The Biggest Lessons I’ve Learned About Writing Books

1. You don’t need permission to call yourself a writer. You need a sentence.
2. The blank page is never actually blank — it’s full of every book you’ve read that made you want to write one.
3. I didn’t become a writer because I was already good at it — I became one because I loved reading and was willing to stay diligent through years of rejection before that first contract ever came.
4. The idea that excites you and scares you a little is usually the right one.
5. The first book teaches you how to finish a book. Every book after that teaches you something else.
6. Genre is a container, not a cage — but you do need to know which container you’ve picked up before you start pouring.

On Discipline and Process

1. Inspiration is lovely. Deadlines are what actually produce books.
2. I have written through sick kids, book tours, grief, and deadlines that felt impossible — and the manuscripts that came out of the hardest seasons are sometimes the ones I’m proudest of.
3. A bad writing day still counts if you showed up.
4. Word count goals matter less than the habit of returning to the page.
5. I don’t write books in order just because chapters come in order. If a scene from three-quarters of the way through the book is vivid in my mind right now, I write it now, out of sequence, and stitch the connective tissue in later.
6. Homeschooling ten kids taught me to write in twenty-minute pockets. I’d tell the kids “let’s wrap up this page,” step away for ten minutes, jot the scene down, and come back. Some of my best chapters were built that way, in stolen fragments, not long open afternoons.
7. Burnout doesn’t announce itself. It creeps in disguised as “I’ll push through.”
8. I plan differently for every genre — a cozy mystery needs a clue map; a devotional needs a spiritual arc; a split-time novel needs two outlines that shake hands at the right moments.

On Research

1. Research is never wasted, even the 90% of it that never makes it onto the page. It’s what lets the 10% ring true.
2. One research thread can hand you an entire book you didn’t know you were looking for. While researching Arms of Deliverance, I read the memoir of a B-17 bomber pilot who, before flying over Europe, had volunteered in the Spanish Civil War — a war I’d never even heard of. That single autobiography sent me down a path that eventually became its own series.
3. I have interviewed survivors, walked the actual ground where scenes take place, and spent hours in archives for a single paragraph of finished prose — because a detail that’s merely plausible reads differently than a detail that’s true.
4. Research for historical fiction and research for self-help look nothing alike, but they demand the same rigor: don’t tell the reader something you haven’t verified.
5. Over-research is a real trap. At some point you have to stop gathering string and start writing the book.
6. Primary sources beat secondary sources every time you can get them — a letter, a diary, an original interview will always outperform a summary of one.
7. When I can’t verify a detail, I don’t guess. I either find the answer or write around the gap.

On Craft

1. Voice is the one thing you cannot outline. It shows up somewhere around chapter three and you have to go back and fix chapters one and two once it does.
2. The sentence-level work matters more in some genres than others, but it always matters.
3. I revise for structure first, language second. A beautifully written scene that doesn’t belong in the book is still a scene that doesn’t belong in the book.
4. Every manuscript has a “true center” — the scene or theme the whole book is actually about — and I usually don’t find it until the second or third draft.
5. Cutting is a craft skill, not just an editing chore. Learning what to leave out took me longer than learning what to put in.
6. Dialogue reveals character faster than description ever will.
7. The opening line matters, but the opening page matters more. Don’t over-polish line one at the expense of the paragraph around it.
8. Endings are a promise-keeping exercise — you owe the reader payoff on everything you set up.

On Faith and Story

1. Writing from a place of faith doesn’t mean writing without darkness. Some of the truest spiritual moments in my books happen in the middle of the mess, not after it’s resolved.
2. A book doesn’t need a sermon in it to carry a spiritual truth. Sometimes the story is the sermon.
3. I’ve learned to trust readers to find the meaning rather than handing it to them pre-chewed.

On Rejection, Revision, and Growing a Backlist

1. My first rejection letter did not predict my seventy-fifth published book. Neither will yours.
2. Every editor’s note that stung turned out, months later, to have been right more often than it was wrong.
3. My breakthrough didn’t come from a rejection letter — it came from a community college scene-writing class taught by a former Hollywood scriptwriter. One lecture on how scenes actually work changed how I wrote, and I had a book contract within the year. The rejections before that had already taught me what didn’t work; that class taught me what did.
4. Comparison between your book two and someone else’s book twenty is a trap. Compare your book two to your book one instead.
5. I’ve had to let go of books I loved that weren’t working, and I’ve had to fight for books nobody else believed in yet. Knowing the difference takes experience you can only earn by writing a lot of books.

