Why do you need all those writers conferences to commiserate and moan about an activity—writing—that you supposedly love?

It’s a fair point, and yet, writers are very familiar with all those agonizing hours we spend squirming, staring at walls, searching for words, deleting words, and writing through drafts that won’t quite come together. Why such struggle?

I finally figured out why writing is so hard.

It came to me through a handout that was given to me by my friend David Esselstrom. It concerns a book called Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style, published by Erasmus in 1512. The handout shows variations in the ways that someone might write the idea, “Your letter mightily pleased me.” Here are a few:

“To a wonderful degree did your letter please me.”

“By your letter I was mightily pleased.”

“I was exceeding pleased by your letter.”

“Your affectionate letter brought me unbelievable pleasure.”

This list goes on for three pagesand includes 83 different ways of expressing the idea. And we could easily add many more.

As I read through this list, becoming more and more agitated without really knowing why, it finally occurred to me why writing is so hard: There are too many choices.

The reason those similar but slightly varied sentences made me so uncomfortable is because they sounded like a mockery of my own writing process. I, too, can think of at least 83 ways of writing each sentence, and sometimes it’s hard to know which one is right. It’s why I sometimes take an absurdly long time even to write something as simple as an email or a thank you card. These things can actually be harderfor writers than non-writers because the writers see the dozens of choices, and those choices can be paralyzing.

The larger the project, the more the choices and difficulties multiply. Let’s say you want to write a nonfiction book (writing fiction raises a different set of issues that are equally daunting). The idea comes to you. You write it down. Is the idea too narrow? Too broad? You revise. You refine. You throw it out. You start again. Have you captured it in a way that gets at the essence of what makes this worth doing? Is it clear? Is it reader-friendly? Is it compelling?

You finally settle on the idea. Maybe you scratch out an outline. You can’t cover everything. What is crucial to include? What should you leave out? How can this be divided into chapters? How many chapters? In what order? What will best capture the progression of ideas? Each of these questions has the potential to disrupt everything you have decided up to that point. You may have to go back to the beginning.

Once you start writing, what voice do you take on for this project? Is it personal? Scholarly? Humorous? Confessional? Who is the audience, and how can you best appeal to them? Should you include explanatory footnotes, for example? Would those enhance your credibility, or would they put readers off?

As you write each chapter, what can you start with that will engage the reader? Maybe you can think of 10 or 15 ways of doing that. Which will you choose? How long should each chapter be? What evidence should you include? How much of your research should you

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show, and how do you present it? How much do you quote? How much do you paraphrase? How do you weave your own ideas into the ideas of others? You don’t want the chapter to get bogged down, but neither do you want to skim too lightly over important ideas. How do you find balance?

After you finally settle on how to structure the chapter, you still have to write all those pesky sentences, and each one offers 83 or more possibilities.

As you continue this process day after day, something that felt brilliant on the day you wrote it may strike you as stupid and embarrassing when you read it the next day. Maybe you should switch those chapters around. Delete that paragraph. Revise that sentence.

Doubts creep in. Insecurities abound. Should you even be writing this book? What if you fail? What if everyone reads it and laughs at you? You consider tossing the whole thing aside. On the other hand, insecure moments may alternate with delusions of grandeur. This paragraph is brilliant! You’re a genius! This book will be a bestseller that absolutely everyone will read!

With all these obstacles that writers face, the real question may be not why writers agonize so much, but rather how they manage to finish anything at all.  So, non-writers, I would plead with you, have patience with us. We’re not just whiny babies. This really is hard. We need all the love we can get.

Let’s imagine that you have never even opened the Bible. Does that mean you’re untouched by its influence? Not if you know what a “good Samaritan” is, or what the term “prodigal son” refers to, or who Adam and Eve are, or what kind of passengers Noah had in his ark, or what happened on the Cross, or a hundred other examples I could give.

Recently I had the opportunity to visit the Museum of the Bible that opened late last year in Washington, D.C. This is a world-class, interactive, multi-story museum just off the National Mall near some of the best museums in the country. Because of its prime location

Museum of the Bible entrance, which represents the Gutenberg Bible plates

and its stiff competition, this museum had to be good to be taken seriously, and in my opinion, it succeeds.

