What Speaking Taught Me About Writing

I became a better writer the day I started speaking.

That's not the direction the influence is supposed to run. Writers write; speakers speak. The skills feel adjacent but separate. But standing in front of a live audience and watching in real time how people respond to language has taught me things about writing that I'd never have learned from years at a desk alone and isolated.

An audience gives you immediate feedback that a manuscript never can.

You feel the moment a story resonates with your audience. The quality of the attention shifts, the room leans in. You also feel the moment it doesn't. The restlessness that returns, the slight drift of focus. You learn quickly which words carry weight and which ones dissipate into the air without leaving a mark. You discover that sentences which read beautifully on a page sometimes collapse when spoken aloud, and that the clearest, simplest construction almost always wins.

I brought all of that back to my writing.

I am becoming increasingly more aware of rhythm. The way a sentence sounds as well as how it reads. More ruthless about clarity. More attentive to the moment when I was holding a reader's attention and the moment I was losing it, even without a live audience in the room. Speaking has taught me to feel those things in my body, and once you can feel them, you can't unfeel them.

These two disciplines have made each other stronger. Writing gave me better material to use when speaking. Speaking gave me a more calibrated ear to utilize when I write.

That isn't something I expected, but I'm grateful for it.

Have you ever found that one skill you developed in one area unexpectedly improved something completely different? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Show Don't Tell: When a Story Preaches Unintentionally

It happens in the revision.

You're reading back through a scene you wrote weeks ago and you stop at a line of dialogue that feels a little too on-the-nose, a character observation that reads more like an essay than a thought, a moment where the story pauses and your intention becomes visible underneath it like a watermark.

The story is preaching. And you didn't mean for it to do that.

This is one of the more uncomfortable moments in the writing process, because you have to honestly face your own instincts. The impulse to make sure the reader understands the point is understandable. You care about the truth you're carrying in this story, and you don't want the reader to miss it. But caring too much, holding the message too tightly, has a way of working against itself. The reader feels the grip and pulls back.

The fix is almost always the same: trust the scene to do the work without the explanation. Cut the line that names what the scene is already showing. You know, the famous, "Show, don't tell," command. Let the character feel the thing without narrating why it matters. Return the story to experience and let the meaning live inside the experience rather than beside it.

This is easier to describe than to do. It takes a great deal of authorial restraint that goes against the instinct to make sure the reader gets it. But readers are rather perceptive. They get it. Give them the benefit of the doubt. They get it more fully, in fact, when the story trusts them to see it.

The best message is the one the reader finds without being shown where to look.

Have you ever noticed a story trying too hard to make its point? Did it pull you out of the experience? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Characters Who Don't Know They Have Faith

Some of my favorite characters to write are the ones who don't know what they believe.

They're not skeptics exactly. They don't carry a philosophical position against faith. They're just people who have been shaped by something they haven't yet examined, who operate from a set of values that have roots they haven't traced, who reach instinctively toward hope in dark moments without understanding the source of that instinct.

They have faith. They just haven't called it that yet.

Writing this kind of character takes quite a bit of patience. The temptation is to move him/her toward knowing too quickly. To engineer the moment of clarity and give the reader the satisfying resolution of a character who arrives at belief. Sometimes, that's the right story to tell.

But sometimes, the better story is the one where the character doesn't fully arrive. Where they move closer to something they can't quite name, where their actions increasingly reflect a faith they haven't yet claimed, where the reader can see what they can't see about themselves.

That story reflects the truth about how belief actually develops in real people. It rarely happens all at once. And rarely in a single illuminating moment. More often, it's gradually, quietly, in the accumulation of choices and experiences that slowly reorient a life without the person fully realizing it's happening.

You want to tell that story with care and without rushing. The unnamed faith is still faith. And the reader knows it, even when the character doesn't.

Have you ever seen yourself in a character who was finding their way toward something without quite knowing what it was? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Grace in the Difficult Scene

The easiest scenes to write are the ones where everything goes right.

The breakthrough moment. The reconciliation. The answer arriving after a long silence. Those scenes are satisfying to write because they're satisfying to read. They deliver what the story has promised and the reader receives them with relief and recognition.

But the hard scenes are something else entirely.

The betrayal. The loss that doesn't get explained away. The moment when a character does the wrong thing for understandable reasons and has to live with it. These are the scenes writers sometimes soften, pulling back from the full weight of what the story requires because it feels too dark, too painful, too much.

But grace doesn't live only in the bright scenes. It actually lives most powerfully in the hard ones.

A character who receives kindness she hasn't earned in the middle of her worst moment. A relationship that survives something it probably shouldn't have. A small, quiet act of mercy in a scene that could have gone a different direction entirely. These moments create a completely different landscape than the triumphant ones because they arrive where they're least expected. In the darkness, where grace is most itself.