On the Writing Life

1. Community matters. I did not build this backlist alone, and neither will you.
2. Family life and deadline life will collide. Plan for it; don’t be surprised by it.
3. Say no to the projects that don’t fit your season, even the exciting ones. I’ve learned this one the hard way more than once.
4. Success looks different at book five than it does at book fifty. Let your definition evolve.

PART TWO

What Each Genre Specifically Taught Me About Writing

Historical Fiction

1. Historical fiction demands a partnership between imagination and accuracy that no other genre requires quite the same way.
2. The research has to come first, but the story still has to come first — you’re serving two masters, and neither one gets to win outright.
3. My first novel, From Dust and Ashes, grew out of recorded interviews I gathered from WWII veterans — stories I felt I had to preserve, not just borrow for fiction. Years later it’s still in print and has been translated into other languages.
4. A single trip changed the direction of my whole career. Not long after caring for my dying grandfather, I traveled to Europe with two novelist friends who were researching their own books. Our last stop was Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria ��� the one place on the itinerary I least wanted to visit. What I saw and learned there became the novel that started my WWII writing life, and my agent’s reaction when I pitched it says everything: she told me it didn’t sound like anything I’d written before, and asked where it had come from.
5. Small anachronisms break trust fast. A reader who catches one wrong detail starts hunting for more.
6. The emotional truth of history often matters more than the literal timeline — I’ve had to compress, combine, and reorder real events while staying faithful to what it actually felt like to live through them.
7. War, in particular, taught me that restraint on the page is more powerful than showing everything. The reader’s imagination does heavier lifting than my prose could.
8. I write an author’s note for every historical novel, because readers deserve to know where the history ends and the fiction begins.
9. The best historical fiction details are the mundane ones — what people ate, what they worried about, what was in short supply — not just the headline events.
10. The veterans I interviewed became more than sources — I stayed in touch with many of them for years, and some read my manuscripts before publication just to make sure I’d gotten it right. One of the most meaningful moments of my career was reconnecting a Holocaust survivor with the medic who had saved her life decades earlier, simply because she’d read my novel and recognized enough detail to ask.
11. Not every research trip needs to be about the “main” story you think you’re telling. On a mission trip to the Czech Republic, a conversation with a pastor’s wife about WWII led me to the story of a rescued Jewish child — and that offhand conversation became the seed of an entirely new novel.

Contemporary Fiction

1. Contemporary fiction removes the safety net of “it happened a long time ago” — readers will measure your world against the one they’re living in right now.
2. Cultural specifics date fast. I write toward what’s emotionally true rather than what’s trending, because trends expire and emotional truth doesn’t.
3. Contemporary stories let me put real, current struggles on the page — but they demand more restraint about which real struggles are actually mine to tell.

Split-Time Novels

1. Two timelines are really two novels that have to earn the right to live in the same book.
2. The connective tissue — the object, the letter, the house, the mystery — has to be strong enough to justify cutting away from either story at its most tense moment.
3. I outline split-time books differently than anything else: two full character arcs, mapped against each other, with the emotional beats of one timeline echoing or contrasting the other.
4. “The past and the present have to be in conversation, not just in proximity.
5. Readers will have a favorite timeline. Your job is to make them love both enough not to mind when you cut away.

Amish and Faith-Based Romance (including the Big Sky series)

1. Amish fiction readers are some of the most loyal, detail-oriented readers I’ve written for — they know the world, and they’ll tell you when you get it wrong.
2. Setting a series in a specific place, like Montana’s Big Sky country, meant the landscape itself had to function like a character with its own arc.
3. I didn’t come to Amish fiction on my own — an editor asked if I’d be interested, and I had to sit with the idea before saying yes. What sealed it was meeting friends who had actually relocated their Amish family from Indiana to Montana. Learning about that real community was what hooked me.
4. The whole Big Sky series traces back to one true story: a couple named Ora Jay and Irene Eash, who left their Amish community after losing two daughters in a buggy accident and started over in a small Amish settlement in Montana. Their real hardship and resilience became the emotional foundation for Beside Still Waters and the books that followed it.
5. Faith-based romance still needs real conflict. Sweetness without stakes isn’t a story, it’s a greeting card.
6. Series work taught me to think in arcs longer than one book — planting threads in book one that don’t pay off until book three.

Children’s Picture Books

1. Picture books taught me more about economy of language than any other genre. Every single word has to earn its place when you only have a few hundred of them.
2. You’re writing half a book. The illustrator writes the other half. Learning to leave room for art rather than over-describing was a real shift for me.
3. Rhythm and read-aloud sound matter as much as meaning. I read every line out loud, more than once, before it’s finished.
4. Children are an unsentimental audience. They know when a story is talking down to them.

