Unlikely Missionary

Just a quick interview with Elizabeth Brady, author of The Unlikely Missionary. It's a book she graciously donated to me last year when I was doing a lot of contests/drawings. I thought it was high time I interviewed her. It's short, to the point, and like dropping in on a conversation that's already been started. Enjoy...

How did you come up with the topic for your novel?

I served as a short-term missionary in Burkina Faso, West Africa, for 10 months in 1990-91. It had a profound impact on me, but it took me a long time to find the "story" in my own experience.

I had tried to write about my missionary experience for years, but I could never find the "story" in it. I think that it took marriage, birth, and the death of three loved ones and other life experiences to put it into proper perspective. I wrote a short essay for a now defunct magazine in 2000 that became Chapter 1. Once I had the opening I was able to write an outline of each chapter. From there, it took about me about two years to write the novel. Perhaps the "spice" comes from perspective. Katherine's year on the mission field was a decade of life condensed for me. A true-time telling of my own mission experience would've been decidedly more boring!

Dialogue has to move us somewhere, the chat at the breakfast table needs to reveal something to us, even if it's subtle. I like to read it out loud to see if it's authentic. People don't often speak in complete, tidy sentences. When I read, I like to feel like I'm at the breakfast table with them. I like to know what people are eating, or not, and funny little quirks they have.

I read writing books all the time and they say the same thing: it's a daily discipline. There is a notion I have found in several books that describes the realm of creativity as something that exists for us to find. And, I have come to believe that when we're writing daily and are able to dig through the pile of busy thoughts we come close to that realm. I have had one or two moments where an image came to me and I grabbed it and wrote it down. It was a moment of true inspiration that I cling to as encouragement for the more typical days of distraction.

Visit Elizabeth Brady at http://www.unlikelymissionary.com/