Writing the hard scene honestly, without softening it into something easier, and then placing grace inside it rather than after it? Well, that's actually one of the most truthful things a writer of faith can do. It reflects how grace actually operates in the real world.

You don't find grace after the hard thing. You find grace inside it.

Has a difficult scene in a book ever moved you more deeply than a triumphant one? What made it stay with you? I'd love to hear in the comments.

What Doubt Looks Like on the Page

A character who never doubts is a character no one believes.

Faith that has never been tested doesn't read as strong. It reads as untried. And readers, especially readers who have carried their own faith through genuinely hard seasons, recognize that difference immediately. A character whose belief is too clean, too certain, too untroubled by the weight of real experience feels like a stranger to them.

Doubt on the page, written honestly, creates recognition. It says to the reader, this person knows what it actually costs to believe, and that makes everything that follows feel earned rather than assumed.

Writing doubt well means resisting two temptations. 

1. Making it too dramatic — doubt as crisis, as collapse, as the thing the plot pivots on. Real doubt is often quieter than that. You find it in the ordinary moments, the unanswered prayers, the silence that stretches longer than expected.
2. Resolving it too quickly — a single conversation, a convenient revelation, and everything is settled. Real doubt doesn't work that way, and readers know it.

The most honest thing a faith-infused story can do is let doubt exist without rushing to fix it. Let the character sit in the uncertainty for a while. Let the reader sit there with them.

That doesn't mean the character is having a crisis of faith or even failing in their faith. It's just what faith actually looks like when it's being lived rather than performed.

How do you respond to doubt in fiction? Does it make a character more relatable to you, or does it make you uncomfortable? I'd love to hear your perspective in the comments.

Writing Toward the Light: Faith in Fiction

The most powerful light in a room is often the one you don't look at directly.

You see it in what it illuminates . The way it falls across a surface, the shadows it creates, the warmth it lends to everything it touches. Someone doesn't need to point it out to you. You know it's there because of what the room looks like with it present.

That's how I think about faith in fiction.

The moment you name it too directly, the moment a character stops and delivers a tidy theological conclusion, the light stops illuminating and starts blinding. The reader feels the sermon underneath the story and the spell breaks. What would have been an experience becomes a lesson, and lessons, however true, don't change people the way experiences do.

Writing toward the light means trusting that it's present without announcing it. It means a character making a choice rooted in grace without stopping to explain that grace is the reason. It means a moment of forgiveness that holds significant weight because the story has earned it. Secondary characters don't need to narrate the significance.

This restraint is one of the harder disciplines in writing. The instinct to make sure the reader gets it is understandable, but it's usually wrong. Readers are perceptive. They feel what's underneath a scene even when it isn't labeled. They receive the light even when no one points at the source.

Trust the story. Trust the reader. Write toward the light and let it do its own work.

Have you ever read a book where faith felt present without being stated? Where something underneath the story moved you without announcing itself? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Letting Characters Speak Words You Can't Say

Some of the most important things I've ever said, I said through a character in one of my novels.

Sometimes I don't realize it until I'm rereading a scene months later and something in it catches me. It could be a line of dialogue, an interior thought, or a moment of raw honesty that I recognize as something I needed to say and didn't know how to say it any other way.

Fiction creates a kind of permission that real life doesn't always offer. Behind the shelter of a character, a writer can approach truths that feel a bit too risky or maybe even embarrassing to state directly. The character can be afraid, or angry, or broken, or desperate in ways the author might not feel safe being in plain view. And paradoxically, that roundabout honesty often reaches readers more deeply than a direct confession would have.

Readers feel this from the other side too. A character says something and a reader thinks, yes, that's exactly it. That's the thing I've been carrying and couldn't name. The character has done the work of articulation that the reader couldn't do alone, and suddenly the reader feels less isolated in their own experience.

That exchange from writer to character to reader, where the truth travels the long way around, is one of the most quietly powerful things fiction does. It connects people across the distance of their private experience and says, you are not the only one. You are not alone.

That's one of the many reasons I write these stories. And it's a very worthy goal to set, every single time.

Has a fictional character ever said something that felt like it was meant specifically for you? Something you'd been feeling but couldn't find the words for? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

The Story You Didn't Know Your Soul Needed

Nobody picks up a novel thinking, this is going to change me.

We reach for a book because we want to be entertained, or transported, or because someone we trust recommended it, or because the cover caught our eye at exactly the right moment. We come to fiction looking for a story. We don't come looking for surgery.

But sometimes surgery is what we get.

