to use to deliver a message through? I wanted to prove the
naysayers wrong by providing a few urban lit authors who
were an authority in the genre a platform to showcase the
diversity in their gift.
These authors brought out their A game and penned stories
that didn’t include explicit language or graphic sex scenes,
while at the same time giving honor to the one who gave
them their gift in the first place.
How much of your stories mirror your real life or the
lives of people you know?
As a fiction author, my formula is to write what I know first,
research what I don’t know, and then make up all the rest.
I had no idea that every book I wrote would be about me.
I’m glad I didn’t know, because sometimes knowing too
much will keep us from doing what we’ve been called and
assigned to do. If I had known before sitting down to write
over thirty books that I was going to have to show readers
(through my writing) how awful of a mother I was to my
son that I got pregnant with at the age of 15 and gave birth
to at the age of 16, I would have never e ven purchased a
computer!
There are so many things penned in my books that I thought
were between just God and me, then He turned around
and tricked me into sharing it with the world. I won’t say
tricked, but there were a lot of things I’d forgotten about
in regard to my past. What I know is that God didn’t bring
them forth to hurt me, shame me, embarrass me, or make
me feel guilty. He brought them back to my remembrance
as a reminder of how far He brought me, so that I could
then turn around and let my readers know that if He did it
for me, then He can and will do it for them.
Do you have a specific outline when writing a new book?