Well, John Piper has written over 50 books. So how does he do it? It's a question I would love to ask you today, Pastor John. I don't know if there's a process that you have articulated in the past or not. I don't recall hearing it. So I'd love to hear about the process you use to write your books.

And I doubt I'm alone here. Assuming that every book, every book I'm sure is a little bit different. But what are some common stages that you go through when you write books? Okay. I do most of what I do, I think, intuitively without following any regimen learned from a book or from anybody else or that I have formulated in my head.

But when people ask me questions like this and I step outside my head and look at me, I do see that I do things. There are processes that recur over and over again, for example, in writing books or writing a poem. So let me talk about the creation of a book, not the creation of a poem.

Those are very different creative processes. And we could do poetry at another time if anybody cares about that. Not many people care about poetry these days as much as I do. So I have six steps that I'll mention that I pass through in writing a book. Number one, first, a seed thought or a seed idea is sown in my mind, usually by something I'm reading or something I'm hearing either positively because I so much want to dig into that seed and flesh it out or negatively that I hear something or I read something I so dislike that I want to give a beautiful alternative view of reality.

So that's the seed. For example, the seed thought for The Pleasures of God, the book The Pleasures of God, was while I was reading Henry Scougal's little book, The Life of God and the Soul of Man, when I read this sentence, "The worth and excellency of the soul is to be measured by the object of its love," that was like a lightning bolt into my brain.

When I read that, the thought sprang up, "Is that true for God, that the excellency of God's soul is to be measured by the object of his love?" Could I present a fresh picture of the worth and excellency of God by focusing on what he loves? And the kind of love that Scougal is talking about is not agape love towards your enemies in spite of how disgusting they are, but it was a delighting, affectionate sense of something you find pleasing.

So what does God find pleasing? What does he delight to do? And the book was born. The seed for future grace, the book Future Grace, was the thought, "Nobody sins out of duty. We sin because sin makes promises to us. And to the degree that we find those promises compelling and attractive and winsome and desirable, we will sin.

So the key to killing sin is severing its root by the power of a superior promise." And the book was born, all 400 pages of it, from that reality. Yeah, kill sin by the power of a superior promise because nobody sins out of duty. They sin because they're fully in love with the promise that sin is lying to them about.

Stage two, step two. They're not all that long. The gathering step. Here, I simply throw things into a big electronic file from all over the place. Just gather and gather and gather and just throw it in there because it's amazing what you can do with search engines in Microsoft Word and find your stuff and organize it.

So I'm not worrying about any kind of sequence or order. I'm just throwing stuff in a file. This is gathering, filling up a barn with all kinds of hay. For example, when I wrote "What Jesus Demands from the World," the seed thought was Matthew 28, 20, which says that we are to teach the nations to observe everything Jesus commanded.

And I thought, "Where's a book that does that, that helps a missionary teach his disciples everything Jesus commanded and how to observe it?" So I took several weeks, read through all four Gospels, cut and pasted all the imperatives and all the implied imperatives into one document. Hundreds and hundreds.

I think there were about 500 entries in that file. It looked hopelessly daunting. I just stared at it for days thinking, "What in the world will I ever do with this? Everything Jesus commanded is what has been given to us, and we're supposed to teach it to the nations." So that was the gathering step.

Number three, third step, praying and reading and thinking and doodling on pieces of paper toward a conception of structure. What in the world am I going to do with hundreds and hundreds of imperatives from the Gospel? How will that come into any semblance of order or structure or coherence?

How is it to be presented? How will I turn that into a book, a readable, organized, sequential book? And frankly, I think this is, at least for me, the hardest step in writing. And I think it's the step that kills most writing projects and kills most writers. It simply looks impossible.

It looks too big, too complex, too confused. And the reason for that is that we are staring at something that doesn't exist. We're staring at something that doesn't exist. It's like a painter staring at a palette of colors—paint palette of colors—and a blank sheet of paper with a view to creating a scene.

And he hasn't even made up his mind whether it's going to be a scene of an ocean or a mountain or a meadow or an urban scene. And after days and days of praying and thinking and doodling on a piece of paper by drawing lines among all the ideas—my papers look ridiculous, they just totally look like messes, but they weren't for me—what emerged from the massive material of what Jesus demands from the world is that many of these imperatives fall into groupings.

And I wound up structuring the book in 50 short chapters, which are grouped in various groupings so that everything could be covered. And all that came from mind-breaking staring, thinking, doodling, and especially praying. I think God has to break through or we just give up. Number four, step number four, just start writing anywhere.

It may be the middle of the book. It may be the conclusion. It may be the introduction. It may turn out that you will throw it away the next day. But many projects go unfinished because writers wait and wait and wait and wait until they have a clear enough conception in their head of what they're going to say, at least several pages worth, before they start typing away.

And that's hopeless. I just would find that utterly hopeless. I generally find that it's helpful to write what I'm trying to do in the book. Here's what I'm trying to do. And as I write, it dramatically, amazingly takes shape in that moment, which I mentioned last. But number five, as I begin to write, I try to avoid falling into worn-out jargon and into familiar ways of saying things.

I am always trying to describe and explain glorious reality in fresh and compelling ways. Now, here's the last step, and it's the most amazing step to me. Actually, the one that gives me the breakthrough into conception is amazing, but this one feels even more amazing to me, a kind of mystery that in the process the book takes on a life of its own.

I mean, as God enables us, ideas start coming from the very writing itself, ideas that we did not have before we began to write. This is the most mysterious and wonderful part of the creative process, that the very act of trying to make something clear brings deeper and clearer insight into the reality.

This is why it would be a mistake, a deadly mistake, to wait until you have clarity on everything before you start writing. The sight comes through the saying, the writing. This is why I can never predict ahead of time how long a book is going to be or how it will be organized.

Whatever ideas I got at the conceptual stage may be turned upside down. It's dramatically different as the book takes on a life of its own as I do the writing. So that's a glimpse into the six steps that have brought most of my books into being. One, the birth of a seed idea.

Two, the gathering of lots and lots of material with little care to order and sequence. Three, praying and thinking and doodling toward a conceptual structure. Four, starting to write anywhere just to get going. Five, aiming at avoiding being trite or using worn out jargon, but aiming at fresh, compelling ways of saying truth.

And number six, watch the book take on a life of its own as the writing itself becomes a way of seeing. That's an incredible glimpse into your six-stage book writing process. Thank you, Pastor John. And thank you for making the Ask Pastor John podcast part of your day. You never know where we're going to go on these episodes, and I appreciate you listening in.

You can stay current with our new episodes on your phone by subscribing through your preferred podcast app or through the APJ app or even now through DG's YouTube channel. And to search our past episodes or to browse our most popular episodes or to send in a question, do those things online, at our online home at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.

Well speaking of creativity, next week we're going to talk about preaching and all the ways that I think will bless a preacher who listens to the podcast, but also we're going to, I think, bless people who listen to sermons and who have questions about how sermons are made and about questions like how long is too long of a sermon and how short is too short of a sermon.

It should be a really interesting week. Three episodes on preaching next week. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you on the other side of the weekend. See you then. Page PAGE of NUMPAGES www.verbalink.com Page PAGE of NUMPAGES www.verbalink.com Page PAGE of NUMPAGES www.verbalink.com