The books that have marked me most deeply are almost never the ones I approached with high expectations and deliberate intention. They're the ones I stumbled into during an ordinary afternoon and couldn't put down, that left me sitting quietly afterward with the specific feeling of having been rearranged. Something had shifted. Something that needed to move had moved.

A few off the top of my head that have left a lasting impact are:

• Down from the Cross by Joyce Livingston
• Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers
• Ribbons of Steel & Ribbons West series by Tracie Peterson
• It Had to Be You by Linda Windsor

I didn't know I needed it until it happened.

As a writer, I find this both humbling and clarifying. It means I can't always know, while I'm writing, which scene or character or line will be the one that does something real in a reader's life. The moment I think will land sometimes doesn't. The quiet, seemingly small moment I almost cut sometimes turns out to be the one a reader mentions years later.

My job is not to engineer the transformation. My job is to write the truest story I can and trust that it will find the reader who needs it, in the moment they need it, and do whatever it's supposed to do.

That requires a particular level of faith, and it's one I'm still practicing.

Has a book ever found you at exactly the right moment? One you didn't know you needed until you were already inside it? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Truth in Disguise: the Surprising Power of Fiction

Fiction lies, technically speaking.

I often joke and say I get paid to lie. The characters aren't real. The events didn't happen. The places, in many cases, exist only in the architecture of my imagination. A novel is, by definition, made up.

And yet.

Readers regularly describe fictional experiences in the language of truth. That character understood me. That story changed how I see things. That book told me something real about myself. We don't say those things about things that are simply false. We say them about things that have gotten somewhere true by an unexpected route.

That's the paradox at the heart of fiction, and it's one I find endlessly valuable. A story can be factually invented and emotionally, spiritually, humanly true at the same time. The invented surface carries something real underneath, and what the reader receives is the real thing, not the invention.

This is why I've never felt any tension between writing fiction and caring deeply about truth. The fiction is the vehicle. The truth is the destination. A well-crafted story doesn't lead readers away from reality. It leads them more deeply into it, through a door that would never have opened otherwise.

In this case, disguise isn't deception. It's strategy and grace rolled into one. It's the reason a made-up story can tell you something true about your own life that no amount of straightforward instruction could have ever reached.

Has a work of fiction ever told you something true? Something you recognized as real the moment you encountered it? What was it? I'd love to hear in the comments.

The One Person Who Changes Everything You Create

Every writer has an ideal reader living somewhere in the back of their mind. And every content creator has an ideal viewer.

Not the entire audience. Not the demographic profile or the market category. One specific person. The individual toward whom you're instinctively aiming, whose response you're imagining when you make a thousand small decisions about what to include, what to cut, what to convey plainly and what to leave for the individual to discover on their own.

Mine has shifted over the years, but she has always shared a few qualities. She's honest with herself, even when it's uncomfortable. She carries her faith seriously but not rigidly. She has been through something hard and is still standing, a little worn but not defeated. She reads because she needs more than distraction. She needs to feel less alone in the specific texture of her experience.

I write for her.

Knowing the individual who will receive what you create doesn't narrow the content. It focuses it. In writing, the most universal books are almost always the ones written with deep specificity toward a particular kind of reader, because specificity is what creates the feeling of being truly seen. A reader who feels seen becomes a reader who stays.

If you create anything — writing, art, music, content of any kind — knowing your one reader, your one viewer, your one listener, changes everything about the choices you make. It moves you from performing for a crowd to speaking directly to that one, individual person who needs what you have to offer.

That is where real connection begins.

Who do you create for? Is there one person, real or imagined, whose response matters most to you? I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

What Fairy Tales Know About Real Life

I don't know about you, but I think fairy tales often get underestimated.

They're filed away as children's entertainment. Charming, simple, suitable for bedtime. Every now and then, they get dug out to appease the request of a child or to dazzle a group of children in a reading circle at the library.

But personally, I see fairy tales enduring because they're built on something true. Not literally true, obviously. But they map onto real experience and land somewhere deeper. Somewhere our hearts simply recognize. It's why the same core stories keep resurfacing in new forms across generations and cultures.

And it's why I decided to try my hand at retelling a few of them. Magic of the Swan is the first.

What Fairy Tales Carry That Other Stories Don't

Fairy tales deal in archetypes, which means they deal in the most compressed and universal version of human experience.

• The curse that distorts reality and makes the true thing appear false.
• The quest that requires more than the hero initially has to give.
• The love that is tested by the willingness to see clearly when everything conspires against clarity.
• The transformation that costs something real before it gives something back.

These are not just plot devices. They're descriptions of actual human experience, rendered in a form that makes them visible and survivable and meaningful. The person reading a fairy tale about a curse isn't just reading about a magical enchantment. They're reading about every situation in their own life where the true thing has been obscured by something false, where they've had to fight to see clearly through distortion. The story gives that experience a shape, and giving something a shape makes it possible to hold.

