In part 1 of this series, I shared the early seeds of my decision to take a step back from my engineering career to write a legal thriller and why my personality and background made that choice so unlikely. We pick up the story by returning briefly to grad school, where I met the woman of my dreams.

Rebecca

Rebecca and I were introduced by mutual friends and within two weeks I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. She took another fifteen minutes beyond that but eventually came to the same conclusion. She is beautiful, kind, gentle, thoughtful, reliable, and fun. Perhaps her greatest qualities are her steadfast love and her unswerving faith in God.

When Rebecca accepted my marriage proposal, she thought she was marrying a soon-to-be professor. She stood by me when she found out that she had married an engineer instead. But, when I started to come home from work feeling drained, it was hard for her to understand why I didn’t make a change. When she sees a problem, she fixes it. She doesn’t complain. She doesn’t settle. She doesn’t procrastinate. She just gets things done. I love that about her.

We had some form of that conversation many times, but it never led anywhere. She did, however, come up with an innocent question that would change our lives.

Little did I know that she had an ulterior motive for her innocent question. She was fishing for Christmas gift ideas. That year she gave me a book called On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King. If you have any interest in writing, read that book. I’ll share just one of the ideas that helped resurrect the writer in me.

King expands the classic dictum, “write what you know,” to interpret it as broadly as possible. For a new writer, that dictum can be incredibly limiting if taken too seriously. If only experts wrote books completely within their expertise, science fiction would be limited to science fact, fantasy would not exist, and murder mysteries would only be written by murderers or detectives. Imagination is a huge part of fiction writing.

I eventually wanted to write a legal thriller with theological themes, but I wasn’t a lawyer or a theologian or a professional writer. “Writing what you know,” may infuse your work with authenticity. But, if you aren’t inspired by what you know best, write what you want to write and read as much as possible in your subject.

I was so pumped after reading King’s book that I began writing a novel in my spare time. It was an action adventure about a pastor, a hitman, and a grifter running from the mob. I wrote 15,000 aimless words and hit a wall.

Asha

Months later, I had one of the best days of my life. I was traveling for work and had arrived at my hotel for the night. Rebecca texted me to ask if I wanted to join her in a video chat. I knew immediately she was up to something.

A former colleague had recently approached me about moving to Texas for a job opportunity, so I thought maybe that’s why Rebecca wanted to talk face to digital face. That wasn’t the half of it.

“I found out something that might affect our decision,” she said with a sly grin, showing me the positive pregnancy test. I couldn’t figure out how to describe my joy. I ended up saying, “wow,” over and over again. We talked, we laughed, we pictured our future with a third person in it. I barely slept that night, daydreaming of fatherhood.

The next two weeks were a precious time for Rebecca and me. We took long walks together, planning this new season of our lives. We decided not to move to Texas, and we tentatively decided that I should be a stay-at-home parent, at least for a time. We crunched the numbers and knew it could work financially.

Then, we lost the baby. The miscarriage replaced our joy with confusion. We didn’t know who we lost. We only had a few weeks to get attached, to imagine who God was forming in Rebecca’s womb. We didn’t have months or years to get to know our child, to grow in love.

How could we mourn someone we didn’t know? Was he a boy? Was she a girl? Would our child have taken after Rebecca or me or someone else in our family tree? We didn’t know anything, except that we couldn’t wait to meet our baby. The focus of our grief was vague and abstract, like a dream we couldn’t quite remember.

We told a few loved ones what had happened, and that too was confusing. We hadn’t told anyone we were pregnant in the first place, so all we had to share was our grief. How could they mourn with us, when they didn’t even know they had someone to lose? But they did what they do best, they loved us and that was enough.

We decided to name our lost child Asha, which is a Sanskrit word for hope.

Asha’s short life changed Rebecca and me in ways we are still unraveling. We learned how to support each other in grief. We learned how to trust God through suffering. And we realized that we could manage our finances on a single income, if we had the right reason to do so.

Inspiration

Around that time, I began writing another book. Unlike the rambling mess that was my first attempt at a novel, this new novel had a compelling premise, a structure that worked, and a central theme that held it together, one I truly cared about. Perhaps the most important difference between the two potential books was inspiration.

Inspiration scratches at the door of your mind like a puppy begging to go outside and play. This particular puppy, my new novel, yearned to escape to the outside world through the blinking cursor of my word processor. I easily put down my first attempt at a novel and let it collect digital dust, but my second novel refused to be scorned.

She raced around my mind, whispering new, tantalizing details when I least expected it. She beckoned me to rush off to my computer to record what I heard so it wouldn’t be lost forever.

That’s the difference with inspired work, it feels like you are simply a witness to it. You aren’t creating so much as recording what you see and smell and touch and taste. The novel was already there. Someone had let her loose in the deep caverns of my mind. All I had to do was pay attention.

Inspiration visits many people, but most of them don’t quit their day jobs. I, too, believed that writing would always be just a hobby. I chugged along, but the work of writing was frustratingly slow.

I only had so much mental energy in a day and most of it was expended designing buildings. Structural engineering required my full attention. If I slacked off, if my mind drifted elsewhere, I risked not just my career, but peoples’ lives. Dividing my loyalty was not an option. So, as the puppy called Inspiration whined as I worked, the best I could do was hope she still wanted out when I got home.

But home is not a writer’s den, free of distractions. My first love (after God) is my wife. She deserves my best when we’re together. She deserves to be heard. She deserves to be loved. She deserves far more than what remains of my energy after a long day at the office.

So, even at home, I left that sad puppy clawing at the door while I tended to my wife. I could hear the whimpers, and it broke my heart to ignore them. But to neglect the love of my life would have been worse. On those rare occasions when I did carve out a chunk of time to play outside and see what Puppy did, I felt like I was missing her greatest tricks. I had ignored so many ideas throughout the week that might have set my story on fire.

I desperately wanted to write but couldn’t join the energy and time necessary for the effort. I couldn’t see it yet, but God had been busy paving the way . . .

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5