When I asked what people wanted more of on Thursdays, one of the things folks asked for more of was talk about writing process, so I thought today I’d talk a bit about the seed that sprouted Surprised By God—and some of the horticulture needed to help figure out what form it was going to take.
It’s a useful story in that sometimes books develop in really straightforward ways, and sometimes, you know—not.
And from it emerged the core piece of advice I offer people who tell me they have an idea for a book.
(This is all, mind you, before we’ve even gotten to a final book proposal, this process.)1
(OK, some other writing advice I give sometimes is peppered throughout this as well, because why not).
If you write, maybe some of this will be useful. And if not, maybe this is an interesting peek behind the curtain, a little glimpse at How Your Creative Religious Nonfiction Gets Made.
I suppose the story starts here: I have a friend—for those of you who’ve read Surprised, she’s called Alex in the book, the one I meet through email and who becomes a dear friend and confidante. Yeah, she’s real, she has a different name, she’s still one of my dearest people and in one of life’s most gorgeous twists of fate (or divine gifts, not sure) she now lives about a 10 min drive from me. (She’s also reading this at the same time that you are. Hi, bb. 💖)
Anyway. When I was in my mid-late 20s—a few months before Yentl’s Revenge came out (oh, that’s another story! will do that some other time)—Alex came to San Francisco for a month or so. We spent a lot of time walking around Golden Gate Park, eating cherries and talking about All of the Things, as one does.
She was midway through seminary, fed up with where she was and starting to take classes at the Episcopal school up the street—a time of theological transition. I was applying to rabbinical school, trying to figure out how deep to go in my religious practice, in what ways, how to navigate the rest of my life at the same time. We talked how changing spiritually impacted our existing relationships and community, especially given the queers and the artist-types we both hung around who didn’t always feel so comfortable around ideas Abrahamic. We talked around and back again; I started to see ideas and themes repeating themselves, the common threads in our stories, how my struggles weren’t just me, it was a thing, this was a thing—and how, actually, if I thought about it, Gandhi talked about some of this, and Merton and some of the Talmudic stories I knew, but how I wasn’t hearing it in the popular discourse:
This stuff is hard.
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