Interview with Jerry B. Jenkins

How did you get started with writing?

I was injured playing sports in high school and started sports writing for the school paper to stay close to that scene. By the time I was 14 I was a sports stringer for the local paper. Too young to drive, I had to have my parents drive me to the games and to the newspaper office.

Had you always wanted to be an author?

No, I wanted to be a big league baseball player. :) I was sports editor of a suburban Chicago daily by the time I was 19, then became a magazine editor at 22. During that time I interviewed a young man for an article that I thought would make a good book. It became my first of now around 180 published books.

How is it possible to write over 175 books, have a family, kids and grandchildren and live a healthy, happy life? What's your secret?

Priorities and compartmentalization. I think people find the time to do what they really want to do, and I want to exercise the only gift I have. I don’t sing or dance or preach. This is all I do. And when my kids were growing up, I never wrote while they were at home and awake. That allowed me to work without guilt and made me more productive. My journalism background contributed to my being able to write fast.

You spend quite some time writing for budding writers. What is the single most important piece of advice for someone who wants to finish their first novel?

The only way to write a book is with seat in chair. Stop talking about it, dreaming about it, pining over it. Write it. Publishers may like your idea and even your sample chapters, but for that first novel, they need to be shown you can cross the finish line.

What is the best writing advice you've ever been given?

Omit needless words.

What is one of your favorite opening lines of a novel?

How about two? :)

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. (Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952))

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. (Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938))

70 million copies sold, which means tens of millions of people have read a Jerry B. Jenkins book. Is it time to lose your modesty?

Nah. I think it’s important to know who you are and who you’re not. I didn’t work any harder or even any differently on the books that became a sales phenomenon. The market decides. All I can do is the best I can do. The result is otherwise out of my control.

Who is the most overlooked literary hero?

Rick Bragg, former columnist for the New York Times and now an author. His memoir, All Over But the Shoutin’ is a masterpiece.

You've written a number of successful biographies, most well-known 'Just As I Am' with Billy Graham. What is the biography you would like to have written, but that someone else wrote already?

Tim Tebow’s. My kind of book. My kind of guy.

You own the Christian Writers Guild. In which way is a Christian author different from a non-Christian author?

Worldview is the major difference. The Christian writer’s ultimate theme should always be hope. That doesn’t mean tying everything in a bow and concluding that everyone lives happily ever after. The plot can be gritty and real, but a Christian writer’s story should never end in total despair.

Were you pleased with the movie adaptations of your books?

I was happy with what my son did with my short story Midnight Clear and what Hallmark did with my novel Though None Go with Me. I was abjectly disappointed with the amateur treatments of Left Behind.

Are you currently working on a new movie project?

My son and I are brainstorming an idea with our partners next week for something that will likely shoot later this year.