Martin begins with a criminal act. He is not innocent. He is not standing outside the trouble as a pure observer. He enters the house. He opens the safe. He takes what is not his. But fiction often becomes most interesting when a morally compromised character uncovers a deeper moral problem.
He does wrong and discovers wrong.
He steals valuables and finds a secret.
He opens a safe and exposes a past.
That does not excuse him. It complicates him.
I am drawn to that kind of complication because real people are rarely as neat as the stories they tell about themselves. A person can be guilty and perceptive. Respectable and dishonest. Kind and resentful. Faithful and afraid. Devout and controlling. Injured and dangerous. A small town can produce all of these contradictions because it gives people so many roles to perform.
Church member.
Parent.
Pastor.
Businessman.
Coach.
Widow.
Deacon.
Good family.
Troubled family.
Insider.
Outsider.
Believer.
Backslider.
Once those roles harden, it becomes difficult for the truth to move freely. People begin protecting not only themselves, but the version of the town they need to preserve. They protect the church. They protect the family name. They protect the memory of the dead. They protect the story that has already been told.
But buried things do not stop exerting pressure.
They wait.
That may be the central fact of the Boaz world. The past waits. It waits in houses, churches, files, court records, family stories, old newspaper clippings, yearbooks, photographs, and rooms no one has entered in years. It waits inside people too. A comment from high school. A sermon. A humiliation. A prayer. A death. A warning. A secret kept too long.
Then one day someone opens the wrong door.
Or the right one.
That is what I like about the letter in the safe. It does not explain everything. It does not solve the story. It does not give the reader a neat answer. It simply announces that a hidden moral history exists.
Someone sinned.
Someone forgave.
Someone promised secrecy.
Someone kept the letter.
And decades later, someone else found it.
That is enough to pull me forward.
I do not want fiction that merely asks, “What happened?” I want fiction that also asks, “What did what happened do to the people who had to keep living afterward?”
What did the secret do to Rebecca?
What did it do to the pastor who knew?
What did it do to the church?
What did it do to the town?
What does it do when forgiveness becomes part of a secret arrangement?
What does it do when a person’s life is shaped by something almost no one is allowed to name?
These are the questions that make a story larger than its plot.
The safecracking gives The Boaz Safecracker movement. The letter gives it depth. One pulls the reader into the immediate danger. The other opens the old wound underneath.
That is often how the Boaz novels work.
A crime may start the story, but the deeper mystery is usually moral. A secret may drive the plot, but the real pressure comes from the lives shaped around it. A town may appear ordinary, even familiar, but under the surface there are old bargains, old silences, old versions of truth that no longer hold.
The letter in the safe is small.
One sheet of paper.
A few words.
But in fiction, a small object can carry a whole world.
That is what I hope readers feel when they enter these novels. Not just suspense. Not just curiosity. Not just the desire to know who did what.
I hope they feel the pressure of a place where memory is never neutral, where faith can comfort and conceal, where families know more than they say, and where the past keeps waiting for someone to turn the dial.
The safe opens.
The letter appears.
And the town begins to speak.
A novel can feel too big before you write it.
It can also feel too big after you have written part of it.
That may be even more discouraging.
Before the draft begins, the size of the story can still feel exciting. You have characters, possibilities, settings, secrets, turns, memories, motives, and maybe even an ending that pulls you forward. The unwritten novel can feel large in the best sense. It has room. It has mystery. It has promise.
But once you begin writing, the size changes.
Now the novel is not only an idea. It is pages. Scenes. Chapters. Problems. Gaps. Repetitions. Timelines. Characters who do not yet know what they want. Plot turns that seemed clear until you had to put them into words. A middle that suddenly feels like a swamp. An ending that still glows in the distance but no longer seems easy to reach.
This is often the point where a beginning novelist starts to doubt the whole project.
The story feels too big.
Too many things are happening. Too many characters are asking for attention. Too many scenes seem necessary. Too many questions remain unanswered. The writer may begin to think the problem is talent, discipline, or imagination.
Sometimes the problem is simpler than that.
The writer is trying to hold the entire novel at once.
No one can do that very well.
A novel is too large to carry in the mind as one thing. Even experienced writers can become overwhelmed if they try to think about the whole manuscript every time they sit down to work. The beginning, middle, ending, character arcs, backstory, theme, pacing, setting, conflict, and revision problems all crowd into the room at the same time.
No wonder the writer freezes.
The better question is not, “How do I solve the whole novel?”
The better question is, “What is the next useful piece of work?”
That shift matters.
