In adapting a screenplay into a novel, what’s the author’s major challenge?
The challenge is to be 100 percent true to the movie and yet still develop a compelling part of a larger storyline that’s not in the movie.
For a long time Christians were reticent to enter the field of fiction writing. Although fiction had been popular in the secular field for a long time, it was sparse in Christian publishing. The popularity of authors Frank Peretti and then later Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins certainly opened up the door much wider for acceptance of Christian fiction.
Yesterday I made my February 1 deadline for the Courageous novel. I sent it off 11:56 p.m. Pacific time—hated to waste 4 minutes, but I needed a margin in case it got stuck in my outbox and I had to reboot. :)
Many thanks to all of you who prayed. There’s still much editing to come, but I’m grateful for God's grace and kindness in an exhausting project that has consumed the last four months.
For the past few days, I was at a cabin at the Oregon coast to do some extensive, uninterrupted writing on the Courageous novel. Related to writing, my friend Justin Taylor posted this a few months ago on his excellent blog. Loving Lewis as I do, I've heard it before, but part of it not for years.
In my last blog, I wrote about one of my three pilgrimages to Oxford. (I also shared that I'll be attending and speaking at the C.S. Lewis Foundation's 2010 Southwest Regional Retreat & Writer's Workshop, October 28-31. See the PDF download for more information.) Each visit I’ve pondered what Lewis wrote: “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen…I gave in and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England.”
Those who have read my books know that all of them have been touched in one way or another by C.S. Lewis, because ultimately the books we write are the overflow of the books we’ve read. I look forward to meeting Jack Lewis, and exploring the New Earth, where there will be time for us all to walk and talk, with new friends who are also old friends, in the joyful presence of King Jesus.
Unbelievers and believers have the same heart-cry in response to evil and suffering: “Something's terribly wrong.” We know we were made for something far better. But our heart-cry itself is revealing—why do we expect more or hope for more? Why are we outraged by evil and suffering when if the atheists are right it’s no more than we should expect in a world of random chance and survival of the fittest? Where do we get the standard of goodness by which we judge evil to be evil?
In If God Is Good, I appeal to unbelievers and believers alike to consider these questions: Why is there so much good in the world? Why do the great majority of suffering people want to go on living nonetheless? Is evil and suffering just bad luck, or is there a rational explanation for it? Is there a redemptive purpose for it? Can we as hurting people, and as those trying to help hurting people, find perspectives that recognize the full force of evil and suffering, yet offer hope? I suggest the answer is yes.
(Click here if you're unable to view the video.)
The stronger our concept of God and Heaven, the more we understand how Heaven resolves the problem of evil and suffering. The weaker our concept of God and Heaven, the stronger our doubt that Heaven will more than compensate for our present sufferings.
If Heaven did not exist, we could never solve the problem of evil and suffering, for we would never receive any lasting compensation for it.
Nanci read me letters written in 1920 by her grandmother, Ana Swanson, to her family in Sweden. Because Ana suffered severe health ...
While atheists routinely speak of the problem of evil, they usually don’t raise the problem of goodness. But if evil provides evidence against God, then shouldn’t goodness count as evidence for him? And wouldn’t that be evidence against atheism?
From a non-theistic viewpoint, what is evil? Isn’t it just nature at work? In a strictly natural, physical world, shouldn’t everything be neither good nor evil? Good and evil imply an “ought” and an “ought not” that nature is incapable of producing.
In my life, I’d already seen enough evil and suffering to feel deeply troubled by it. What I needed was to find perspective on what troubled me. In this process of writing If God Is Good, I’ve taken most pleasure in focusing closely on God, exploring his attributes of goodness, love, holiness, justice, patience, grace and mercy. While my journey has offered no easy answers, I’ve felt bowled over by how much insight Scripture gives us.
I’ve looked at a God who says, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering” (Exodus 3:7). I found great comfort in hearing God speak of a time when he could bear his people’s misery no longer (Judges 1:16). I revel in God’s emphatic promise that he will make a New Earth where he will come to live with us, and on which “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Revelation 21:4).
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