That's what good stories do, and fairy tales have been doing it longer than almost any other narrative form we have.

What Faith Sees in Them

When I read fairy tales through the lens of my faith, I find something that looks more like deep pattern.

• Darkness
• Testing
• Transformation
• Restoration

The structure of so many classic fairy tales highlights the idea that things are not as they should be. That something real and valuable can be hidden or distorted or put under a kind of curse. That love willing to pay a real cost has power that other things don't. That restoration is possible even after what seems like an irreversible ending.

I don't think fairy tales are secretly Christian, but I do think they're tapping into something true about the human experience. And the resonance between that and faith is part of what makes both so enduring.

When I write fairy tale retellings, I'm going to do my best to follow the truth that's already present in the original and ask where it leads when you follow it all the way. There may or may not be an overt faith element, but the stories will come from the shared foundation of faith along with the human experience borne of a Creator.

Fairy tales know things. They've always known things. I'm just trying to put my own little spin on them.

Is there a specific fairy tale that has always felt real to you? Something in the tale that resonated beyond the surface of the story? Which one, and what did it touch in you? I'd love to hear about it.

Find Your People: Why Community Changes Everything

Writing is solitary work.

A story gets built inside one person's imagination, transferred through one person's hands, shaped by one person's understanding of character and language and what makes a scene feel true. No one can do that part for you, and no one should try. The solitude is where the work actually happens.

But that solitude is sustainable only when it's held inside a larger community. The writers who last are almost never the ones who go it entirely alone.

I know this from experience, both kinds. I know what it feels like to be connected to a community of people who understand this work from the inside, and I know what it feels like when that connection frays or goes quiet. The difference is not subtle. It's part of what led to my period of silence and lack of new releases.

What ACFW Gave Me

I've been part of American Christian Fiction Writers almost since it began, and the organization has shaped my career in ways I'm still discovering.

The most obvious gift is access to editors, agents, craft education, and the broader ecosystem of Christian publishing. But what has mattered more, in the long run, is the relationships. The authors I've met through ACFW who have become genuine friends. The ones who understand without explanation what it means to be in the middle of a difficult manuscript, or to receive a disappointing editorial letter, or to watch a book release into the world and wonder whether it found the readers it was meant for.

There's a particular relief in being known by people who share the specific aspects of your experience. It doesn't require as much explanation. You can say certain things about the loneliness of a long project, about the doubt that lives alongside the work, about the strange grief of finishing a book, and be understood immediately, without having to first explain why those things are hard.

I never want to take that kind of community for granted.

Why Community Matters More Than You'd Think

Writing community doesn't have to be formal or large to be real. Some of the most sustaining connections I've had in this work have been a single author friend who checks in during a hard stretch, who celebrates a win, who tells you the truth about my work and encourages me.

The authors who have been that for me are among the people I value most in my professional life. And I try, imperfectly and consistently, to be that for others.

Creative isolation is a danger. And you often don't see it until it's already a problem.

You can go a long time producing work without meaningful community and not fully realize what's missing until you find it again. Until you're in a room full of people who understand the work you do and feel something loosen in your chest that you didn't know had been tight. That happened to me. It's part of why the long season away was as hard as it was, and part of why returning to community has been as restorative as returning to the writing itself.

If you're a writer reading this and you've been going it alone, find your people. It will change things in ways you can't fully anticipate from where you're standing. The work is yours alone to do. But you don't have to do it in isolation.

Have you found your community, or are you still looking? What has connection with other creative people meant to you? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

The Fairy Tale That Wouldn't Leave Me Alone

How Magic of the Swan came to be. Some stories arrive quietly and wait to be noticed. Others show up and simply refuse to leave until you do something about them.

Magic of the Swan was the second kind.

The idea of retelling Swan Lake had been sitting in the back of my mind for longer than I can remember. Other author colleagues had done fairy tale retellings, and I always thought it would be fun to attempt one of my own. Fairy tales use the extraordinary to illuminate something deeply ordinary about human experience. But Swan Lake specifically kept returning. Something in the bones of that story — the transformation, the curse, the love that is tested by deception, the question of whether devotion is enough to break what darkness has done — wouldn't let me set it down.

Why Swan Lake

There are more familiar fairy tales I could have chosen. Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White. They've all been retold so many times they've become a genre unto themselves. Swan Lake is less traveled territory in fiction, which was part of the appeal. There was more room to make it genuinely my own.

But it was also the specific emotional architecture of the story that drew me. The curse at the center of Swan Lake is a distortion. It makes the true thing appear false and the false thing appear true, and the one who loves Odette has to find a way to see through that distortion and choose rightly in a moment when everything conspires against him doing so. That's not limited to fairy tales. Human nature has to grapple with that all the time. It's also a deeply theological struggle, if you're inclined to read it that way.

