No writer has had greater impact on me than C. S. Lewis. I find both his fiction and nonfiction to be penetrating and life-shaping. That’s one of the reasons I’m excited to be speaking at this year’s Desiring God National Conference, “The Romantic Rationalist: God, Life, and Imagination in the Work of C.S. Lewis,” in Minneapolis, Minnesota on September 27-29.
In Charles Hummel’s booklet Tyranny of the Urgent, which I read as a young Christian thirty-five years ago, he said that what is urgent is often not important, and what is important is typically not urgent.
As a student of theology, writer, and occasional preacher, I loved reading Martin Luther talking about learning theology, and about the “little books” some of us write and the little sermons we preach. Sometimes the reformers really make you smile.
Earlier this year, I did an interview about my job as a writer with Clash, a website for Christian teens. The work I do is more than “just a job” to me. My writing is a ministry, because ministry is service, and every aspect of our lives is to be a service that glorifies our Lord: “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31).
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.
I'm the author of over 40 books and the founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries. I love Jesus, my wife Nanci, and our daughters, sons and five grandsons!
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