How It All Began

And a little bit more...

It was sometime in the early 2000s—memory’s gone a little soft on the exact year—when I came up with my first idea for a novel. I was in my mid-twenties.

Well. That’s a lie.

I had no interest in a novel. I wanted to write a screenplay, because I’d read somewhere that screenplays were much, MUCH easier than books. (They are not. But I’ll get to that.)

Back then a friend and I used to take road trips to the US, and it was on one of these that the whole thing started. We were headed to Keystone, South Dakota—to see Mount Rushmore, like everyone does. But it was the town itself that got under our skin. There were odd things everywhere, things we couldn’t quite explain and couldn’t quite let go of. Burnt-out homes scattered along the streets. A pretty girl serving us in a diner who looked profoundly, bone-deep unhappy. A sheriff standing in the middle of the road, waving traffic through with those little light-up batons—except there was no traffic. Not a car in sight. Just him, directing the empty air.

So we did what you do. We started inventing reasons. The stories got stranger and more fantastical the longer we drove, and before I knew it the laptop was open on my knees and I was tapping away while we rolled past every wonderful site we’d actually planned to see.

That story—sorry, screenplay—is long gone now. Which is just as well, because I didn’t have the faintest idea how a screenplay was actually written. What I’d really produced was an outline. That was it. An outline.

I won’t get into the plot. I still remember those beats vividly, and one day I might write the thing properly. But that trip is where the bug bit—the itch to get something, anything, down on paper.

By the time we drove home, my buddy and I were convinced we had the next Hollywood blockbuster on our hands. Minor detail: I didn’t know how to write. So, without telling a single soul—because, honestly, I felt ridiculous—I started quietly buying books on screenwriting.

Jump to 2006. I had a hard drive full of downloaded scripts—Crash, The Reader, The Departed—and I’d read them at night the way other people read novels. I watched every video of Paul Haggis I could find, listening to him explain his process. I was obsessed with Crash in particular—the way it braided all those separate lives into a single narrative thread.

That was also the year I decided that owning the proper gear was, clearly, the missing piece. So I bought a MacBook and a copy of Final Draft (Word simply would not do), and with all that at my fingertips I set about carving out my masterpiece. My method was rigorous and entirely original: I took the bits I liked from one script and blended them with the bits I liked from others.

After many false starts, I had half of something I called The Trip. And then the phone rang and it was Paramount and—

No. No, it wasn’t. That didn’t happen.

But I had something. Half of something. And half of something was further than I’d ever been.

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Then I dillied and dallied and fumbled for years. I stopped completely at one point—life has a way of doing that—but I always drifted back, picking away little by little. Still in secret. Still not telling anyone, though I think I may have let it slip to my sister once.

(Insert several years of quiet compression here.)

In 2012 I met the woman who would become my wife. She knew about the screenplay ambition, but I rarely spoke about it. She was encouraging anyway. And then one evening, over a glass or three of red wine, I was doing my usual lamenting—how hard it all was, how she happened to know someone in LA who read screenplays, how I was fairly sure I was no good at any of it—when she said, very simply:

“Have you ever thought about writing a novel instead?”

If a lightbulb has ever gone off over a human head, one went off over mine right then. A novel. No film school required. And everyone has one novel in them, right?

RIGHT?

So—in secret, naturally—I began.

I watched a lot. I took online courses. I read everything I could find about the process. And then I did the thing that probably sounds strangest of all: I copied. Word for word, straight out of other people’s novels. Pages of it. Whole chapters. A great deal of Dan (insert your own sarcastic remark here) Brown, plus a dozen other authors pulled off our shelves. I didn’t add a single word of my own. I just copied.

Because something about it clicked for me in a way the how-to books never quite did. Typing out someone else’s sentences, I could feel the machinery underneath—the structure, the dialogue, the pacing, the descriptions, the way a chapter ends so you can’t help turning the page, the way the next one reaches up and pulls you back in. Some people might find that silly. But we’ve all got our method, right?

Eventually I started writing my own small things. Short stories. Nothing groundbreaking, nothing anyone was ever going to read but me. Silly little stories, just to feel the words move. Then I started outlining bigger things, and before long I had outlines stacked on outlines—whole worlds waiting their turn.

The ones I loved, I fleshed out. I moved into Scrivener (I gave Atticus a go; it wasn’t for me) and started building deeper.

It was somewhere in here—more than ten years ago now—that I sketched out the plot for Shadows of the Father. And I knew, almost immediately, that it couldn’t be my first novel. I’d wreck it. It needed patience. It needed a better writer than I was yet. I hadn’t found my feet, and the whole business of getting a manuscript out into the world felt, frankly, terrifying.

So I reached for a different outline instead—the one that became The Weight of Healing. It follows Elliott, a man who can heal people with his hands. The story felt contained enough that I could hold all its threads without dropping them. I think it’s a beautiful book. It became my debut novel, released in 2025—and in 2026 I finally followed it with the story I’d been waiting all those years to be ready for: Shadows of the Father.

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Here’s the elephant I’ve been walking around this whole time: I did all of it—every word, right up until early 2025—in secret.

That word looks so dramatic written down. But that’s what it was. I kept the whole thing to myself, mostly out of a quiet certainty that I’d never actually pull it off, and a dread of how foolish I’d feel when I didn’t.

And then I got caught.

I was working on the final draft of The Weight of Healing when my wife walked into my office, and I tried—far too slowly—to close the window before she could see. I was not fast enough. But instead of the embarrassment I’d braced for, she became the biggest supporter I could have hoped for. She’s now my final reader before anything goes out into the world, the last set of eyes on every page. She’s the most voracious reader I know, and I trust her completely.

All those years of outlines and half-finished stories left me with something I didn’t fully appreciate at the time: a stack of first-draft manuscripts. Some with more bones than others, but all of them real. A deep well of stories to come back to and develop whenever I’m ready.

And that, after all this time out of the dark, is exactly what I intend to do.