But why does the Bible need a museum in the first place? My own interest in the Museum of the Bible is particularly intense right now because I recently turned in the manuscript for my next book, which will be published by The Foundry Publishing (formerly Beacon Hill Press). My book focuses on the influence of the most famous New Testament passages on popular culture, literature, film, the church, and individual lives.

I spent two days at the Museum and was introduced to it by one of my Azusa Pacific University colleagues who serves as one of the consultants for it and who has helped shape it from its earliest days. I also got to meet some of the people who now run the Museum.

The Bible has reached a critical point in today’s world. It is still well-known, but is it as influential as it used to be? One floor of the Museum of the Bible is devoted to the impact the Bible has had on various aspects of culture throughout history, such as music, art, film, civil rights, education, and other areas. That section of the museum includes a poll that visitors can take about the Book’s influence in the past, present, and future.

The running results of those questions are displayed for visitors to see. One question is, “How would you describe the Bible’s impact on American HISTORY?” The most prominent answers are words like “Strong,” “Profound,” “Foundational,” and “Powerful.” In contrast, the most common answers to the question, “How would you describe the Bible’s impact on America TODAY?” are words like “Weak,” “Fading,” “Lacking,” and “Diminishing.”

Although people have doubts about the Bible’s current impact compared to earlier eras, some trends, such as the YouVersion Bible app that now has more than 250 million downloads all over the world, indicate that the Bible is more widely available than ever. Those trends seemed especially significant as I considered the Bible’s current wide availability in light of the Museum’s copies of Bibles from hundreds of years ago, before the printing press, when each page had to be copied by hand, making the Bible very rare indeed. In those days, most individuals could not own their own copy of the Bible, and even if they did, it would probably be in Latin, a language most of the common people would not know. Still, even under those circumstances, the Bible had profound influence.

The Museum also shows the Bible’s impact in areas where we might overlook it, such as popular music. One room features snippets of popular songs with biblical themes and allusions. The Adam and Eve theme shows up in songs from Elvis Presley, B.B. King, and Elvis Costello. The Moses/Exodustheme can be found in songs by Coldplay and Bob Marley. Psalm 23references can be heard in songs by Kanye West and Coolio, and so on.

Another display shows portions of countless films that have biblical subject matter, such as The Ten Commandments, History of the World Part I, Evan Almighty, and Noah.

Every art form imaginable has been influenced by the Bible. One display shows dozens of examples of the countless paintings of Jesus’ mother Mary, who for centuries was “the single most represented woman in the history of Western art.”

The Museum tries to entertain as well as educate, and one of my favorite parts is a section called the Hebrew Bible Experience. It is a multi-room, multimedia, multi-sensory experience that tells the story of the Hebrew Bible, more commonly called the Old Testament. It contains elements that dazzle, with lights, special effects, music, Moses’ burning bush, and other surprises, but it does more than offer a kind of theme-park ride. It also takes a text that for many readers is a confusing collection of laws, prophecy, history, and poetry and shows the storythat threads its way through it.

It is a story, starting with Adam and Eve, of the fall of humanity and the search for reconciliation with God. It is a story whose episodes include figures such as Abraham and Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Ruth, and many others. Like the Museum itself, the Hebrew Bible Experience shows, through its memorable storytelling, why the Bible still grips people even in our distracted age and why it will no doubt continue to wield its influence in the decades to come.

What is it about social media that makes everybody come across as so unreasonable, even when they seem like such sensible, kind-hearted people when I encounter them in person? When I see their posts about politics or the church or the latest hot-button issue in the news, my mind skips right over the content of what they’re saying and jumps immediately to the tone. Without intending to, I start objecting to their certitude, their lack

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of consideration of other points of view. Even if I ultimately agree with their point, I automatically think up three or four objections to what they’re saying and then keep scrolling.

I have never “won” an argument on Facebook or Twitter, in the sense of having someone acknowledge that they see my point and have changed their position, and I have become increasingly reluctant to post or comment on controversial issues. Why put myself or others through the frustration? Should my reluctance to post be considered the silence of wisdom, or is it the cowardice or laziness of not wanting to take the heat for supporting a principled stand?

