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.

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.

What I Learned from the Books I Didn't Finish

 

I have a small confession to make.

There are books on my shelf with bookmarks still in them. And it's because I stopped on purpose and never went back. Do you have any of those? Maybe they're not even on your shelf. Maybe you returned them, sold them at a yard sale, gave them to someone else, or donated them to a thrift shop. I've done the same thing with a lot of books. And now, there are only two I never finished reading. I just haven't decided what to do with them. The rest are gone, off to entertain someone else or possibly become a paperweight or doorstopper.

As a novelist, I used to feel guilty about that. Shouldn't I, of all people, extend more grace to a fellow author's work? Shouldn't I push through to the end? Perhaps. But somewhere along the way I made peace with the fact that an unfinished book is actually information for me as a reader. And some of the most valuable craft lessons I've absorbed haven't come from the books I loved, but from the ones I quietly set down and never picked back up.

When the Connection Breaks

For me, it almost always comes down to character. If I don't care what happens to the person at the center of the story, the plot eventually stops mattering. Tension without emotional investment is just noise. I can admire beautiful writing, an intricate mystery, or a fascinating historical backdrop and still find myself not caring enough to turn the page if the character hasn't made me feel something.

That realization changed the way I write.

I became more aware, early in a manuscript, of whether I was giving readers a reason to care before I gave them a reason to keep reading. Those aren't always the same thing. A gripping opening scene can pull someone in, but it's the character's interior life and relatability that makes them stay. The small moment of vulnerability. The thing they want that they'd never admit out loud. The contradiction between who they appear to be and who they actually are when no one is watching.

When I find myself skimming in someone else's book, I've learned to stop and ask why. Usually the answer points me toward something I need to pay more attention to in my own work.

Pacing and the Reader's Patience

The other thing that loses me is pacing. Like when a story asks me to wait longer than I'm willing to wait for something meaningful to happen.

There's a difference between a slow burn and a story that has simply lost its momentum. A slow burn still makes progress. There's still tension simmering beneath the surface, still a sense that something is building even in the quiet scenes. When that tension disappears entirely and scene after scene feels like it's marking time, I start to feel it as a reader. And once I start feeling the length of a book rather than the pull of it, I'm ready to toss it away.

I try to keep that foremost in my mind with my own writing. Every scene needs to be doing at least two things at once. Moving plot forward, deepening character, raising a question, or answering one. A scene that exists only to fill space between more important scenes is a scene that should probably get deleted.

What the Unfinished Books Gave Me

A book that loses you is still teaching you something, if you're paying attention.

It's teaching you what you value as a reader. What you're willing to forgive and what you're not. Where your patience ends. What kind of character earns your loyalty and what kind of story keeps you coming back after you've set it down for the night.

Those are exactly the questions a novelist needs to know the answers to. Not in the abstract, but personally and specifically. Because the books we write are, in some way, always written toward the reader we are. The books I didn't finish helped me understand that reader better than almost anything else.

Have you ever put a book down and never gone back? What was it that lost you? The characters, the pacing, something else entirely? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.