Piper’s Six-Stage Process for Writing Books
00:00:00.000 | Well, John Piper has written over 50 books. So how does he do it? It's a question I would
00:00:08.800 | love to ask you today, Pastor John. I don't know if there's a process that you have articulated
00:00:14.960 | in the past or not. I don't recall hearing it. So I'd love to hear about the process
00:00:19.960 | you use to write your books. And I doubt I'm alone here. Assuming that every book, every
00:00:25.840 | book I'm sure is a little bit different. But what are some common stages that you go through
00:00:32.400 | when you write books?
00:00:33.400 | Okay. I do most of what I do, I think, intuitively without following any regimen learned from
00:00:44.460 | a book or from anybody else or that I have formulated in my head. But when people ask
00:00:51.000 | me questions like this and I step outside my head and look at me, I do see that I do
00:00:58.400 | things. There are processes that recur over and over again, for example, in writing books
00:01:04.240 | or writing a poem. So let me talk about the creation of a book, not the creation of a
00:01:10.160 | poem. Those are very different creative processes. And we could do poetry at another time if
00:01:17.000 | anybody cares about that. Not many people care about poetry these days as much as I
00:01:20.720 | do. So I have six steps that I'll mention that I pass through in writing a book. Number
00:01:27.760 | one, first, a seed thought or a seed idea is sown in my mind, usually by something I'm
00:01:34.040 | reading or something I'm hearing either positively because I so much want to dig into that seed
00:01:42.560 | and flesh it out or negatively that I hear something or I read something I so dislike
00:01:51.080 | that I want to give a beautiful alternative view of reality. So that's the seed. For
00:01:57.800 | example, the seed thought for The Pleasures of God, the book The Pleasures of God, was
00:02:02.600 | while I was reading Henry Scougal's little book, The Life of God and the Soul of Man,
00:02:07.960 | when I read this sentence, "The worth and excellency of the soul is to be measured by
00:02:15.760 | the object of its love," that was like a lightning bolt into my brain. When I read
00:02:21.840 | that, the thought sprang up, "Is that true for God, that the excellency of God's soul
00:02:28.960 | is to be measured by the object of his love?" Could I present a fresh picture of the worth
00:02:36.680 | and excellency of God by focusing on what he loves? And the kind of love that Scougal
00:02:42.000 | is talking about is not agape love towards your enemies in spite of how disgusting they
00:02:48.240 | are, but it was a delighting, affectionate sense of something you find pleasing. So what
00:02:55.040 | does God find pleasing? What does he delight to do? And the book was born. The seed for
00:03:01.960 | future grace, the book Future Grace, was the thought, "Nobody sins out of duty. We sin
00:03:09.200 | because sin makes promises to us. And to the degree that we find those promises compelling
00:03:14.600 | and attractive and winsome and desirable, we will sin. So the key to killing sin is
00:03:21.120 | severing its root by the power of a superior promise." And the book was born, all 400
00:03:29.120 | pages of it, from that reality. Yeah, kill sin by the power of a superior promise because
00:03:36.400 | nobody sins out of duty. They sin because they're fully in love with the promise that
00:03:40.320 | sin is lying to them about.
00:03:45.040 | Stage two, step two. They're not all that long. The gathering step. Here, I simply throw
00:03:52.040 | things into a big electronic file from all over the place. Just gather and gather and
00:03:56.320 | gather and just throw it in there because it's amazing what you can do with search engines
00:03:59.920 | in Microsoft Word and find your stuff and organize it. So I'm not worrying about any
00:04:04.120 | kind of sequence or order. I'm just throwing stuff in a file. This is gathering, filling
00:04:08.740 | up a barn with all kinds of hay. For example, when I wrote "What Jesus Demands from the
00:04:17.040 | World," the seed thought was Matthew 28, 20, which says that we are to teach the nations
00:04:23.200 | to observe everything Jesus commanded. And I thought, "Where's a book that does that,
00:04:29.660 | that helps a missionary teach his disciples everything Jesus commanded and how to observe
00:04:37.080 | it?" So I took several weeks, read through all four Gospels, cut and pasted all the imperatives
00:04:42.920 | and all the implied imperatives into one document. Hundreds and hundreds. I think there were
00:04:47.480 | about 500 entries in that file. It looked hopelessly daunting. I just stared at it for
00:04:54.480 | days thinking, "What in the world will I ever do with this? Everything Jesus commanded
00:05:01.680 | is what has been given to us, and we're supposed to teach it to the nations." So that was the
00:05:07.160 | gathering step.