I have good ideas. When the issue of football players kneeling during the national anthem came up, for instance, I had a helpful solution for that! I also had some useful ideas about the Confederate monuments, the tax bill that Congress passed, the Dreamers, and a few other issues of the day. Ultimately, I decided to keep my thoughts to myself.

Why? I have been social media exchanges on such issues before, and it almost always ends in frustration. I set forth my idea, and almost immediately I’m blasted by someone on the other side who is not really addressing the specifics of what I’m saying but is simply stating the conclusion they came to long ago. My attempts to push back and clarify lead only to more muddled and sometimes increasingly angry exchanges. More friends jump in, the “conversation” hopelessly fragments, and pretty soon I’m sorry I posted anything in the first place.

In the meantime, the whole thing has been a big distraction. Instead of doing the real work I have to do, I find myself obsessed with composing responses in my head to a debate that isn’t headed anywhere anyway.

It’s tempting to drop out of social media discussions altogether, but I don’t like that idea either. When I consider this dilemma, two quotes do battle in my mind. The first is Edmund Burke’s famous line, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” The second is Paul’s advice in 2 Timothy 2:23: “Don’t have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels.”

Paul certainly wasn’t reluctant to speak out about what he believed in. In fact, he gave his life for it. But would he have spent time on Facebook posts about kneeling during the national anthem or the best approach to tax reform?

I can’t say what Paul would do, but for me, I have decided to not entangle myself in social media disputes unless I really feel compelled to add my voice to the debate. I will ask myself, is this an issue on which I can really have some influence? Is speaking out on this topic contributing something, or is it a time-waster? Posting on Facebook sometimes gives the illusion of “doing something” about an issue, but sometimes instead of posting, I need to—well, do something.

I don’t want to be just one more person pointless voice weighing in on every Trump tweet or blasting away on an issue I really don’t know all that much about. I want to speak when it can mean something. Otherwise, I can enjoy the freedom of just letting it go.

Millennials, the much-picked-on generation of young people from about 18 years old to their early 30s, are often referred to as the “Lost Generation.” A Washington Post opinion writer named Catherine Rampell summed up many of the stereotypes about this generation in an article she wrote (with “Lost Generation” in the headline) a couple years ago: “For years you’ve probably been reading about aimless, idle millennials hunkering down in their parents’ basements, filling their days with video games, Instagram and deep, longing gazes upon their shelf of participation trophies. Members of the Boomerang Generation simply haven’t been sufficiently motivated — or well-parented? — to get a damn job, spouse and apartment of their own already.”

The term “Lost Generation” is borrowed from Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926. I am teaching that novel right now in a literature course at Azusa Pacific University. The quote “You are all a lost generation” appears as an epigraph on the first page of the novel, and it is attributed to Gertrude Stein.

According to a story Stein told, the “lost generation” phrase came from a French garage mechanic who said he could not hire anyone between the ages of 22 and 30 because they were no good, spoiled, lacked respect, and drank too much. Does that sound like a familiar list of complaints about today’s “lost generation”? Never mind that the young ne’er-do-wells Stein and the garage owner were referring to had just won World War I. They were still “lost.”

When Hemingway’s novel came out, his publisher’s advertising team “pushed it as the tome encapsulating the voice of the ‘war generation too strongly dosed with reality . . . all illusions shattered, all reticences dissipated,’” according to scholar Lesley M.M. Blume.

Hemingway was not pleased with that marketing strategy. Defining an entire generation had not been his intention. His Lost Generation quote shares the page with another epigraph, a quote from Ecclesiastes, which begins, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. . . .The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose. . . .”

He meant for the quotes to comment on one another. As Blume explains, Hemingway believed “Stein’s ‘lost generation’ remark was merely ‘bombast,’ and he had meant to lampoon its pomposity, not endorse it. . . .To Hemingway, the whole point of the book was that ‘the earth abideth forever.’ Wasn’t that obvious enough?”

When it comes to rejecting easy labels for an entire generation, I’m with Hemingway. I teach Millennials at APU and have done so ever since they came along. I don’t think they’re any more “lost” than any other generation I have taught. They do have their quirks. They don’t take notes in class as much as previous generations, for instance. They would rather take a picture of what I write on the whiteboard than copy it down on paper. They can’t write in cursive as well as previous generations, and some of them have trouble even reading it. They’d rather text than talk on the phone, and email strikes them as old-fashioned.

