Novelist

People want to find out what happens to the characters, and want to keep reading, and turning the pages.

As for dialogue, I think it keeps things moving to cut to the chase.

There is a comfort zone of knowing where things are going and having characters in place, but the action gets more and more dramatic and is very challenging to describe.

The uninitiated have real questions and valid concerns over how the things of God appear to them.

Of course, bad marriages are so pervasive that they have invaded the faith community too.

Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile.

People are scared to death and they're looking for something beyond themselves.

Left Behind takes what to some people may be unbelievable predictions from the Bible and shows how they might play out. It makes the events of biblical prophecy understandable and thus believable.

Broken relationships are a source of heavy heartbreak that seem to affect every family.

In the prequel we're going to tell about the characters before Left Behind, and the book would end with the rapture instead of start with the rapture like the first one did.

Tim sends me a fairly ambitious workup in notebook form noting the passages we're going to cover and the chronology of the biblical events, and his commentaries on those things he's read and written.

The theater of the mind is impossible to compete with, and I like the idea that with a few suggestions, each reader forms in his or her own mind what a character or a place looks like.

Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.

I've written enough books with real celebrities, such as Walter Payton and Hank Aaron and Billy Graham, to know that fame looks good only to people who don't have it.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.