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.