YA Nonfiction

1. Teen readers can smell condescension from a mile away — you have to respect their intelligence even when simplifying complex material.
2. Structure carries more weight in nonfiction. A confused reader in fiction might stay for the voice; a confused reader in nonfiction just closes the book.
3. YA nonfiction taught me to answer the question “why should a teenager care about this” on nearly every page.

Cozy Mysteries

1. Cozy mysteries run on clockwork. I plot backward from the reveal more rigorously here than in any other genre I write.
2. Fair play matters — the reader has to have had a real chance to solve it, which means every clue has to be planted before it’s needed and never invented after the fact.
3. “A cozy mystery is a puzzle wearing a story’s clothes — but the story still has to be good enough to want to solve it slowly.”
4. Red herrings need their own internal logic. A red herring that only exists to mislead the reader, with no other reason to be in the book, always feels cheap.
5. The community/setting in a cozy carries as much weight as the crime — readers come back for the town, the characters, the feeling of home, as much as for whodunit.

Biblical Novels

1. Writing characters whose stories readers already think they know requires a different kind of research — theological, historical, and cultural, all at once.
2. I have to hold real reverence for the text alongside real creative freedom in the gaps Scripture leaves open, and knowing where that line sits took study.
3. The white space in Scripture — what isn’t said — is often where the richest fiction lives, as long as it doesn’t contradict what is said.
4. Readers of biblical fiction bring deep personal faith to the page. That’s a trust I don’t take lightly.

Steampunk Fantasy

1. Steampunk fantasy was the genre that gave me the most creative freedom — and freedom, it turns out, needs just as much internal logic as historical accuracy does.
2. World-building rules have to be consistent even when they’re invented. Readers will forgive a fantastical premise; they won’t forgive it breaking its own rules.
3. Blending real Victorian-era history with invented technology meant the research habits from historical fiction came in more useful than I expected.
4. Genre-blending taught me that “the rules of fantasy” and “the rules of historical fiction” aren’t actually opposites — they both come down to internal consistency.

Self-Help

1. Self-help has to be useful on a Tuesday, not just inspiring on a Sunday. I test every principle against the question: can a reader actually do this tomorrow?
2. Vulnerability is currency in this genre — readers trust the advice more when they can see it cost the author something.
3. Co-writing someone else’s story is its own genre skill. Working with Todd and Brooke Tilghman on Every Little Win, my job wasn’t to tell my story — it was to help them tell theirs honestly, from adopting children and fighting for a critically ill newborn’s life to a near-divorce and Todd’s Voice win. The craft challenge was staying invisible enough that it reads entirely in their voice.
4. Structure has to serve skimmability. Readers don’t read self-help cover to cover the way they read a novel; they dip in where they need help.
5. The best self-help doesn’t just tell readers what to do — it tells them why they haven’t been doing it already.

Memoir

1. Memoir is the genre that costs the most to write and asks the most of the writer’s honesty.
2. I’ve had to write about people I love, which means weighing truth-telling against grace on nearly every page.
3. Writing Teen Mom and Blue Like Play Dough meant putting my own story on the page — becoming a mother at seventeen, and the shame that came with a visible, unhideable situation in a small community. The hardest part wasn’t remembering it. It was trusting that naming the shame honestly, instead of glossing it, was what would actually help the reader who was living it now.
4. The events of a memoir are true, but the shape of a memoir is still a craft choice — you’re still selecting, sequencing, and building toward meaning like any other story.
5. Distance helps. The chapters I could write most honestly were often about the seasons I’d had the most time to make peace with.
6. Memoir taught me that the reader isn’t actually interested in your life — they’re interested in what your life illuminates about theirs.
7. Coordinating a teen mom support group for over a decade shaped how I write memoir more than any craft book did. Sitting across from young moms facing the exact fears I once faced taught me which details actually help someone and which ones are just for show.

365-Day Devotionals

1. Writing 365 entries taught me a kind of discipline no single book ever has — you cannot coast for even one day out of the year.
2. Devotional writing lives or dies on variety within a very tight form: same structure, same rough length, every day, for a year — and it still has to feel fresh on day 340.
3. Short-form spiritual writing forced me to trust brevity — one true thought, developed simply, beats three underdeveloped ones.
4. Devotionals taught me to think in seasons — readers experience day 45 in winter and day 200 in summer, and the best devotionals feel aware of that rhythm even without saying so directly.
5. Repetition of theme across a year isn’t a flaw if it’s handled well — readers return to core truths the way they return to prayer, expecting familiarity, not just novelty.