I’m Daniel, and I’m a Novelist.

All together now… “Hi, Daniel.”

I clearly recall the moment when my Fiction Addiction began. I thought it would be a lark, a one-time thing just to prove I could do it. Just once, and just a little—a fifteen-hundred word entry for the Writer’s Digest “Short Short Story” competition. Just one little story. Just one.

I had no idea what a rush it would give me, how free I would feel when no longer bound by those pesky things like truth and reality that non-fiction editors cherish. The story began to flow from my fingertips, smooth, wordy, adverb-laden sentences that came from the fiction monster living deep in my heart, a monster I had released in my ignorance and would never again be imprisoned by reality.

I thought I could control my novelism. I did for  a while. I was a functional novelist, still in denial, still able to believe that I would one day see my non-fiction book proposal accepted. Then I attended a writers conference, where Denny Boultinghouse from Howard Publishing pushed me toward the edge with a harsh dose of reality: “It’s a good idea, and I like your writing, but you’ll never sell this. It’s a recovery book. You don’t have the right letters after your name to be an authority on the subject, and you don’t have a national speaking platform, either.”

How ironic. A carefully constructed platform of denial, with a recovery book as its foundation. To make matters even worse, at the same conference I found an enabler who encouraged me to not only embrace my novelism, but to let the monster have its way with me.

I returned home and began writing more stories. Short stories at first, then longer ones. Soon I was writing chapters, getting so involved in the lives of the fictional characters in my head that they became real people I talked to and that talked back in the pages I wrote. I joined a critique group, hoping that they would discourage my addiction by criticizing my work, but they only enabled me to go even deeper into the depths of my soul, to use stronger verbs and mercilessly slaughter adverbs, to use my prose to show rather than tell, to weave stories that would change the way readers think, feel, and believe.

One Step Closer to Recovery

I began to take online classes, to secretly buy books about the writing craft, to do everything in groups of three. Even in casual emails, I found myself paying attention to sentence structure and cadence, mixing my sentence lengths and killing those dreaded weasel words. My characters crept into my dreams. I would often awaken in the middle of the night with the perfect resolution, the perfect line, the perfect conflict so hot in my head that I had to go to the computer that instant and feed my novelism. I even began—and I’m so ashamed to admit this—to sleep with a laptop next to my bed.

At last, I faced—and embraced—my addiction. I joined a recovery group, the American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW).  Through the outstanding work of ACFW, I learned that I may never recover. I may never again be normal. I am a novelist. ACFW has given me hope. In 2008, ACFW recognized the depth of my recovery commitment by awarding me First Place honors in the Contemporary Fiction category of the ACFW Genesis contest for unpublished novelists. As a direct result, I now have connected with a recovery specialist (literary agent) and am pursuing with all my heart the only known cure for Novelism: A twelve-book recovery program.