Jerry Jenkins Interview, Part II

Jerry Jenkins, former Vice President for the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, is the author of more than 150 books, including the best-selling Left Behind series. Sixteen of his books have reached the New York Times best-seller list (seven in the number one spot). Also the former editor of Moody Magazine, his writing has appeared in Reader's Digest, Parade, Guideposts, and dozens of Christian periodicals.


His non-fiction books include as-told-to biographies with Hank Aaron, Brett Butler, Bill Gaither, Orel Hershiser, Luis Palau, Walter Payton, Nolan Ryan, and Sammy Tippit among many others. The Hershiser and Ryan books reached the New York Times best seller list. The 2002 Baker book, Behind the Stories, tells more about Jerry Jenkins himself in the chapter, The Test of Success.

Jerry Jenkins helped Dr. Billy Graham with his memoirs, Just As I Am, also a New York Times best seller. Jerry owns Jenkins Entertainment, a filmmaking company in Los Angeles, which produced the critically-acclaimed movie Hometown Legend, based on his book of the same name. Hometown Legend was listed as one of the Top 10 family films of 2002 by Good News Communications' MOVIEGUIDE.

Jerry Jenkins also owns the Christian Writers Guild, which aims to train tomorrows professional Christian writers. As a marriage and family author and speaker, Jenkins has been a frequent guest on Dr. James Dobson's Focus On the Family radio program. Jerry Jenkins wrote the nationally syndicated sports story comic strip, Gil Thorp, from 1996-2004.

Jerry and his wife Dianna have three grown sons and three grandchildren.

You talk about having thick skin. How thick is your skin? Knowing how successful you are, as many lives as you've changed, does it still bother you if you get a bad review?

I've never had a bad review ... just kidding. I don't follow my own advice. Developing a thick skin is not easy. It's kind of ironic, because I do in my writers workshops what I call a thick-skinned writers critique, and I'll take someone's work, anonymously—we don't tell what the writer's name is—but put it on the screen and we edit it. And it's really brutal. Then I might go home and have somebody do that to me--a publisher and it's this needs more or less.

I don't want to be falsely modest, but I've been a book editor as well, so when I turn a book in, my goal is to make it as perfect as it can be so they have to do very little on it. They say they want more of this or less of that, of course I get the change and for the first twenty-four hours, I might be a little hurt and go, "Don't they realize I know how to write?"

So it's even at your level?

It's never going to get easy. Of course, my goal in life, as most people's goal is, is to have everyone love me in addition and think everything I do is perfect. But it's something I have to remind myself all the time. I mean, I've written a lot of books and it's still a thrill to see a new one, to see a project come out with your name on it and know you've put all of yourself into it. And it still hurts to get criticized and edited, too.

The Left Behind books really brought a whole lot of attention to Christian fiction as a whole. Now that we have that attention on us, where would you like to see Christian fiction go?

Well, in many ways, I'd like to see more cross over. I mean, ironically, you wouldn't have expected Left Behind to cross over, because it was overtly evangelical, Christian publisher, Christian writers, Christian theme and we're talking about the rapture of the church, the return of Christ—who would have expected that to be the one that crossed over and became a star in the secular market?

People often talk about how many doors that opened to Christian fiction and you see a lot more Christian fiction in the general market bookstores. But I want to see a hit. You can't manufacture that. We didn't manufacture it. On one hand you can say it's a God thing and on the other the market decides. They read and talk about it. It happens in non-fiction. We've seen the Prayer of Jabez, we've seen The Purpose Driven Life. I'd like to see Christian fiction crossing over.

There are two schools of thought. One is that we start out with a message and we write the story around the message. The other is we just tell a good story and as Christians, our worldview will come out. Where do you stand on that?

I read the competition. I read the other NY Times best selling fiction, and I rarely read a secular novel that doesn't have a message. When you read between the lines, there's a message. Even Stephen King has a message. James Patterson has a message.

John Irving wrote The Cider House Rules. Here's a writer who's a brilliant writer, a wonderful book, who has a message that I would probably diametrically oppose—in real life, I'd disagree with him. Yet when he won the academy award for best movie based on a novel, and he got up there and thanked the pro-choice people and everybody, I applauded him, because he's not pretending he doesn't have a message. He's pro-choice. I would be pro-life. He's not denying that he has a message.

I say yeah, we have a message. If Left Behind was just a novel, say it was a sermon, pretending to be a novel, it might have been popular for a little bit because of the subject matter, but then it would have died. To have sixteen books do as well as they did, something's working. But yeah, it was a message, so I think obviously we have a message. You have to know what your message is before you start, but then make sure that your craft is writing, that your fiction is right, because if it just looks like a sermon disguised as a novel, it isn't going to work.

On that same line, do you think as a Christian author, that we have an obligation to present the Gospel in every novel that we write?

I don't. That may sound surprising, because every Left Behind book there's what we call believable, reproducible conversion experience, something Dr. La Haye really wanted. I do the writing on those. Sometimes it took me as long to write the conversion scene as it did the rest of the book put together, because you want it to be realistic.

One of the keys is to make sure you have enough skeptics in there and people who don't agree and don't believe that wind up losing out in the end. On the other hand, I'm working on a children's series with Chris Fabry, and it's more of a C.S. Lewis/Tolkien feel. It's fantasy, a parable about God and Jesus. There's not conversion scenes in there but you get the point. It's just like there's not a conversion scene either in Narnia, yet you can tell that Aslan the lion is Christ resurrected.

In my mind, it's important to write fiction from a Christian worldview, and do the best work we can. I would not say if it doesn't have a conversion scene that it's not a Christian novel.

We all have something in our writing that we're strong at and then something we struggle with a little more. What would you say, craft wise, that is more of a struggle for you than other things?

I think for me, because of my background in journalism, I tend to be a minimalist. I think that helps a lot in non-fiction. I'd get to the point I'd omit needless words, I really try to write tight and economically. In fiction, people want you to slow down, to set the scene. Now I don't necessarily like to read that type of writing, unless it's really good.

I read Cold Mountain, by Frasier, his debut novel. He would spend pages on description, and it was so brilliant, I loved it. But with most people, it's the same old, same old. Sun peeking through the trees this and that. I want you to use as few words as possible to set the scene and then get on with it. I tend to do that. But I've had to force myself to say people are settling in reading, and now with this latest novel being so long, it's going to be a settle in and read kind of novel—take people a few days. Part of it is because I've slowed down to set the scene.

Last question: Have you ever walked into a store, or into your house and nobody was there, and you thought maybe you were left behind? (laughs)

Actually, there was a time when Diana and I were first married, and didn't have any kids. I was talking to her, and turned away to do something else. When I turned back around, she was gone. I thought, oh she's in the bathroom. But she wasn't. In the bedroom, but she wasn't. Looked in the den, and she wasn't there either. This was a small house. That was about it. I'm like, where could she be? As it turned out, she actually was in the den, on the couch, laying in a shadow. So when I looked in there, I assumed she couldn't be there. It was like she'd disappeared.

So you're thinking, how ironic that I was left behind. You're thinking hey this is going to be good media! (laughing)

Well, except it was so long before Left Behind, but it reminds me of a good line. There was a woman at Moody where I worked, who was talking to her boss at the elevator. She turned to say something to me. I could tell by the look on his face, he forgot something, so he slipped away to his office. She turned back around and he was gone. She had the greatest line, I remember. She said, "Wow, I hope it wasn't the rapture. I had it figured the other way around."