When the Story Starts Writing You
Today, I started outlining my next book, Rewrite Fear and Rise.
And I cried. More than once.
This book has actually been forming for over a year and a half. The idea first came to me while I was preparing for a speaking event I was genuinely afraid to do. Fear was rising—loudly—and in the middle of wrestling with it came what would eventually become AFER™:
Accept. Face. Embrace. Rise.
At the time, I thought I was being given a framework for moving through fear.
I was. But that wasn't all I was being given.
Over the past year and a half life has added layers to that original idea that I couldn't have predicted.
Some of them have been beautiful. Some have been painful. Some have been the kinds of experiences you would never willingly choose, but change you profoundly for the best anyway.
I've recently written about part of the original AFER experience for a magazine article that will appear in a special Emmys Week edition with She Rises Studios. But today, something different happened.
Today, I began finding the story. My main character came. Then my other characters came. The character web began forming. The concept deepened. The promise of the premise started revealing itself. The emotional arc took shape.
The world is still coming. There is still so much I don't know. But suddenly, I could see her. And I could see what this story was really about.
I won't give away the story here because it's very much alive and still revealing itself to me. And while this character is not me, there are pieces of me woven into her. Feelings I've felt. Fears I've faced. Things I've survived. Things I've misunderstood about myself. Things God has been teaching me—sometimes gently, sometimes through circumstances I desperately wished could have been different.
That's probably why the tears came. Because somewhere in the process, I realized:
I thought I was writing fiction. In many ways, I was writing a map.
That's one of the greatest gifts storytelling has given me.
We tend to talk about writing as though the writer creates something and then gives it to the audience. But sometimes the story works on the writer first. Sometimes you create a character so that you can understand something you couldn't understand when it was happening to you.
More often than not you put pain on the page and discover that it wasn't meaningless. And the thing that was meant to break you becomes material God uses to build something greater than you. Through it all you discover a truth through the story that you couldn't have arrived at by simply sitting down and trying to write a lesson.
That's what happened today.
Something emerged from this story that goes beyond the original AFER framework. Something I don't think I could have intellectually planned my way into. The story had to show it to me. And that's why I believe so deeply in storytelling.
A story isn't merely an illustration of transformation. Story can be transformation for the person reading it, yes. But also for the person brave enough to write it.
There has been vast amounts of pain woven into the road that brought me to this book. Things that felt unfair. Things that terrified me. Things the enemy intended for harm.
And yet here I am, watching God use pieces of all of it.
Not by erasing what happened—by redeeming it.
By turning wounds into wisdom. Fear into revelation. Pain into purpose.
Transmuting the years the locusts have eaten into something more beautiful than I could have planned before they were lost.
I don't know the ending of this journey yet. And strangely, I don't think I'm supposed to. I'm living it while I'm writing it.
What I do know is that God gave me the gift of writing for a reason. And I'm beginning to understand that it's far more multifaceted than I once thought.
I get to tell stories. But the stories also tell me things. They reveal, uncover, heal, challenge... and by God, do they transform.
And when they find the people they were meant to find, my prayer is that those people recognize something of themselves inside them too. That they feel seen and remember transformation is possible. That they begin questioning the authority fear has been given over their lives and understand that what happened to them does not get to author their ending.
And that maybe—just maybe—the very thing they thought disqualified them could become part of what God uses for the absolute best.
There is much more to come from Rewrite Fear and Rise. For now, I'm still listening, discovering, writing... still being rewritten.
And I can't wait to share more of the journey.
Follow the journey behind Rewrite Fear and Rise, along with stories, resources, giveaways and more about faith, creativity, transformation, and becoming.
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I help people bring meaningful stories to life on the page, stage, and screen. I don't believe in coincidences, there's a reason you're here. Perhaps it's to work together... let's meet and see! Book your complimentary call and let's see where the synchronicities take us.
