Sabbatical Presents Pat Taylor Ellison with Novel Experience
By Pat Taylor Ellison, Ph.D.

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On the 2nd of April, 2007, I was shown to an office at The Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey – an office that held everything I needed for a writing leave: two desks, a long table to stack things on, all the free photocopying and printing I needed, internet access, telephone. Twelve good colleagues and several of their spouses were working on projects alongside me. I had a wonderful townhouse to live in up in the woods about three miles from the office. My family back home in Minnesota continued running the house, paying the bills, remodeling the kitchen, feeding the pets. My colleagues at Church Innovations jumped into my responsibilities, returned my phone calls, and generally did what I would have been doing in addition to their own work.

And what was I doing? Not sleeping enough, and also writing everything I could put down onto paper or the screen. My job was to write a novel or two for young readers and their parents that could help them deal with life’s troubles, in a way only Jesus Christ can help. What kind of trouble would that be, I wondered? Although I wasn’t sure for quite awhile, I thought that perhaps I was meant to focus on death and resurrection. Since I had never written fiction before, I had no idea how to start, except to write and just get good at writing. For three weeks no words came to me. I wrote character studies and short stories and travelogues and letters. I wrote every day from 8 a.m. until 1 or 2 p.m., ran out of steam, had lunch, and then sometimes I’d sit down again and write into the evening.

I knew who several of my novel’s main characters would be, somewhat based on children in my life, three of whom had died in their 20s or early 30s. I even knew how to draw a couple of the adult characters. I knew the settings very well, too. I just didn’t know what would happen. In short, I didn’t have a plot.

On my 22nd day at the Center, I counted how many days were left in my three-month stay. I had spent 22 and I had 70 left. A little panicked, I knew I had to begin. I would have to just start writing the characters I knew, in the setting I knew. Before I started that, I made a list of the characters I wanted to have and realized there were too many for one book. I also dissected The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for word count, page length and number of chapters. When I put my character list and setting selections alongside the specs for that great children’s book, I realized I had maybe three or four books of 18 short chapters apiece.

Then I needed something to help me see the interconnection of characters across the books, to help me see what instances of death and resurrection the characters would be dealing with. I tried to do it on several sheets of paper on the long table in my office, but I kept moving things around and erasing things. I began to long for a wall I could write on. When I asked whether there might be a chalk board that I could use somewhere at the Center, Cecilio Orantes, who has held everything together there for 20 years, told me, “Not really.” I said to him, “ Does ‘not really’ mean there is actually a chalk board somewhere?” He grinned and took me down to the basement, and there, with a slight break in the wooden frame’s upper right corner, was a chalk board, complete with an eraser and a box of chalk. Within the hour, Cecilio had propped it on the table in my office, and I was diagramming the books, four of them, and the big picture development that had to happen in each one before the next could begin.

The next day, I sat down at my computer and opened MS Word, as always. And then Lilly, one of the main characters, started pestering her mother to get her a dog. I could see it in my imagination. I could hear what she said and how she whined and growled at her weary mother. I could hear father laugh and distract her at the dinner table by announcing the family’s imminent vacation. And as I saw Lilly and her friends and heard them speak to one another, I typed how it seemed to me. Eleven days later, the first book was completely drafted.

This was an amazing experience, because I was riding (not so much writing) the story, along with the characters. As I went along, I became convinced that the children would do something that night, but it would happen in the morning instead. Or I thought one child would say that they should turn back, but another child said that instead. Reading about the writing process and hearing writers interviewed, I have heard these sorts of experiences before. Apparently it’s not uncommon, and most people who know about writing (editors, especially) say that when the story and the characters take on a life of their own, that’s a very good sign. Armed with this brilliant and quick process, I couldn’t wait to begin the second book. But I was in for a few surprises.

Pat Taylor Ellison, Ph.D., is the managing director of research for Church Innovations.