A novel becomes less overwhelming when you stop treating it as one giant burden and begin breaking it into smaller units of attention. A scene. A sequence. A character decision. A missing pressure point. A chapter that needs to end with more consequence. A conversation that needs conflict instead of explanation. A protagonist who needs a clearer want.
Small questions do not make the work small.
They make the work possible.
One of the most useful places to begin is with scenes. Not because scenes solve every problem, but because scenes give you a practical unit of story. A scene has a job. Something should happen. Someone should want something. Some pressure should be present. Something should change, even if the change is small.
When a manuscript feels too big, ask about one scene.
Who is the point-of-view character?
What does that character want right now?
What stands in the way?
What changes by the end?
Why does the reader need this scene?
If those questions cannot be answered, the scene may not yet be doing enough story work. That does not mean it should automatically be cut. It may mean the scene needs a stronger purpose, sharper conflict, or a clearer consequence.
A wandering novel is often made of wandering scenes.
But the opposite is also true.
A stronger novel is often built by strengthening one scene at a time.
Another useful step is to identify the central pressure of the story. Not the theme in abstract language. Not the message. Not the entire backstory. The pressure.
What is pushing the story forward?
A secret? A crime? A deadline? A family wound? A moral choice? A relationship under strain? A danger that cannot be ignored? A question the protagonist must finally answer?
If you cannot name the central pressure, the novel may keep expanding in every direction. Every subplot will seem equally important. Every character will seem entitled to more space. Every memory will demand a chapter. The book will grow, but it may not deepen.
Pressure gives the novel shape.
It tells the writer what belongs near the center and what belongs farther away.
That does not mean every page must be loud or dramatic. Some of the best scenes are quiet. But even quiet scenes need pressure beneath them. A silence can have pressure. A family meal can have pressure. A walk, a phone call, a church service, a courtroom hallway, or a kitchen-table conversation can have pressure if something is at stake.
The novelist’s job is to know what that pressure is.
A third step is to separate discovery from decision.
In the early stages of writing, you may need to discover more than you decide. You may write scenes that teach you about a character. You may follow a subplot farther than it needs to go. You may let a minor character talk too much because, for a while, you are learning why that person is in the story.
That is not wasted work.
But eventually discovery must give way to decision.
At some point, the novelist has to ask: What is this book really about? Whose story is this? What changes? What must be kept? What must be compressed? What must be removed because it belongs to some other book?
This is where many beginning novelists struggle. They feel disloyal when they cut material. They remember how much effort went into a scene. They like a character who no longer serves the story. They keep a chapter because it contains a sentence they love.
But a novel does not become stronger because the writer keeps everything.
It becomes stronger because the writer learns what the story needs.
That learning takes time.
If your novel still feels too big, do not assume that means it has failed. It may mean you are standing at the edge of revision. It may mean you have gathered more material than the final book can hold. It may mean you now need structure, not more inspiration.
Structure is not the enemy of imagination.
Structure is what allows imagination to become readable.
A manuscript needs shape. It needs movement. It needs cause and effect. It needs scenes that do more than display information. It needs characters who act under pressure. It needs an ending that grows out of what came before, not one that simply arrives because the writer is tired.
The beginning novelist does not have to solve all of this at once.
Start smaller.
Name the central pressure.
Look at one scene.
Ask what changes.
Notice what repeats.
Find the places where explanation has replaced action.
Look for the character who has the most to lose.
Then do the next useful piece of work.
That may not sound grand enough for the dream of writing a novel. But most novels are not finished by grand gestures. They are finished by returning to the work, reducing the fog, and making one honest decision after another.
A novel feels too big when it has no visible path.
The path appears one scene at a time.
A few nights ago, I started rereading The Boaz Safecracker.
I did not begin with a formal plan. I was not preparing a lecture on the Boaz novels. I was not trying to analyze my own work as a story coach or editor. I was simply reading.
Then somewhere in the early pages, I caught myself thinking, “This is an awesome story.”
That may sound strange coming from the author. It may even sound self-congratulatory. But that is not how it felt. It felt more like surprise. Or rediscovery. Or maybe the odd experience of meeting an earlier version of myself who had managed to leave something alive on the page.
The novel begins with Jimmy Fred Martin, a sixty-four-year-old man who is about to crack his first safe.
That alone creates a question. Why now? Why this man? Why this safe? Why has a person who has lived most of his life as a lawyer, husband, insurance agent, son, church member, and respectable Boaz citizen suddenly crossed a line he cannot uncross?
But the safe is only the doorway.
Behind it is Boaz. Behind it is memory. Behind it is high school, church, family, football, old resentments, inherited belief, grief, and the peculiar power of secrets that have waited decades for someone to disturb them.
