Writers write. Dreamers talk about it.
When you come to Christ as a real young person, I think when you become a teen-ager either you rebel or you search, doubt, and wonder.
When I was a junior camp counselor and it was my job to tell the campers a bedtime story or devotional, I would tell them a rapture story.
Tim sends me a fairly ambitious workup in notebook form noting the passages we're going to cover and the chronology of the biblical events, and his commentaries on those things he's read and written.
There is a comfort zone of knowing where things are going and having characters in place, but the action gets more and more dramatic and is very challenging to describe.
The uninitiated have real questions and valid concerns over how the things of God appear to them.
The theater of the mind is impossible to compete with, and I like the idea that with a few suggestions, each reader forms in his or her own mind what a character or a place looks like.
The Christian market has less competition and lower standards.
SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.
People want to find out what happens to the characters, and want to keep reading, and turning the pages.
People are scared to death and they're looking for something beyond themselves.
Of course, bad marriages are so pervasive that they have invaded the faith community too.
My dream remains to inform and entertain through fiction in the form of novels and movies that compete in the marketplace of ideas.
Left Behind takes what to some people may be unbelievable predictions from the Bible and shows how they might play out. It makes the events of biblical prophecy understandable and thus believable.
Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.
In the prequel we're going to tell about the characters before Left Behind, and the book would end with the rapture instead of start with the rapture like the first one did.
In my opinion, Jesus is God's attempt to reach man. But while I believe Jesus is the way to God, it makes no sense to hate people who disagree.
I've written enough books with real celebrities, such as Walter Payton and Hank Aaron and Billy Graham, to know that fame looks good only to people who don't have it.
I was raised in a Christian home and, in fact, my mother led me to Christ as a youngster.
I was raised as a Christian but the transaction has to be made by yourself - you and God - at some point.
I put off writing the first Left Behind book for a year because I got invited to assist Billy Graham in his memoirs, and had we known what we were putting off for a year, we might not have put it off.
I love inventing worlds and characters and settings and scenarios.
I fear it's because religion is man's attempt to reach God, and when he feels he has succeeded, he cannot abide anyone else's claim to have done the same.
He just kind of talks them through, and then I get the fun part cause I get to make up the stories.
Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.
Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
Funny, I don't feel any more powerful today than yesterday.
Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile.
Books that do a tenth of what Left Behind has done are smashing successes.
As for dialogue, I think it keeps things moving to cut to the chase.
