(upbeat music) - John Piper is back with us coming off of a six week writing leave. And Pastor John, you have written a new book and I wanna talk to you about what you've written soon. But first, as a writer, I would love to know what you've learned more generally about the writing process from this past six weeks.

And maybe give us some lessons that writers can learn from as you reflect back on this time. - It's a huge gift to have a writing leave. Most writers write in between things and I get this incredible gift of once a year or so getting six to eight weeks where I can do nothing but write.

And for me, the conceptualization stage is the absolute hardest. I tend to quit before I get started. It's so frustrating. But once I'm off and running, you know, it's like pushing a car. Getting the thing going is hard. But once you get it rolling, then you could probably keep it going by yourself.

And you need about six guys to get started with it. So I stepped back and asked, what did I learn about that initial process and then the actual writing? And I'm assuming here that we're talking about a nonfiction book, about a topic. And I'm assuming that people are writing against the backdrop of ongoing Bible reading and meditation and prayer and participation in a local church.

That's assumption. So here's number one. Plan a block of time that you can commit to regularly. For me, that was every day, six days a week from about nine in the morning after devotions and exercise and breakfast. So about nine in the morning to about seven in the evening with maybe half hour off for lunch.

Number two, decide on a general topic that you intend to address. For me, that was a want to write a book about the Bible. And I thought it was a book about how to get from the Bible, the treasures of the Bible and how to live those out. In other words, a how-to book about using the Bible most effectively in your spiritual walk.

And I proved to be totally wrong about that, but that should encourage people that you can set out to write something and then wind up writing something totally different. So that's number two. Pick out the general topic. Number three, pray earnestly and call upon others to pray. I have a whole prayer team that I keep posted on what I'm doing.

Pray and have others pray for you. Pray daily, pray hourly over your work and ask God for motivation. Ask him for perseverance and for insight and creativity and ask him for competence and truthfulness and faithfulness to the scriptures. Ask him for a touch from God that will make the book a great honor to Christ and good for the church and an advancement to the global mission of the people of God.

That's the way I pray about what I write. Number four, read over what you have already written about the topic. So for me, that was like 30 sermons that I'd written about this topic over the years, and I did not want to take the time to do that, and I didn't.

I skimmed them and looked at their themes 'cause I knew if I took the time to read all of those, I would just get so bogged down. And here, I know I'm assuming that people have written something. And why would I assume that? Well, I'm assuming that if there's a topic on which you intend to write a book, you've thought about it.

And if you're a writer, thinking about it means you've written down something. Might be in a journal, a blog, an essay, a sermon, a lesson, a notebook, somewhere you've written about this or you shouldn't be intending to write a book about it. Not for a long time yet. So dig all that stuff up, pull it out of your journals and wherever it is and then pull it all together and read over it.

That's number four. Number five, as you read that stuff, make an ideal list of all sorts of issues that could be addressed in the book. You might be writing this on your computer, you might be by hand. I'll say more about that in just a minute. This will be a completely random list at first.

It just be a mess on your piece of paper. When you've read all your material, make a brainstorm about what you've got there and make that list as long as you can. In other words, when you're done reading, keep making ideas and putting them down. So now you've got a page or several pages of just jumble of ideas that this book might contain.

Number six, step back and look at that ideal list and use a pencil to draw lines. Now here, if you put that on a computer, if you made that list on a computer, print it out. I don't know any way to do what I'm talking about here on the computer.

I don't think the technology's there to do this. Print it out or two or three, lay them all out in front of you, tape them together if you have to, if you got more than one sheet and start drawing lines between them. Circle them and block them and look for patterns on that jumbled sheet of ideas until you see things kind of falling together and keep scribbling down new ideas as you do this because every time you start to make a connection, another question, another idea is gonna come to your mind.

Number seven, from all that confusing, random, messy, big taped together piece of paper that seemed to have no coherence whatsoever except a few jumbled connections that you've circled and drawn arrows to, this is the real discouraging, paralyzing point where you look at it and say, "Good night. "How will that ever become a book?

"How can I ever bring sense out of that "or turn that into a book?" I mean, it really keeps a lot of people from moving forward. So here, at this point, I'm saying, take a few minutes and jot down one of the ideas from that sheet that you think you could start writing about.

Doesn't matter whether it become a chapter or whatever, just something you could start writing about. Put that at the top of a piece of paper, that idea, that sentence, and then jot down under it, don't take too long doing this, 15 minutes of ideas that you might say about that.

And that's, you haven't even begun to write yet. But I'm not talking about weeks of doing this. I'm talking about that would take maybe a day or two, depending on how much of your stuff that you have to read. And this is the point that's so frustrating 'cause everything's a jumble.

And so that's everything up till writing. I think I'll stop here and maybe continue next time on, okay, now the writing. What lessons did you learn about the actual writing? - Excellent, that sounds good. Let's do that. But one immediate takeaway for someone who wants to write a book, but for them it seems like a far off dream at this point, they should just be journaling right now, right?

- Right, if a person doesn't have the book on their agenda for tomorrow, but five years out, because they're dreaming of something that's just utterly fascinated them, then yes, they should be thinking, and that means writing now. So a journal is one possibility, or some kind of idea, notebook.

In my early days as a pastor, I kept two, I only made two of these and then I stopped, but they were really fruitful. I call them the sermon garden. I still have those, they're ring binders, about 50, 60 pages each, where I just gave idea after idea after idea that came to me in devotions and elsewhere.

So yes, a book comes into being not out of nowhere, it grows in the garden of thinking and ideas. - Wonderful, thank you Pastor John. And if you are listening to this and you're a writer, or you wonder if maybe God has called you to become a writer in the future, we have a very interesting episode from early in our episodes, episode number three in fact, titled "How Important is a Christian Writer's Influence?" You can find that in the podcast archive.

It's episode number three, "How Important is a Christian Writer's Influence?" So we have talked about the research phase, so what has Pastor John recently learned about the writing process? I'll ask him this tomorrow. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast. (silence) (silence) (silence)