That is what pulled me back in.
The safecracking plot gives the novel movement, but the deeper pressure comes from what Jimmy Fred has carried for years. He is not merely stealing coins and jewelry. He is opening locked compartments in his own life. He is returning to old rooms. He is revisiting old voices. He is remembering what shaped him before he knew he was being shaped.
That is one of the reasons the book surprised me as I reread it.
Some fiction is invented almost entirely from the outside. A writer imagines a crime, a town, a family, a betrayal, and builds from there. But some fiction grows out of lived memory, even when the story itself is fictional. Names change. Events are reshaped. People become characters. Places are altered. Time is compressed. But the emotional truth comes from somewhere real.
The Boaz Safecracker has that kind of memory in it.
I felt it as I reread. High school days. The old pressure of belonging. Football. Church. Family meals. The sense that certain beliefs were not merely taught, but absorbed. The way a small town can know your name before it knows you. The way a boy can grow up inside a world and only later begin to understand how completely that world formed his imagination.
The novel is fiction.
But fiction is not always made from nothing.
Sometimes it is made from old weather.
That is what I kept feeling as I turned the pages. The story was not simply asking what happens when an older man becomes a safecracker. It was asking what happens when a man returns to the locked rooms of his own past.
Jimmy Fred’s grandfather worked for Mosler Safe Company. The old journals, the safe combinations, the knowledge passed from one generation to another — all of that gives the novel its machinery. But the machinery is not the whole story. The safe becomes a metaphor without ever needing to announce itself as one.
People are safes too.
Families have combinations.
Churches have locked rooms.
Small towns keep things behind walls.
Respectable people hide valuables, evidence, shame, letters, grudges, and fears. Sometimes they hide them so well that even they forget what is there. Sometimes they remember, but pretend they do not.
That is where the Boaz novels live.
Not in crime alone, and not in nostalgia alone, but in the pressure between what is publicly known and privately carried.
As I reread The Boaz Safecracker, I was reminded how much of my fiction returns to that pressure. A person does something wrong, but the wrong act is only part of the story. Beneath it are older motives. Old humiliations. Old certainties. Old sermons. Old locker rooms. Old family tables. Old comments that lodged somewhere and never went away.
The past does not have to shout to remain powerful.
Sometimes it only has to wait.
That may be why the novel still grabbed me. It begins with action — a man breaking into a house on a rainy night — but it quickly widens into something more layered. The stolen valuables matter. The secret letter matters. Rebecca Rawlins matters. Noah Waters matters. Luke matters. The church matters. Boaz High School matters. The old friendships and old wounds matter.
The plot keeps asking, “What will happen next?”
But underneath that, another question keeps forming:
“What has already happened that nobody has fully faced?”
That is the question that interests me most as a novelist.
I have always been drawn to stories where the present is being quietly governed by the past. Not because people live backward, but because they often live inside explanations they inherited before they were old enough to question them. A town teaches. A church teaches. A family teaches. Coaches teach. Pastors teach. Friends teach. Loss teaches. Silence teaches.
Years later, a person may discover that he has been carrying all of it.
In The Boaz Safecracker, Jimmy Fred’s criminal adventure is dangerous, foolish, funny at times, and morally troubling. But it is also revealing. He is not a young man chasing thrills. He is an older man with history behind him. Grief behind him. Faith behind him. Boaz behind him.
That makes his story more than a caper.
It becomes a return.
A return to a town. A return to memory. A return to old questions about belief, loyalty, justice, resentment, and truth.
Rereading the novel reminded me that fiction can preserve what ordinary memory cannot. A photograph may capture a face. A newspaper clipping may record an event. A yearbook may list names. But a novel can hold pressure. It can hold atmosphere. It can hold the feeling of sitting at a family table while everyone knows which subjects not to raise. It can hold the sound of a church sentence that once seemed unquestionable. It can hold the strange mix of affection and suffocation that a small town can create.
That is why I am glad I returned to this book.
Yes, I noticed flaws. I almost always do when I reread earlier work. There are sentences I would revise now. There are places where the grammar could be cleaner. There are choices I might sharpen if I were editing the manuscript today.
But those things did not keep me from being pulled into the story.
That matters.
A novel does not have to be perfect to be alive.
And The Boaz Safecracker is alive to me.
It is alive with old Boaz air. Alive with questions. Alive with secrets. Alive with the uncomfortable truth that a person can leave a place, question a place, criticize a place, and still carry that place in his bones.
Maybe that is why rereading it has stayed with me.
I was not only rereading a novel.
I was opening an old door.
Richard L. Fricks 