Why the Gilded Age

Or a little bit after. Setting the story in the Gilded Age felt right almost immediately.

The early twentieth century in America had a gilded appeal in and of itself. Glittering on the surface, complicated and sometimes dark underneath. The wealth and the beauty and the elaborate social performance of that era sit alongside labor exploitation and stark inequality in ways that create natural dramatic tension. It's a world where appearance and reality are frequently at odds, which made it a fitting home for a story about a curse that makes the true thing look false.

It also gave me rich historical territory to research, which, as I've mentioned before on this blog, is one of my genuine pleasures as a writer. The Gilded Age has texture and specifics I absolutely love and find fascinating.

The Book Launch

After the long season away from fiction, after everything the hiatus cost and required, putting a new novel into the world was an act of faith in the most personal sense of that phrase. Faith that the work still mattered, that the stories were still worth telling, that the return was real and not temporary.

The response from readers has been amazing. But holding the book in my hands proved the voice was still there, the stories hadn't gone anywhere, and the fairy tale that wouldn't leave me alone had been worth following all the way to the end.

I have a feeling these fairy tales won't leave me alone.

Is there a fairy tale or classic story that has always felt like it was trying to tell you something specific? One that stays with you or keeps coming back? I'd love to hear which one and why in the comments.

Writing for Hire: What Freelance Writing Taught Me

Not every word I write belongs to a novel.

This is something readers don't always know about authors, particularly authors who are building or rebuilding a career. The writing life frequently involves a significant amount of work that never carries your name on the cover, that pays the practical bills while the creative work takes the longer road it always takes.

I do freelance content writing. Blog posts, articles, web copy. All produced for clients across a range of industries, in voices that are not my own, on topics that have nothing to do with historical fiction or faith or the particular world I build when I'm working on a manuscript. It's professional, it's deadline-driven, and it requires a different set of skills than novel writing does.

It has also, unexpectedly, taught me things about my own voice that I'm not sure I would have learned any other way.

What Freelance Writing Actually Looks Like

The practical reality is this: content writing pays consistently in a way that novel royalties do not.

Publishing is often a slow-moving financial ecosystem. Books take years from concept to release, royalties arrive on a delayed schedule, and advances are earned out over time. For a writer who is also running a household, homeschooling teenagers, and maintaining a platform, the gap between what the creative work produces and what daily life requires has to be filled somehow.

Freelance content writing fills that gap. It's not glamorous, and it doesn't scratch the same creative itch that fiction does, but it's honest work that uses the skills I have. I've made peace with that trade-off now, but it definitely took much longer than it should have.

What It Taught Me About Voice

But there was an unexpected gift in this part of my writing career that I didn't like at first. Writing in other people's voices made me better understand my own.

The time I've spent deliberately adjusting tone, vocabulary, sentence rhythm, and level of formality to match a client's brand and audience, has heightened my awareness of how those elements function. I started to notice the choices I'd make consciously that I used to make by instinct. And when I returned to my own work after a stretch of client writing, my own voice feels distinct in a way it didn't before. More recognizable. More deliberate.

It's the rhythm of my sentences. The way I move between the specific and the reflective. The place where warmth lives in my prose and how I find it when I've temporarily lost it. Freelance writing gave me that awareness, and that's made me a more intentional novelist.

Maintaining Balance

Now, there are seasons when the freelance load has been heavy enough that returning to my manuscripts feels harder than it should. It's as if the writing muscles have been used all day for someone else's purposes and have nothing left for my own. Learning to protect the creative work, to treat the novel as a priority even when the client deadlines are louder, has been an ongoing discipline.

I don't always get that balance right. But I keep returning to it, because the freelance work funds the life that makes the fiction possible.

Do you do creative work alongside other work that pays the bills? How do you protect the thing that matters most when everything else is making noise? I'd love to hear how you navigate it in the comments.

Writing Between the Lessons: Homeschooling and the Creative Life

Most mornings in our house, the school day and the writing day start at roughly the same time. But this isn't as harmonious as it sounds.

I've been homeschooling my teenagers for years now, which means that the person responsible for their education and the person trying to finish a novel are the same person, working in the same house, often at the same hours, with competing demands that don't particularly care about each other's schedules. It's a balancing act I chose deliberately and would choose again. It's also, on certain days, genuinely exhausting.

One of the things I've committed to on this blog is telling the truth about what the writing life actually looks like. And the truth is that mine looks like this.

