Written to Published
Donna Williams asked me to describe the long collaboration process with Janice Miller, my editor, and the hurdles we had to overcome. To me this opens a whole window into the world of creativity and how it works.
First of all I must tell you that I finished the book many years ago. I gave it to several people to critique. All of them were taken with my ideas and theory, but they also said that the work was simply too dense to be readable by the general public. I suppose you might say I created a monster that was too hard to handle. It was obvious I needed help.
Through a series of strokes of luck I was introduced to Janice Miller, an editor and publisher. She plowed through the manuscript and was taken with it. When she agreed to work with me, I’m sure neither of us dreamed it would be another ten years before the final product saw the light of day. But it did.
What took the time was for us to literally go through each sentence in what turned out to be a 514 page work, to make sure it was crystal clear. That’s where the creativity came in. It was necessary for her to write the terrifying words “not clear” opposite a paragraph, and for me to craft a readable result but still keeping to the sometimes very complicated point I was trying to make. There were many times the solution would come to me out of a sound sleep at 3:00 am in the morning.
As to hurdles, I can honestly say in all those years we never had a disagreement. Her suggestions for clarity were sheer genius. Any discussions we had evolved from my having to explain a point with which she might not, at first, have been familiar. They were few and far between.
I think the result of this collaboration is a book, Talking With God, that can be read and understood by anyone with an interest things biblical. I hope readers will agree.