00:05:08.440 | Number three, third step, praying and reading and thinking and doodling on pieces of paper
00:05:14.480 | toward a conception of structure. What in the world am I going to do with hundreds and
00:05:19.800 | hundreds of imperatives from the Gospel? How will that come into any semblance of order
00:05:26.200 | or structure or coherence? How is it to be presented? How will I turn that into a book,
00:05:32.480 | a readable, organized, sequential book? And frankly, I think this is, at least for me,
00:05:39.760 | the hardest step in writing. And I think it's the step that kills most writing projects
00:05:46.400 | and kills most writers. It simply looks impossible. It looks too big, too complex, too confused.
00:05:54.240 | And the reason for that is that we are staring at something that doesn't exist. We're staring
00:06:02.000 | at something that doesn't exist. It's like a painter staring at a palette of colors—paint
00:06:07.600 | palette of colors—and a blank sheet of paper with a view to creating a scene. And he hasn't
00:06:15.080 | even made up his mind whether it's going to be a scene of an ocean or a mountain or
00:06:18.920 | a meadow or an urban scene.
00:06:21.480 | And after days and days of praying and thinking and doodling on a piece of paper by drawing
00:06:27.800 | lines among all the ideas—my papers look ridiculous, they just totally look like messes,
00:06:33.680 | but they weren't for me—what emerged from the massive material of what Jesus demands
00:06:40.000 | from the world is that many of these imperatives fall into groupings. And I wound up structuring
00:06:46.000 | the book in 50 short chapters, which are grouped in various groupings so that everything could
00:06:53.520 | be covered. And all that came from mind-breaking staring, thinking, doodling, and especially
00:07:00.640 | praying. I think God has to break through or we just give up.
00:07:04.960 | Number four, step number four, just start writing anywhere. It may be the middle of
00:07:11.200 | the book. It may be the conclusion. It may be the introduction. It may turn out that
00:07:15.540 | you will throw it away the next day. But many projects go unfinished because writers wait
00:07:22.380 | and wait and wait and wait until they have a clear enough conception in their head of
00:07:27.200 | what they're going to say, at least several pages worth, before they start typing away.
00:07:33.040 | And that's hopeless. I just would find that utterly hopeless. I generally find that it's
00:07:38.760 | helpful to write what I'm trying to do in the book. Here's what I'm trying to do.
00:07:45.080 | And as I write, it dramatically, amazingly takes shape in that moment, which I mentioned
00:07:56.480 | last.
00:07:57.480 | But number five, as I begin to write, I try to avoid falling into worn-out jargon and
00:08:06.200 | into familiar ways of saying things. I am always trying to describe and explain glorious
00:08:13.120 | reality in fresh and compelling ways. Now, here's the last step, and it's the most amazing
00:08:19.920 | step to me. Actually, the one that gives me the breakthrough into conception is amazing,
00:08:24.600 | but this one feels even more amazing to me, a kind of mystery that in the process the
00:08:32.080 | book takes on a life of its own. I mean, as God enables us, ideas start coming from the
00:08:44.320 | very writing itself, ideas that we did not have before we began to write. This is the
00:08:53.040 | most mysterious and wonderful part of the creative process, that the very act of trying
00:08:59.480 | to make something clear brings deeper and clearer insight into the reality.
00:09:07.120 | This is why it would be a mistake, a deadly mistake, to wait until you have clarity on
00:09:14.040 | everything before you start writing. The sight comes through the saying, the writing. This
00:09:22.160 | is why I can never predict ahead of time how long a book is going to be or how it will
00:09:27.440 | be organized. Whatever ideas I got at the conceptual stage may be turned upside down.
00:09:34.920 | It's dramatically different as the book takes on a life of its own as I do the writing.
00:09:42.400 | So that's a glimpse into the six steps that have brought most of my books into being.
00:09:50.400 | One, the birth of a seed idea. Two, the gathering of lots and lots of material with little care
00:09:55.960 | to order and sequence. Three, praying and thinking and doodling toward a conceptual
00:10:01.800 | structure. Four, starting to write anywhere just to get going. Five, aiming at avoiding
00:10:10.200 | being trite or using worn out jargon, but aiming at fresh, compelling ways of saying
00:10:16.960 | truth. And number six, watch the book take on a life of its own as the writing itself
00:10:24.840 | becomes a way of seeing.
00:10:26.600 | That's an incredible glimpse into your six-stage book writing process. Thank you, Pastor John.
00:10:33.160 | And thank you for making the Ask Pastor John podcast part of your day. You never know where
00:10:37.480 | we're going to go on these episodes, and I appreciate you listening in. You can stay
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00:11:02.040 | Well speaking of creativity, next week we're going to talk about preaching and all the
00:11:06.000 | ways that I think will bless a preacher who listens to the podcast, but also we're going
00:11:10.440 | to, I think, bless people who listen to sermons and who have questions about how sermons are
00:11:15.680 | made and about questions like how long is too long of a sermon and how short is too
00:11:20.800 | short of a sermon. It should be a really interesting week. Three episodes on preaching next week.
00:11:26.520 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you on the other side of the weekend. See you
00:11:30.480 | then.
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