What Homeschooling Takes From the Writing

The most obvious cost is time. Hours that might otherwise go to a manuscript go to lesson planning, teaching, and the general orchestration of another human being's educational life. Writing sessions get interrupted. Creative momentum, which is a fragile thing under the best of circumstances, gets broken by the real and legitimate needs of real people who are more important than any manuscript.

I've had to make peace with a slower pace of production than I might otherwise maintain. Books take longer. The gaps between projects stretch out. There are days when I sit down to write with whatever is left after everything else has been handled, and what's left is not always much.

I've had to learn to write in smaller windows than I'd like, to pick up a scene in the middle and find my way back into it quickly, to treat fifteen good minutes as worth having even when I'd prefer three uninterrupted hours.

What Homeschooling Gives Back

However, homeschooling has made me a better observer.

Teaching requires you to explain things you've understood for so long that you stopped noticing how they work. It requires patience with the process of learning, attention to how understanding actually develops, and a willingness to meet someone exactly where they are rather than where you wish they were. Those are good skills for a novelist to practice.

I've also found that the conversations that happen naturally in a homeschool environment (all the tangents and the questions and the moments when a history lesson turns into a two-hour discussion about human nature and the way things change) feed the part of me that writes.

My teenagers are interesting people with sharp minds and genuine opinions, and spending serious time with them has given me more insight into how people actually think and talk and process the world than I could have gotten any other way.

What Holds It Together

Honestly? Faith and flexibility, in roughly equal measure.

The faith piece is straightforward. I firmly believe this is the right choice for our family in this season, and that conviction steadies me on the days when the balance feels impossible. The flexibility piece is harder won. It means releasing the idea of a perfect writing day and finding genuine gratitude for the imperfect one. It means accepting that this chapter of life will eventually look different, and that the constraints of right now are not permanent.

In the meantime, I write between the lessons. Sometimes in the twenty minutes before the next subject starts, in the hour after everyone has gone to their own work for the afternoon, or the wee hours of the late night after everyone's in bed.

It's not the writing life I imagined when I started, but it might be better, actually, for being so thoroughly rooted in the real one.

How do you manage the creative work alongside everything else life requires of you? I'd love to hear what your balance looks like in the comments.

Three Names, One Writer: Published Under Different Names

If you've gone looking for my books and been confused by the author name situation, you're not alone.

I've published under three names over the course of my career. Amber Miller came first. Then Amber Stockton. Now Tiffany Amber Stockton. Same writer, same heart, same stories. Just a name that has evolved alongside everything else.

I might eventually drop my middle name, but for now, it stays. Still, it gives credence to one of my favorite quotes: "Writing is the only socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." :)

How It Started

When I published my first novels, I wrote as Amber Miller. It was my middle name combined with my maiden name, and it appeared on my earliest books in Christian historical romance. I felt it had an easy, smooth sound to it. A little less clunky than Tiffany Miller.

Then, I married my husband Stuart and began publishing as Amber Stockton, which lasted for the majority of my writing career to this point. Eventually, I realized I rarely introduce myself as Amber, and a lot of folks who met me weren't making the connection.

That led to me using my full name of Tiffany Amber Stockton. That's what I use for fiction now, although there are some nonfiction pieces with just first and last name, and if you search under any of them, you will find me and my books. My full name is on the cover of my most recent work, including Magic of the Swan, which released last month.

The Costs of Changing a Name

The publishing industry doesn't often warn you about the impact of changing your name mid-stride.

Readers who loved your earlier books under one name don't automatically find you under the next one. Search results fragment. Confusion occurs. A reader who picks up a book by Tiffany Amber Stockton may have no idea that the same woman wrote the Amber Miller titles from years ago. Building a readership is slow, careful work under the best of circumstances, and a name change can reset parts of it that take years to repair.

It took a bit of time and perseverance, reaching out to multiple databases and author support interfaces, but I finally managed to merge all 3 of my names online. The changes and the long season away and the return still fit. Even though it wasn't my intention in any way, I'm no longer hiding behind a partial name or a professional abbreviation. I'm simply showing up as the whole person.

If you find a book by Amber Miller or Amber Stockton on a shelf somewhere and you enjoy my writing, that's mine too. The voice is the same even when the name on the cover isn't. I'm still the same writer I was when this started. I've just grown a bit, and my name has grown with me.

Have you ever gone through a season where you felt like you were still becoming who you were meant to be? Where the outside finally caught up with the inside? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

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.

The Research That Never Made the Page

For every detail that ends up in a finished novel, there are probably a dozen that didn't.

I research thoroughly, sometimes to a degree that goes well beyond what the story actually requires. It's all to understand the world my characters inhabit from the inside.

• The way people spoke
• The rhythms of daily life
• The particular texture of a place and time
  

That kind of understanding requires far more knowledge than will ever appear on the page. Most of it is invisible to the reader but all of it impacts how the story feels. Unknown or uncommon facts are one of my favorite things about research discovery.