But lost? Only in the way that all generations are lost. The King James Bible that Hemingway was quoting from teaches that all human beings are lost in and in need of rescue by Jesus Christ. Hemingway was reluctant to follow the teaching all the way to redemption, but he did agree with the lost part. He simply didn’t think one generation was all that different from another.

I am skeptical of generational stereotypes or conclusions. In the more than 30 years that I have taught English, people have often asked, why can’t students write as well as they used to? But people have always said that. Gertrude Stein had trouble finding a good garage mechanic a hundred years ago, and it isn’t so easy today either. But let’s not blame any particular generation. “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever.”

That’s what they call it. Real.

That implies, of course, that what they’ve been doing at the university for the previous four years or so is not real, an assumption I vigorously challenge.

The course I teach most often is a survey course called American Literature Since 1865. It is real. I can tell you from about 30 years of teaching this class—and the feedback I have received from students—that the reading the students do in the course brings moments of insight and inspiration that are as important as anything they will experience after college. I’m talking about times inside and outside of class when we get lost in the literature, caught up in the stories, challenged by the poetry, awakened intellectually and spiritually by the things that matter most. Not every day, of course, and not for every person at the same time. A class day that is life-changing for one student may leave another student cold.

But some moments are life-changing. I’ve known students who have changed their major to English based on one literature course they had signed up for simply to fulfill a General Education requirement.

In my American literature survey course, we cover about 50 authors over the course of a semester. Students delve into the gut-wrenching psychological journey of Edna Pontellier as she questions every assumption about her role and identity in life in Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening. We work our way through a very different kind of journey in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, as Huck wiggles out of one scrape after another while also trying to help his friend, the escaped slave Jim, reach freedom. We analyze the opposing perspectives and approaches toward race of  Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.

We spend time with the fascinating but dysfunctional families in Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. We’re challenged and inspired by the poetry of T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Adrienne Rich, Emily Dickinson, E.E. Cummings, Theodore Roethke, and Billy Collins. We marvel at the creative storytelling techniques of William Faulkner in his novel As I Lay Dying. We enter the worlds of a wide variety of American lives in the stories of John Updike, Toni Morrison, Julia Alvarez, Rudolfo Anaya, and Amy Tan. As students read and consider the lives and ideas of others, they rethink their own relationships, challenges their own biases, and form a better understanding of the past. Sometimes become lifelong fans of authors they had previously never heard of.

None of that is real?

Only a job after graduation is real?

Our students do get jobs, too, by the way. Or they go to graduate school, or do missions trips, or pursue dreams in a variety of ways. I don’t diminish the importance of that, or of paying off the high cost of the college experience.

What I’m fighting is this perception that college is only preparation for life and is not life itself. The years you spend in college are real years, just like the years you spend in your thirties or any other time. Why reduce the college years to simply a time to endure so you can move on to “real life”? Why not relish every phase of life? I don’t know many people in their thirties, for example, who behave as if that time is mainly preparation for their seventies.

I’ve been focusing on one of my courses as an example of what’s real, but I could choose many others from my colleagues in English, and that’s only one department. Other fields are just as crucial, and not only for job preparation, but also for life—psychology, economics, theology, art, music, history, and others. And that’s just the curricular part of college. I haven’t touched on all the other elements of college life such as friendships, service, international study and travel, spiritual worship and development, and all the fun that college students also have.

Isn’t all that real?

I admit that this lack of satisfaction may not be entirely the fault of the movie itself. I am a Thomas Wolfe fan and scholar and have loved his work for almost 30 years, so it’s possible that nothing less than about a 9-hour movie would have been enough to satisfy me.

Perhaps my overall reaction to the film can best be summed up by a comment I kept making to my wife as she and I sat in a coffee shop right after the movie and discussed our responses. She has not read Wolfe or A. Scott Berg’s book on which this movie is based, so as she mentioned scenes that stood out to her and asked if that’s what really happened, I kept saying, “Well, yes, but it was more complicated than that.”

