How does your faith impact when you’re writing about people who are in danger? There are crime elements, your stories have murders—where do you find that balance between being realistic without dwelling on it? Where do you find that line?
The fact is that I’m a Christian reader as well. So, I really think about when I’m reading a book, what makes me feel defiled in some way? If I’m reading a really gruesome book, and there’s a lot of blood, and there’s a lot of violence, you know it makes me feel defiled. I don’t want to do that to my readers, so there are lines I won’t cross.
But I do have murder, and I do have blood. But I try not to make the reader wallow in it.
Probably my most gritty book was Predator. I deliberately did it in that book, because I wanted to scare the socks off people who were dumping all their information on social networks. I wanted them to understand that social networks are a predator’s playground. And that if you were a predator, where would you go to find out where somebody was at any given time, you know, and what their habits were, what their routines were.
I just wanted to scare mostly young people, but even adults. I think that book was probably the grittiest, and that was for a purpose.
But mostly, I try not to show too much blood, not to get too gory, and to describe things in a way that it gets across what happened, but they don’t have to wallow in it.
You’ve mentioned in in the past how you draw from your own personal trials to create plots for your books. Tell us about that…
I often use events from my own life, and the emotions I’ve experienced, in writing my books. I don’t waste much in my life. When I go through something painful, there’s a part of me that’s always kind of standing outside myself recording how it feels to be in that situation, and later I process it by writing about it in some way.
I don’t always use the exact event from my life, but I might have someone going through something similar to it, so the emotions I write in those characters are real.
With so many books to your credit, is it difficult to create so many new characters and storylines?
You’d think that with 80 books published, I would recycle plots and characters over and over, but that isn’t the case at all. My books have to be exciting enough to hold my attention, and I get bored easily. So, I try to make each book different from all those that came before. I don’t seem to have any trouble coming up with new ideas, and new ideas for plots always generate new, unique types of characters.
You started out as an author in the general market. Why did you make the transition to writing Christian fiction?
After I’d been writing for the romance market for 13 years, I became miserable. I loved being a writer, but I wasn’t fulfilled at all. I was a Christian and had what I call a spiritual awakening, and I felt an intense conviction that I wasn’t using my gift the way God had intended. I had several books under contract at that time, but I didn’t want to write them.
I remember the day I got down on my knees, literally, and told God I didn’t want to write anything else that didn’t glorify Him. I didn’t know how that would look. I knew there was a Christian fiction market, but I didn’t know anything about it.
I told my publisher that I wanted to buy back my contracts, and it happened that they owed me more than I owed them, so that worked out really well. Then I was able to get an agent who sold to the Christian fiction market, and I wrote my first book proposal for a suspense novel with a Christian theme. It just so happened that Christian publishers, who had mostly published prairie fiction and historical or biblical fiction up until that point, were ready to expand their list to include more genres.
I came in at exactly the right time, and Zondervan not only bought that suspense novel, but they gave me a four-book deal. I’ve been writing suspense for them ever since.
Click through to find out about the book Terri wrote that was too preachy…