This is a guest post by junior English major, Daniel Patterson.
I was twelve when I discovered I loved to read. It was night, and I was at a Books-A-Million with my mom, who was willing to buy me a book. I went to the Christian fiction section and searched the shelves, hoping I would find something interesting. What I stumbled upon was a book titled The Pawn by Steven James. It was a crime novel about an FBI agent named Patrick Bowers. I took it home and had fifty pages read before it was time for bed. That book was what made me fall in love with reading, that and the books that followed it in the series.
Throughout high school I played sports—mainly basketball—but when I wasn’t playing for my school, I was reading books. I read whatever I could get my hands on, whatever I thought was good—which meant I read a lot of Steven James and Stephen King books, along with some various other authors. It wasn’t until tenth grade that I wrote my first short story. In my English class, the teacher told us we could write a short story and turn it in for a grade. I loved to read, and so I thought I’d give writing a try. I ended up turning in a ten-page short story about time travel. I thought it was pretty good, but looking back at it now, I know that it might have been the worst short story ever written. That’s fine, however, because sitting down to write that short story somehow got me where I am now: a creative writing student at Union University.
There is a quote from The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger that I love: “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.” No, that doesn’t happen much. But I feel like Steven James is the type of author you can contact once you finish reading one of his books. His books are what made me fall in love with reading, and so I reached out to him and asked him if he would be willing for me to interview him. What follows is all because of the willingness of James to connect with his fan base.
If you’re a writer, then you have your own defining moment of when you fell in love with telling stories.
“When I was a boy, my uncle would always tell us stories when we got together over the holidays,” James told me. “That had a big impact on me. I started to tell and write my own stories when I was in college working as a camp counselor searching for a way to quiet the kids down at night so they weren’t jumping off the bunks when it was time to go to bed.”
There’s an interesting dichotomy in writing that I think applies to a majority of people. I write because I need to write. It’s about me—in a way—but at the same time, I write because I want people to experience what I’m experiencing; I want my words to have the chance to change the people who read them. Still, as much as I want my words to shape others, I still always know my writing is ultimately for myself. Writing is a necessity. I lay in bed at night and try to sleep, but it’s always a struggle; my mind is running, chasing some story that has materialized in my head. I stay awake. I chase it. I chase it until I can sketch it out on paper, and then, if I’m lucky, I hope I might sleep.
I told James about my need for writing. I told him that I felt like stories are always trying to crawl out of my head, and that if I don’t write them quickly, I’ll never be able to remember what the story was wanting me to say.
“Yes, I understand where you’re coming from,” James said. “If I don’t write, I go a little batty. I know some authors who chose to spend their life writing, but that’s not the case with me. Writing chose me and won’t let me go. So, welcome to the tribe.”
The Tribe. People take this idea and romanticize it, turning it into some kind of privilege and poetic enlightenment. In a sense, I do think it’s a privilege to be chosen to write, but it’s not as romantic as people think. I sit in class, constantly finding myself envisioning a story in my head, only to realize I’m not paying attention. I focus on the lecture, but only for a minute before I get lost again. I go out with friends, get dinner, and then I see someone interesting and conjure up a story, which leads to another story and then another.
Always being somewhere else is only one struggle when it comes to being a writer. Sitting down and writing a full story is a challenge. It’s not that I don’t know what to say on the paper—I do—but that I never like how I say it. I’ll write a scene and love it, often times reading aloud some of the lines, impressed with myself for how well the words flow together. That feeling of satisfaction never lasts; I’ll read what I wrote again the next day and the same lines from the day before don’t sound the same. I actually hate the sound of them now.
My craft is never good enough, I always think. I told James about this, asked him if other writers feel the same.
“Most of the authors that I know struggle with this while they are working on a book,” he said. “They think things like, ‘I’ll never finish this. I’m not good enough. No one will ever want to read this.’ So, it’s pretty common. And no—it doesn’t ever go away.”
I wish that it would leave. There’s nothing worse than having a great idea for a story, writing it, and then not being happy with it because you think you could have done better. Maybe though, this self-doubt is good for writers and for artists. Maybe the doubt helps drive us to become better, constantly attacking us, pushing us to learn the craft and never be content with what we wrote.
But even if this self-doubt will never go away, even if it helps to drive writers onward, surely there has to be something that can at least help lessen the intensity of it. I asked James if there was a way to overcome some of it.