Any film on this subject would have to oversimplify some things, of course. Perkins became one of the greatest editors of 20^th century American literature, as he helped establish not only Wolfe’s career but also that of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and others. He was a complex figure, as Berg’s book, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, brilliantly shows. Wolfe was equally complex, and the relationship between him and his editor, both when it was working well and when it was crumbling, is hard to capture in any movie of a couple of hours. Throw in other elements such as Wolfe’s tempestuous affair with his lover Aline Bernstein (Nicole Kidman), and Perkins’ relationships with his wife and daughters, and you have enough material for a min-series rather than a movie.

Still, even though as I watched it I kept thinking, “Wait, slow down, there’s more to show about that incident,” I still enjoyed the movie overall and strongly recommend it. Here are a few moments that stand out:

• The opening 10 minutes alone made are worth the price of the whole movie for me. An editor plops the huge manuscript of Wolfe’s O Lost (which would eventually become Look Homeward, Angel) onto Perkins’ desk and asks him to read it. Perkins promises to give it a quick look, but in the following minutes, as we hear voice-over passages from the book, Perkins is mesmerized by the novel over the next few days as he rides the train, ignores the greetings of his family at home, or sits at his desk and combs through page after page. The beauty of the writing itself is what Perkins was masterful at recognizing, and this scene captures it.

• Colin Firth gives the best performance in the film. He embodies Perkins’ reserved but in-control personality that served him so well as an editor and that comes through so forcefully in Berg’s book. Perkins was able to modulate his responses to the needs of the very different personalities of his authors. He did not participate in the foibles of those men, but he didn’t turn away from them because of those flaws either. He was the true father-figure, strong and steady.

• Even though some of the factual details of how Wolfe and Perkins worked together on Of Time and the River are altered, the film brings to life the creative collaboration of these two men as they spend hours arguing and editing and wrestling the manuscript into shape.

• Even some of the small moments make the film memorable—stacks of Look Homeward, Angel appearing in the bookstore window at the novel’s release, Perkins reading the book to his daughter when she misses Tom, the moving reading of Wolfe’s final letter to Perkins (even though some details of its composition and delivery are altered).

For many of us who love Wolfe’s writing, our hope has been that this film would bring Wolfe the renewed attention we think his work deserves. We hope readers will want to go out and read one of his novels. I believe this movie may have that effect. As the film ended, I heard a woman behind us tell her friend she hadn’t read any of Wolfe’s novels, but she sounded as if she wanted to. I hope she does. I was ready to go home and read one of them again myself.

One example I refer to in the first chapter is the Boll Weevil Monument in Enterprise, Alabama. Why did the people build it? The following excerpt from the book suggests the answer:

When a Destructive Insect Embodies Redemption

The boll weevil is an ugly little insect that loves cotton. Over the past hundred years, it has caused billions of dollars in dam­age to cotton crops in the United States and elsewhere. Numerous farmers across the decades have gone bankrupt because of this one pest. Scientists have used every means they can think of to try to eradicate it—pesticides, wasps, fungi, specially engineered anti-weevil cotton plants, and other methods. The fight against it continues to this day, and the eradication programs have been largely successful.

No one sheds a tear for the boll weevil. Just about everybody wants to kill it. So I was surprised when my friend Jim Davis, who lives in Alabama, a state that historically has been plagued with wee­vils, told me that a town named Enterprise, Alabama, has a boll wee­vil monument prominently displayed in the center of its downtown.

A monument to a destructive insect would be surprising in any town, but for Enterprise, Alabama, to honor such a creature seems especially strange, considering the destruction the boll weevil has wreaked on that town and the surrounding county. As the town’s historians report, in the early twentieth century, the boll weevil destroyed almost 60 percent of the county’s main crop of cotton, and farmers were at risk of utter ruin.1 Their failure would have meant devastation for the entire economy of that region.

The monument the town built to this pest in 1919 features a statue of a woman standing in Statue-of-Liberty-like robes, her arms held high above her head. In her hands, on top of a kind of pedestal, stands a large and ugly boll weevil. A flowing fountain surrounds this statue.

