What I Learned Writing My First Book

If you had told me a few years ago that I would sit down and write a novel—never mind one that grew to more than 700 pages—I probably would have laughed at you.

I was a builder, not a writer.

For most of my life, I have created things with my hands. I've built homes, remodeled

rooms, designed projects, made furniture, drawn plans, and even picked up a paintbrush later in life. Writing a book seemed like an entirely different world.

It turns out, it wasn't as different as I thought.

You Don't Have to Know Where You're Going When You Start

When I started writing Angel in the Night, I didn't have hundreds of pages mapped out in front of me. I had an idea, some characters beginning to form in my head, and a story I wanted to see come alive.

So I started.

That's probably one of the biggest lessons the book taught me.

Sometimes we spend so much time trying to figure out exactly where something is going that we never take the first step. Writing taught me that it's okay not to have every answer. You can discover some of them along the way.

I've done the same thing in construction countless times. You start with a drawing and a foundation. Eventually, something that existed only in your imagination is standing in front of you.

A story isn't much different.

Characters Can Surprise You

This one I wasn't expecting.

Steve and Sarah started as characters I created. Somewhere along the way, they became people I knew.

I began to understand what Steve would say before I wrote it. I knew when Sarah would challenge him, when she would tease him, and when something simply didn't sound like her.

Sometimes I intended for a scene to go one way and the characters seemed to take it somewhere else.

That may sound strange to someone who has never written fiction.

It sounded strange to me too.

But I learned that when characters begin to feel real to the person writing them, there's a better chance they'll feel real to the person reading them.

Writing Makes You Look at Your Own Life

Although Angel in the Night is fiction, writing it made me think about things that are very real.

Love.

Family.

Friendship.

Faith.

Loss.

Second chances.

The importance of community.

And what it really means to belong somewhere.

It also made me think about how much the world has changed during my lifetime. I remember when people sat on porches and talked. Neighbors knew one another. Families gathered without everyone staring at a phone.

Life wasn't perfect then, either. I don't believe there ever was a perfect time.

But there were things worth remembering.

Those memories found their way into the world I created—not because I wanted to write about the past, but because I wanted to write about the things I believe still matter today.

Love Is More Interesting When It Isn't Perfect

I didn't want to write about two perfect people living a perfect life.

I don't believe that's love.

Real relationships have disagreements, mistakes, laughter, frustration, sacrifice, forgiveness, attraction, friendship, and moments when two people have to decide whether they're going to keep choosing each other.

That was important to me.

The beautiful moments mean more when the characters have earned them.

Maybe that's something age teaches us. The older I get, the less interested I am in perfection and the more interested I am in what is real.

I Learned That I Actually Love Writing

This may have surprised me most of all.

I wasn't much of a reader growing up. English wasn't my strongest subject. I was the kid who wanted to know how something worked, take it apart, fix it, draw it, or build it.

For years, I assumed that meant writing simply wasn't something I could do.

I was wrong.

I just hadn't found something I wanted badly enough to write about.

Once I did, something clicked.

I'd find myself thinking about a scene while driving. A line of dialogue would come to me while I was working. I'd picture a place, a conversation, or a moment between Steve and Sarah and want to get back to the computer so I could see where it went.

Writing stopped feeling like an assignment.

It became another way to create.

The Biggest Lesson

Perhaps the biggest thing writing this book taught me has nothing to do with books.

Don't decide you're incapable of doing something simply because you've never done it before.

I spent more than forty years learning how to build things.

Then I learned to paint.

Then, much later in life, I discovered that I could write.

I'm certainly still learning. I hope I always will be.

But that's part of what makes creating something worthwhile.

You begin with nothing more than an idea.

You make mistakes.

You change things.

You tear parts apart and rebuild them.

You wonder occasionally what in the hell you got yourself into.

And then one day you look at what you've made and realize:

It exists because you were willing to start.

For a builder who never thought he'd become an author, that's been one hell of a lesson.