“I suppose it’s like anything that you apprentice toward—it takes time to get to the place where you have well-founded confidence. Feeling worthless will trap you, and pride will undermine you. So, strive to have humility as well as confidence. That’s the killer combination.”
It’s a combination that’s hard to reach, but I hope that one day I’ll get there.
James is all about helping writers reach that point. He is an author who truly wants to help other writers who are trying to make it. I asked him about his podcast[1] and why he cared so much for teaching others the craft.
“I’m in love with writing and storytelling, yet I have read too many poorly written stories in my life—many of them self-published,” he said. “With the ease of self-publishing, too many people today are publishing their stories long before they are ready to be published—they’re not constructed well, edited well or proofread. I want all authors—if they choose to publish their own work or seek out a publisher—to write with excellence.”
I think it’s this kind of care that sets James apart from other authors. He is someone who truly wants to help other people become the best writers they can be. This may sound good to most people, but I don’t think someone can truly understand how significant and appreciated this is until you sit down and write one awful story after another and don’t know how to meaningfully improve your craft.
Speaking of the podcasts and his heart to help other writers, I asked him for advice on writing.
“Fear will drive you back to an outline, back to writing cookie cutter stories or painting by number,” James said. “Fear and the risk of failure are part of the process and if you don’t step out on a limb—live out there at times—you’ll never grow as an artist.”
For me, fear has held me back in my writing since I first began, and only recently have I been able to step away from it. The stories I first wrote were awful because they weren’t realistic. I was scared to be authentic in my work because I feared people would judge me based off of what happened in the story. And so, I told weak stories that never felt genuine.
I’m learning to let go of what people think in my writing. I used to tell clean stories that would not offend anyone, but that’s changed. Now I just want to be authentic. Being authentic in my writing means that I tell a story like it really would be in real life. In real life, people cuss, people drink, they have sex and kill and struggle with addiction and deal with depression and wonder if there is a God. People are not perfect. People are not clean. I want to show that brokenness, and I hope that by doing so people can learn how to get out of it.
Thinking about my own struggles as a writer, I asked James about his own.
“Letting my perception of what others might think of me edge in on my artistic ventures,” he said. “So, I have stopped reading reviews of my work. I try not to think about critics and think about simply telling a powerful and resonant story instead.”
That might be what every writer needs to do: tell the story as authentically as you can and not pay attention to what the critics have to say.
Not paying attention to what people are saying is something I’ve had to learn early on, being a Christian who doesn’t want to write “Christian stories.” I’m not interested in writing Christian stories. I don’t want to deal with that community. Yet when I tell people that, I get told I’m not using my talent for Christ. People read my work and criticize me for its darkness, telling me my stories don’t show the light of Christ.
I asked James what it meant for him to be a Christian writer.
“In the Bible, there’s a place where Paul says that he ‘takes every thought captive for Christ,'” James said. “Since I’m a storyteller, I think in stories so my goal is to take every story captive for Christ. How can I tell this story in a way that it tells the truth about human nature? I believe that God gives us the desires of our hearts—and I think that includes the desire of a storyteller to share his stories.”
I think James is right. I think that being honest about human nature when it comes to writing stories can be one of the ways to honor Christ. Or maybe I’m just trying to find a way to justify the kind of stories I write, dark ones. I really do think that being honest in one’s work gives glory to Christ; for my own writing, I think Christ wants me to write about people as they really are, that way they can look for someone to help them get out of where they are.
Although I’m not worried about what other people think when they read my stories, I still struggle with fear. I told James about a poem Keats wrote, called “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be.” The poem is all about a narrator who is wrestling with the idea that he may die before he writes all that he wants to write. I struggle with this thought, too, I told James.
“Since I’m a Christian I believe in heaven, in the afterlife,” James said. “I don’t know that it’s a fear for me about not being able to write all that I want to—there’s no way I will ever be able to do that, but I do believe that in heaven I will be able to write and will finally write my ideas the way they were always meant to be written. I kind of look forward to that.”
Steven James can be found at Stevenjames.net, on Twitter @readstevenjames, and on Facebook as himself.
[1] The podcast is named The Storyblender. It’s focused on talking about writing tools and techniques that young writers can learn and apply in their craft.