The farmers in Coffee County, Alabama, where Enterprise is located, were determined not to let the boll weevil defeat them. Instead, they turned its destructive behavior into an opportunity to diversify their crops and be more successful in the long run. If the crisis of the boll weevil had not forced the issue, they might never have made changes and would have missed out on the pros­perity the shift brought them. Peanuts in particular became an especially profitable crop for the region.

As the Enterprise history relates, “By 1917, Coffee County produced and harvested more peanuts than any other county in the nation. (In 1993, Coffee County ranked 4th in the state of Alabama with 128,000 acres planted in peanuts.)” The plaque that accompanies the monu­ment states, “In profound appreciation of the Boll Weevil and what it has done as the herald of Prosperity this monument was erected by the citizens of Enterprise, Coffee County, Alabama.” The work of a pest was redeemed.

Read more in Nothing is Wasted: How God Redeems What is Broken (Beacon Hill Press, 2016).

Many forces stand ready to squash the creative self. You no doubt have been struck by these enemies. Even the most successful people are prone to these creativity crushers. To name just one example, there are the naysayers. These are the people who tell you, either directly or in some other dismissive way, that you just can’t do it. You’re not good enough. Or you’re not as good as you used to be. Who do you think you are? Nobody asked for your creativity.

Growing up, I always felt vaguely embarrassed about wanting to be a writer. I feared that if I said too much about it, I was simply opening myself up to mockery. It felt so pretentious to want to write a novel. Who was I?

So I hid it. I wrote my first novel almost secretly. When I would go off to write, I would be vague with family and friends about what I was doing, telling them simply that I had work to do. In college, I was so paranoid about my roommates reading over my shoulder that I developed a secret coded language in which I could write when others were around, which I then had to decode later.

Today I am still tempted to let my creativity be squashed, not so much by naysayers, but by other enemies such as procrastination, the pressures of life, fear of rejection, weariness.

Yet the words, the ideas, keep bubbling up. When the ideas come, I think, I have to write this. Why is no one else saying this? I find myself writing as fast as I can, letting the momentum carry me. In those great moments, the creativity blasts right through the doubts, tiredness, discouragement, and second-guessing. I write. I create.

This semester I am working with an outstanding group of writers in a course I am teaching in the new M.A. in English program at Azusa Pacific University. The theme of our course, which I write on the board every week, is, What is possible for me as a writer?

Part of our work involves breaking down obstacles that discourage creativity. I will mention only two of them here, which stall many writers:

1. Nobody cares whether you create or not. The world is not asking for your work. Nobody is out there saying, “The world is a diminished place because you are sitting there not doing your writing.” If you don’t write, they won’t know or care. The world will go right on.

2. The market is already glutted. Mountains of work are already being rejected every day. So who needs you in there adding to that pile and struggling to compete?

Harsh, I know. I’m reluctant to even mention those things, but for many writers, it’s not as if these dark thoughts don’t already plague us fairly regularly.

So why keep writing?

Let’s look at that first obstacle. The world may not be asking for your work and may not think they need it, but the world in fact may be a diminished place without your writing. Think of your favorite author. Would your life be diminished if that writer had not written the books you love? Of course. For example, I love the novels of Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. Some of the most meaningful hours of my life have been spent with their words flowing through my head. The world would be a much shallower place if they had let obstacles to writing stand in their way, and for both of them, there were many obstacles.

You may or may not have the wide impact of those two writers, but picture one reader who reads your words at just the right moment, who is challenged, inspired, or entertained by exactly what you have to say. You have made the world richer for that reader, and perhaps many others, even people who haven’t been born yet. Write for those readers. It’s worth it.

As for the second obstacle, the glutted market, it’s true. Amazon boasts around 8 million books, more than the world needs for a lifetime. Online and print magazines, newspapers, website, blogs and other sources have an almost infinite number of articles, videos, lists, and other material available. There is no shortage.

And yet, as a reader, don’t you still find yourself searching for something new, something that fills a particular need that sometimes you can’t even articulate? Be the writer who writes that for someone else.

As a writer, I have known the joy of connecting with readers. Not as many as I would like to have connected with, of course. But I have known the fulfillment of connecting with that individual reader who gets what I’m doing, who loves it, who needs it. That’s what keeps me writing. I’m not willing to let anything crush it.

