The Books That Made Me a Writer

Before I ever wrote a word of fiction, I was a reader.

From very early on, books were the place I went to understand the world, to find language for things I felt but couldn't articulate, to inhabit lives different from my own, to discover that the particular loneliness or longing or wondering I carried was not unique to me but had been felt by others and written down. It made the struggles of my real life a bit more survivable.

That kind of reading leaves marks. The books that found me long before I knew I was a writer planted something that took years to fully surface. When I finally sat down to write fiction of my own, those early stories were already in the foundation whether I knew it or not.

Reading is the Life

I was a voracious reader as a child. If anyone needed to find me, I was probably reading or telling stories and captivating whatever audience I could find, even if that audience consisted of Barbie dolls and stuffed animals. My mother once said I was completely content playing and doing things solo as long as someone else was in the room with me. Guess that's how I can hone in on my writing in the middle of a crowded coffee shop as I sip my tea.

I gravitated early toward stories with strong emotional cores. Books where the characters felt genuinely real and the stakes were high and the resolution was earned rather than convenient. I had little patience even then for stories that didn't make me feel something. Even though I read to escape reality, I still wanted to be inside the story, not observing it from a careful distance.

The books that accomplished that for me became the standard I used to measure everything else. Even though I didn't know it at the time, I was actually developing a sense of craft. And I thought I was just reading. But every story that moved me was teaching me something about what fiction can do when it's working at full capacity. The stories that left me unmoved were teaching me something too.

What Historical Fiction Gave Me

My deep love of historical fiction developed early and has never left. Even though I've shifted some to contemporary stories, there's still a small-town, coziness reminiscent of historical timeframes that's evident.

There is something about a story set in another time that satisfies the desire to understand how people lived and loved and made meaning in circumstances entirely unlike our own, to find the thread of common humanity running through the distance of years and different worlds. A well-researched historical novel makes the past feel not so distant. And it brings to the past to life in a way no history book ever will.

That's what drew me to writing historical fiction eventually. I wanted to know the WHY behind the WHO and the WHAT and the WHEN covered in history class. And I wanted to build those worlds myself. To do the research and find the details and construct a place and time that invited a reader into that world.

What Faith-Infused Stories Gave Me

The books that shaped me most deeply were ones where faith was present in the way it's present in real life. Not announced or imposed, but woven into how the characters understood themselves and their world. This is known as a Christian worldview.

Those stories gave me permission to write the same way. They showed me that a novel could be thoroughly grounded in Christian conviction without becoming a sermon. That the truest expression of faith in fiction is often the quietest one. I absorbed that lesson as a reader long before I could have ever articulated it as a writer.

When I finally sat down to write my own stories, I was drawing on all of the emotional honesty, the historical grounding, the faith woven quietly into the foundation. Without even realizing it, the books that made me a reader had already made me a writer.

What books shaped you along your life's journey? Is there a story from your earlier years that planted something that's still growing? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.