Category: A Contemplative Life

For those of you who’ve never had the chance to write a book, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. For most of us writers, there doesn’t come a time when crowds of people start following us through the street for our autograph (that’s not the secret). For most of us, a royalty check has not yet arrived in the mail that we look at and say, “That’s cool – now I can pay off the house” (that’s not the secret either).

Here’s the secret.

In my experience, for every book I’ve written, there’s come a moment in time when a light has fallen down from the heavens and a voice has whispered in my ear, “This is why you wrote this book.”

Seriously. I’m not kidding.

Sometimes that moment happens before the book is ever published. When I wrote Think No Evil, a book about forgiveness in the midst of the Amish schoolhouse shooting, that moment came as I sat across from first responders who had the chance to talk about what they experienced on that horrendous day. As they wept and talked and processed, that little voice said, “This is why you’re writing this book.”

During work on a recent family memoir, a daughter of the lady the book was about looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “I never knew my mom went through all of this stuff. Thank you.”

At a book signing I attended with Tim Kreider for the book Refuse to Drown, more than one person leaned in close to Tim and I and said, “My relative did something horrible, and it had a huge impact on our family. Thank you for writing this book.”

This is why you wrote this book.

* * * * *

If you look inside my recent novel, The Day the Angels Fell, you’ll see that it’s dedicated to the following people:

To Maile,
Cade, Lucy, Abra,
Sam, and Leo,
for being the main characters
in my favorite story.

And to the families of
Peter Perella
and
Jason Darity.

Peter and Jason are two high school friends of mine who passed away in the last sixteen months. They were both in their 30s. Jason was an incredible man, raising his daughter, determined to live a good life.

Peter’s family, the Perellas, played a huge role throughout my childhood. His cousin Johnny is one of my very best friends, and his uncle was my little league baseball coach when I was six years old (as well as my 4th grade teacher). His aunt was also a teacher at my elementary school. His father was my music teacher in middle school, and his two brothers played soccer with me and my cousins. His mother is a librarian at our local library. The name Perella has provided a wonderful backdrop to my childhood.

Peter died of cancer earlier this year.

* * * * *

On Wednesday night, I got a message from Peter’s brother Tom asking if I’d sign and write notes in three books for Peter’s three children. I don’t know Peter’s wife or his kids, but I feel like I do. I signed those three books, thinking quite a lot about my own children as I wrote to each of Peter’s children. If I was gone, what would I want someone to write to my own kids?

And as I signed each of those books, I thought to myself,

This is why I wrote this book.

On Saturday night Maile turned the fan off in our bedroom, the fan that is usually on high speed and sounds like a helicopter preparing to lift off. It’s been a long time since we’ve slept without that fan on, and for the rest of the night I kept waking up to voices on James Street, people shouting back and forth, cars with loud exhausts and squealing tires.

There’s a lot that goes on in the city when most of us are sleeping, but it’s pretty easy to tune it out if you have decent windows and a loud fan.

* * * * *

I was a little nervous the first week I showed up to teach creative writing to ten 4th and 5th graders at one of the elementary schools here in the city. I didn’t know what to expect. Would they listen to me? Would they even be interested at all in writing?

Turns out they love to write. I’d give them an idea for something to work on and then, for the next twenty or thirty minutes, they’d write. The silence was glorious – I wonder if they could feel it, too, the way that silence works into your bloodstream, the way it gives life. Their pens scratched through the notebooks I gave them and at the end of the first week most of them wanted to take their notebooks home with them, so I said go for it, and the next week everyone remembered to bring them back, and they had more writing in them, more ideas.

* * * * *

I learned a lot while doing this class with them. I learned that we write within our experience, and if we’re subjected to violence or unhappiness or kindness, that’s what we write about. I learned that good writing is often silly writing.

Perhaps most importantly for me, I was reminded that a good story is nothing more than a character in a setting who faces conflict. To see this basic formula play out again and again in the writing of twelve year olds was fascinating.

Most of all, I learned that there’s a whole city, a whole world out there, waiting for us to turn off our fans and really listen. It’s easy enough to turn off our lights and sleep through life, caring only for the people inside our own four, warm walls. Are you tuning out the world? There are voices out there that need to be heard.

* * * * *

I walked down the street this morning, Sunday, and the sidewalks were mostly empty. Then I saw a kid coming towards me on the other side of Duke Street. It was one of the kids from my class. I shouted his name. He didn’t hear me. I shouted it again. He looked up. His eyes lit up and he waved. It was strange for both of us, seeing each other in a different setting, in real life, where our minds weren’t cloaked behind characters and conflict.

There are voices out there that need to be heard.