I spent the entire day reading Go Set a Watchman, but rather than do a typical review, I want to focus on four issues I think are being ignored in the early reviews and discussions of this novel.

1. I believe it is a mistake to see Atticus Finch as simply older and more racist than he was in Mockingbird. Instead, I think he is essentially a different character in Watchman than the reconceived Atticus in Mockingbird. In other words, there are two Atticuses, created by the author to fit the needs of the particular book.  

Why is Atticus Finch so different in Watchman than he is in Mockingbird? The publication history of the two novels is crucial in answering that question. Lee submitted Watchman to her editor in the 1950’s. The editor, enjoying the childhood flashbacks the most, urged Lee to write a novel set 20 years earlier, focusing on those elements of the story. In doing so, I believe Lee created an alternate version of Atticus Finch. He is a different character in Mockingbird than in Watchman, though carved from the same materials.

Mockingbird and Watchman are not really sequels or prequels to one another. They are separate treatments of the same core material. Even the outcome of the trial that is central to Mockingbird is different when it is referred to in Watchman. Lee never expected to publish both books. She did not need to keep the characters completely consistent between the two books. She had the freedom to adjust the characters to meet the needs of the particular book. One implication of this for readers is that if they don’t like the Atticus in Watchman, that doesn’t need to “ruin” the Atticus in Mockingbird for them. They can choose whichever conception of the character they like best.

The Scout character in Watchman, who is more commonly called Jean Louise, also strikes me as significantly different from the Scout character in Mockingbird. It’s not simply that she is twenty years older in Watchman, it’s that I don’t think she is simply a grown-up version of the Mockingbird Scout. She is a reconceived character. She is not radically different in the two books, but different in ways that novelists often change the personalities and other traits of their characters in later drafts of the stories.

2. If Harper Lee had written Go Set a Watchman now instead of in the 1950’s, I think there would be an even greater outcry against it from readers.

If we didn’t know that Lee wrote Watchman before she wrote Mockingbird, then I think the changes in the character of Atticus Finch would be even harder for readers to accept. If Watchman had been written in the 21^st century, I think readers would have protested it as a cynical modern treatment of a beloved 20^th-century American hero. Why, they would have complained, did Lee turn the justice-loving man of integrity of Mockingbird into the racist cranky-old-man of Watchman?

As it stands, I find it fascinating that Lee saw that the character could be written as both of those men. The relationship between Scout and Atticus is more complicated in Watchman than it is in Mockingbird, but what is fiction for if not to shed light on such intricacies of human motivations and relationships? We have had 55 years of Atticus as an unblemished saint. Now we also have him as a fascinating and contradictory man of his times.

3. Go Set a Watchman is not only about race. Its brilliance extends to other areas that are not getting enough attention.

Much of what I have read in reviews and on social media about Watchman has focused on the racial issues the book raises, but when I read the novel, many other elements of it also stood out to me. Like Mockingbird, this novel richly captures small-town Southern life in the middle of the twentieth century. It brings to life the feel of what it is like for Jean Louise to return from living in New York City and be thrust into the family life, church life, and social life of the place she grew up in. Lee is a masterful storyteller who uses humor and passion in creating vivid, memorable scenes.

One of my favorite chapters appears about two-thirds of the way into the novel, when Jean Louise’s Aunt Alexandra hosts “The Coffee,” a reunion of Jean Louise’s former classmates and other women of the town, almost none of whom Jean Louise wants to see. The social satire of this gathering targets the way the women dress, the way they chatter on about their husbands and children, the way they reveal their prejudices, and other details of Southern life. It is beautifully handled and worth reading the novel for. It shows that Lee was a masterful novelist of manners, among her many other gifts as a writer.

4. The release of Watchman reveals that Lee owes her editor a big thanks for compelling her to set aside this book and write Mockingbird instead. Watchman is a good book, but by itself, it would not have become a classic.

Most readers’ first encounter with To Kill a Mockingbird is in a high school literature class, where it has been a standard text for decades. The book has all the features that create a beloved classic—a compelling young narrator who shows courage, grit, and humor in confronting challenges young readers can relate to, a plot that offers conflicts that are universal in scope, a memorable setting, an engaging writing style, and other elements.