• Fascinating historical details
• Pieces of local lore
• Unexpected connections between two things I didn't know were related
• Things that simply don't fit the story I'm telling

I write them all down anyway. They go into a folder that has never stopped growing. Somehow, they'll find their way into a future manuscript. Nothing is ever wasted!

The Scenes That Got Cut

Cutting a scene you worked hard on is one of the quieter griefs of novel writing. No one except me and maybe my editor or critique partner knows it happened.

But there are scenes in every manuscript I've written that I genuinely mourned losing. Moments between characters that felt real and true and earned, that simply didn't serve the larger shape of the story well enough to stay. A scene can be well-written and still be wrong for the book.

I keep those scenes, though. In a folder, just like the unused research. I may or may not use them, but I can't quite bring myself to delete them either. They're part of the story even if they're not in it.

The Long Road Between First Word and Finished Book

What you hold in your hand as a reader represents years, sometimes, from the first stirring of an idea to the day the book exists in the world.

Every book's journey involves:

• Writing and revising
• More revising
• Conversations with editors about what the story needs to become
• Cover designs
• Marketing decisions
• Endorsements to gather
• A release date that needs careful preparation

By the time a book reaches a reader, the author has usually been living with it so long that reading it feels like visiting a place you moved away from years ago. It's familiar in a way that's almost strange.

That long road is why a reader's response matters so much. The letters. The messages. The moments when someone finds me at an event or reaches out online to say that a particular character or scene met them somewhere real. Those moments close a loop that started quietly, alone, at a desk somewhere, with nothing but an idea and the hope that it might become something worth a reader's time.

It did. You're holding the proof of it.

Is there something you've ever wondered about what happens before a book reaches your hands? A part of the process you've been curious about? Ask me in the comments. I'll be happy to pull back the curtain a little further.

Why I Keep Coming Back to The Second Chances Theme

If you've read more than one of my novels, you've probably noticed something.

Second chances show up everywhere in my fiction. The relationship that fractured years ago and finds its way back toward something whole. The person who walked away from their faith and slowly, painfully finds their footing again. The character who made a defining mistake and has to decide whether they're allowed to want something good after it.

I return to these stories the way you return to a particular stretch of shoreline. Even though you've been there before, it keeps having something to say. I've thought about why, and the answer really isn't all that complicated. It's just honest.

Because I Believe in Them

Second chances aren't a narrative device to me. They're a theological conviction.

I believe, in the deepest and most personal way, that no one is ever too far gone. That grace is not reserved for people who haven't made a significant mess of things. That redemption is available in the places that seem least likely to produce it, in the relationships that seem most beyond repair, in the seasons of a life that feel most irretrievably lost.

That's not wishful thinking. It's the core of what my faith tells me about how the world actually works. And because story is how I process what I believe, those convictions find their way onto the page whether I plan them there or not.

Because Life Keeps Proving It

I've also lived long enough to see second chances happen in real life. That makes them much easier to write in a convincing manner

I've watched people rebuild after the kind of loss that looked impossible to survive. I've seen relationships find their way back from fractures that seemed permanent. I've experienced my own version of returning to something I thought was behind me, including this blog and my fiction writing itself after a long season when both went quiet.

That personal experience matters when you're writing about something. There's a difference between writing a second chance story from the outside, as a pleasing narrative arc, and writing one from the inside, as someone who knows what it actually costs to try again.

And it does cost something. It requires a particular kind of courage that isn't dramatic or loud but is real and ongoing and sometimes exhausting. I try to honor that in my characters rather than smooth it over.

What These Stories Ask of a Reader

Here's what I've noticed about readers who connect most deeply with second chance stories: they're usually carrying one of their own.

Not always a romance, obviously. But something. A relationship they're not sure is repairable. A dream they set down years ago and aren't sure they're allowed to pick back up. A version of themselves they'd like to find their way back to. When those readers find a character navigating the same territory, something happens that goes beyond entertainment. The story becomes a kind of permission. A quiet reminder that the door isn't necessarily closed just because it's been shut for a while.

That's the thing about second chance stories done honestly — they don't promise easy outcomes. The characters earn their way back to something, slowly and imperfectly, and the reader feels every step of it. But the destination they're moving toward is real and it's worth it and it's available.

I keep coming back to that story because I keep believing that's true.

Have you ever had a second chance at something you thought was behind you? A relationship, a dream, a version of yourself? What did it feel like to step back into it? I'd love to hear your story in the comments.

How I Name My Characters (And Why It Matters)

Names have weight.

