by Peter Leavell, @PeterLeavell
My wife hovered over her planner like an engineer over a drawing table. She drummed her pencil, huffed, and glanced across the counter at me. In her typical I just read Shakespeare voice, she said, “Above all, my troubles do come about, ye, do waste my veritable efforts upon such vital matters. For obtaining that which I would, I cannot. The trials of my future life to be entered upon must be inscribed within the confines of this paper that enfolds around a spine, yea verily, is not enough to include but a portion of my lot. I know not where to turn.”
“You mean your planner isn’t big enough?”
“Methinks you’ve the gist of it.”
“It’s not a matter of creating the perfect planner. At this point, you’re fighting physics.” She simply couldn’t fit her schedules in a single planner
Why is she so busy? Why am I following in her footsteps with a schedule that requires two planners?
Because writers are thought leaders. And thought leaders need to know things.
What kind of things?
I was fresh off the success of my first novel when a West Coast radio host whose main hobby was surfing interviewed a new writer—me. “Like, dude. You know stuff cause writers are like well-read and stuff, you know? So when Napoleon marched through Egypt and his men found the Rosetta Stone, and there was like, three different scripts on it, the dude who found it totally knew like several languages so he knew how important the stone was. How many languages do you have chillin’ in your brain?”
One. I speak one language. And that one almost fluently. Just don’t go too fast.
I managed to deflect similar questions from different interviews for some time. But soon, I found I knew a little history and virtually little else. I wasn’t going to survive the writing game long if I didn’t do something drastic.
I went back to school to get a couple of master’s degrees. But I realized something important. I didn’t need to have the piece of paper to have the confidence to answer questions. I needed to read, to engage with what I was reading, and to connect the thoughts with other books I read. And boom. I knew things. No degree required.
Fiction writers are thought leaders. Through our work, we explore what it means to be human, to have faith and hope, to search for morality, to defy hate, to destroy injustice, to thrive. Our characters explore the depths of humanity—but the depths they explore are only as deep as the author. And if that doesn’t scare you, I can’t help you.
As a thought leader, read everything you get your hands on. Know things. Fill up your planners with your thoughts. You and your characters will grow deeper. And soon, you’ll speak as the Bard does in Sonnet 23: O, let my books be then the eloquence and dumb presages of my speaking breast. (William Shakespeare)
Philip Anderson keeps his past close to the vest. Haunted by the murder of his parents as they traveled West in their covered wagon, his many unanswered questions about that night still torment him.
His only desire is to live quietly on his homestead and raise horses. He meets Anna, a beautiful young woman with secrets of her own. Falling in love was not part of his plan. Can Philip tell her how he feels before it’s too late?
With Anna a pawn in the corrupt schemes brewing in the nearby Dakota town, Philip is forced to become a reluctant gunslinger. Will Philip’s uncannily trained horses and unsurpassed sharpshooting skills help him free Anna and find out what really happened to his family in the wilderness?
Peter Leavell, a 2007/2020 graduate of Boise State University with a degree in history and a MA in English Literature, was the 2011 winner of Christian Writers Guild’s Operation First Novel contest, and 2013 Christian Retailing’s Best award for First-Time Author, along with multiple other awards. An author, blogger, teacher, ghostwriter, jogger, biker, husband and father, Peter and his family live in Boise, Idaho. Learn more about Peter’s books, research, and family adventures at www.peterleavell.com