Watchman is also an entertaining and well-written novel, but it is much more targeted toward adults. I believe that if it had been released first instead of Mockingbird, it would have enjoyed some success and then gradually faded into the literary background. Lee’s editor’s instincts were correct in pushing the author to bring to the forefront Scout’s earlier story. This shows the crucial and often overlooked role editors play in the creation of literature.

By Alton Gansky

In January of 2015, Baker Books will release my latest nonfiction work, 30 Events That Shaped the Church. It comes on the heels of the 2014 release, 60 People Who Shaped the Church. Some are surprised to learn that I write book-length nonfiction. True most of my books are novels but I also enjoy and see great value in producing nonfiction books as well.

While preparing 30 Events I went through a long list of possible topics. In the end, one chapter caught my attention and so infiltrated my mind that I’m still researching it long after I turned the manuscript in. As I worked through the centuries I came upon a week long event that most of us have heard of but few of us know much about: The Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925. When I research I try to keep my mind free of bias, which is a difficult thing to do. Still, I thought I knew a fair amount about the “Trial of the Century.” I didn’t.

Part of my preparation was to watch an old movie (1960), based on an older stage play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, Inherit the Wind. I remember it being one of the best movies ever made, made all the more memorable by actors like Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, as well as Gene Kelly (no dancing in this movie), and Dick York (later of Bewitched fame) who portrayed John T. Scopes (Bertram T. Cates in the movie). This time, I watched the movie with a critical eye and was surprised how far they had strayed from the truth.

To be fair, Lawrence and Lee, as well as director Stanley Kramer, went out to their way to alert viewers that they were watching a movie, not a documentary. The movie begins with these words:

“Inherit the Wind is not history. The events which took place in Dayton, Tennessee, during the scorching July of 1925 are clearly the genesis of this play. It has, however, an exodus entirely its own. [. . .] So Inherit the Wind does not pretend to be journalism. It is theatre.”

I appreciate the honesty of the writers. Still—and this is the problem with some types of fiction—many took the events as historical fact. To this day, people who have seen the movie think:

William Jennings Bryan was a glutton. (He was a diabetic on a very strict diet at the time of the trial.)

Clarence Darrow crushed Bryan’s beliefs as the latter sat in the witness stand. (Darrow ridicule people of faith but it had no impact on Bryan.)

That Bryan was a buffoon. (He ran for president three times, was a great orator, served as Secretary of State, and was a gifted writer).

That the townspeople of Dayton wanted to hang Scopes from a tree. (Nothing of the sort happened.)

And that Bryan died in the courtroom, the victim of Darrow’s grueling examination and ridicule of biblical stores. (Bryan died five days later from complications of diabetes. He remained active in the days following the trial.)

When I was in college, my psychology professor told the class that the human mind has trouble distinguishing between reality and fiction. It is the reason we jump in scary movies or tear up reading a sad scene.

All of this to say, that we as author’s of fiction need to take care how we represent figures and events in history. Lawrence and Lee went so far as to change the name of the characters (although they also went out of their way to make the actors look like William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow). Despite their efforts, fifty-four years after the movie (longer for the play the preceded it) people still think the movie is trustworthy history.

This realization puts a burden of responsibility on the shoulders of novelists. While the novelist’s goal is to entertain, we in the Christian market also want to edify and to do so we need to be as accurate as we can be when portraying real people.

William Jennings Bryan’s reputation and work was sullied by the play and later the movie, despite the authors’ and director’s efforts to make clear their story was only loosely drawn from the real 1925 court case. Nonetheless, many have taken the fiction and see it as fact.

We novelist take some needed liberties in our creation, but when it involves real people from the past (or worse, vaguely disguised characterizations of living people), then we run the risk of doing harm.

Alton Gansky has written over 40 books of fiction and nonfiction. His latest work 30 Events That Shaped the Church: Learning from scandal, intrigue, war, and revival releases mid January 2015. He is also the director of the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference. www.altongansky.com – See more at: http://altongansky.typepad.com/writersconferences/2014/12/the-need-for-factual-fiction.html#sthash.dBW1l0nG.dpuf