I don't think most people realize how much until they try to change one that has already settled into place. There's a particular kind of wrongness that happens when a character's name doesn't fit. A low-grade friction that follows you through every scene, every line of dialogue, every moment where you type that name and something in the back of your mind quietly objects.

When the name is right, you don't notice it at all. It just disappears into the character, the way a good pair of glasses disappears when you're actually looking at the world through them rather than at them. That's the aim of every author.

Getting there, though, is its own process.

Where the Search Begins

I rarely arrive at a character's name quickly. Oh, I might start with a name to get the story rolling, but those names often change before the book comes to an end. Usually the character exists for a while before the name does. I might even throw in a placeholder of sorts while the rest flows. A presence, a voice, a set of tendencies and wounds and desires that feel real before they have anything to be called.

During that nameless stretch I pay attention differently. Noticing names the way you notice a color when you're trying to decide whether it belongs in a room. A name will catch my attention in a completely unrelated context. It might be a historical record, a passing conversation, or even the credits rolling at the end of a film. Yes, I'm one of those who sits until the very end. But something will shift.

That's not how it always happens, though. Sometimes, a name will land and I'll know immediately that it belongs to the person I've been trying to find.

Other times I go looking deliberately. I keep a list of names I've encountered and liked but haven't yet used. I research naming conventions for the time period and region or contemporary setting I'm usingn to write the story, because a name that belongs to a character's world matters as much as one that belongs to their personality. A woman living on the Virginia coast in the early twentieth century is not going to be named something that sounds like it belongs in a contemporary Manhattan apartment, and if she is, there needs to be a specific reason. And the story needs to earn it.

What a Name Has to Do

A character's name is doing more work than you might think.

It's the first impression a reader has of a person before they know anything else about them. It carries sound and rhythm that affect how a reader experiences every scene where that character appears. It can signal something about the origin of a character, what era they inhabit, what kind of family shaped them. And in dialogue especially, the way other characters use a name becomes a tool for showing relationship and tension without having to explain either one directly. Whether they shorten it, avoid it, or use it pointedly in a moment of conflict 

Names also sometimes unlock something about a character I hadn't consciously known. There have been moments where I tried three or four names that were all technically fine. Then, I landed on the right one and suddenly understood something about the character I hadn't been able to articulate before. As if the name was the last piece that gave everything else clarity.

That probably sounds strange. It makes complete sense to me.

The Names That Didn't Work

I've changed character names mid-manuscript more times than I care to admit. Usually it happens when I realize somewhere around chapter four or five that the name I chose in the planning stage was just who I hoped the character would be rather than who they actually turned out to be once the story started breathing.

Characters have a way of becoming themselves despite your best intentions, and sometimes the name you gave them at the beginning no longer fits the person who showed up on the page. When that happens, there's nothing to do but change it and do a thorough find-and-replace and hope you didn't miss any. Which reminds me, I have a comical story (now) about this:

In one of my earlier book series, I reached the Net Galley phase of the editing process. This is the time to find any overlooked spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. It's not for major substantial edits. Well, in my review, I realized I had 2 completely different very minor characters in similar roles who had the same name.

So, I made note of the pages where the 2nd character appeared at the end of the novel. That, along with a couple other spelling catches went to my publisher for final changes. I specifically stated what needed to happen for that character. Isolate those exact pages, and change the name "Mary" to "Laura." Simple enough. Right?

Obviously not. And I had no idea of the mistake until I received reader email and letters asking what "prilaura" was.

It took me a few minutes to process, but thankfully, one of my readers cited the page number. Anxiously flipping to the page, I found the error. But sadly, it wasn't just that one. My book also had the odd words of "custolaura" and the scent of "roselaura."

Ugh! Instead of limiting the find/replace command to the 7 specified pages of a single chapter at the end of the book, the person who oversaw the galley changes had done a global search & replace and also forgot to capitalize the names. So, anywhere the string of letters m-a-r-y appeared in any word or name, they were replaced with l-a-u-r-a. And there were over 20,000 copies that went to print like this!

After notifying my publisher and replying to that handful of early readers, then sitting in anguish over this glaring mistake that couldn't be fixed, I realized I could get angry, or I could find the fun in it. I chose the fun.

So, I sent out a newsletter challenging readers to find the mistakes and report back. Each one who did was entered into a drawing for 1 of 5 different prize baskets containing not only a copy of this "rare" book, but also a copy of the other 2 books in the series, some herbal tea, a coffee cup, bookmark, and a magnifying glass to honor the sleuths.

If you'd like to join the fun, pick up a copy of Bound by Grace anywhere you can find it and look for yourself. :)

I never mind the extra work. A name that fits is worth the trouble of finding it.

Do you have a name that you've always thought sounded like it belonged in a story? Maybe your own, or someone close to you. I'd love to hear it in the comments.