**Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Glenn Packiam, author of “Butterfly in Brazil: How Your Life Can Make a World of Difference,” songwriter, and worship pastor at New Life Church. Glenn was also the best man at my wedding and someone I spend hours with solving the world’s problems. His awesome blog can be found here

Isn’t it an unfortunate truth that the knowledge required before an experience is only gained after the experience is over? Last summer, my first book was published by Tyndale House. It was a great experience and certainly marked a dream coming true. But, oh, if I could do it again! Rookie mistakes are inevitable in every field, and writing is no exception.

Here are a few thoughts on what I’ve learned through long meetings with my editors, patient advice from more seasoned writers, and the wonderful gift of hindsight.

1. Great ideas are not enough

Just as a good product is not enough to make it fly off the shelf, good ideas don’t automatically make a good book. Hard is it may seem to believe, it actually takes good writing. In my opinion, there are three reasons a publisher says yes to a book proposal: a compelling story or idea, a unique writing style/voice, or a ridiculously large platform that is just about guaranteed to translate to large sales numbers. Or you can, as was the case with me, be average on all three counts and have a great agent who talks up your game!

Pro athletes, celebrities, and conference circuit speakers tend to get book deals because of the large platform for promoting their materials…but their work is often an insufferable read. Speaking and writing are related but separate skills. (Acting, playing sports, or being in a rock band usually have nothing to do with writing—or reading for that matter. But I digress.)

If you want to simply be an author, then find the quickest way to become famous—be a pro athlete on steroids, or a minor criminal, or a slutty porn star—and sign a deal for your tell-all tale. But if you want to be a writer, learn from good writers. Work on finding new ways of saying things. If you’re inclined to non-fiction topics, then for the love of art, read some fiction to learn some new adverbs!

Chances are, most of us will never gain a large enough sphere of influence to demand a book deal. So we need to take our great ideas and bring them to life through great writing. Donald Miller is a great current example of a guy who began with a fresh writing style, a few good ideas, and not much of a platform, and has turned into an influential voice and a really great writer because he paid attention to the fine art of story-telling. Which leads me to the next thing.

2. Everybody loves a good story

I was terrible about including stories. I used to think they were a waste of time. Who cares about silly anecdotal bits about Bob and Susie’s marriage? As it turns out, everyone. Well, not about Bob and Susie, per se, but about stories—anyone’s story. Stories are the language of life. It is how we learn everything.

We hear Mom and Dad talking about how Uncle John lost a bunch of money by betting it all on a single stock, and we learn to be diversified investors. We read about companies that grow by taking care of their employees and we learn to be kinder to out most valuable resource. While there will always be those who insist on distilling every story down to a few bullet points, it is the story itself that draws us in. You can flash all the statistics about the plight of children in Africa or the 2 million kids forced into sex-trafficking, but people stop and listen—and moreover, they remember—when you tell them a story of a single child.

The best stories are the ones that involve you. These were the stories I was most reluctant to tell. Why does anyone care about me? Well, they don’t. But if someone is going to take to time to read something you wrote, they would at least like to know a bit about you. How did you come to these ideas? Why do you believe them so strongly? What’s your story?

3. End with a beginning in mind
The best books are the ones where a chapter ends and we can’t help but peer over the edge of the next page to find out what happens next. Of course, what happens next doesn’t happen until about 5 pages into the next chapter and by that point you almost finished with that chapter and then you’ve got to know what happens after that. Even in non-fiction writing, each idea should tease at the ones to come. It should make the reader have a conversation in their head along these lines: “Well, OK, that may be true, but what about….? Is he going to address that? Oh, wait, he is…but in the next chapter!”

In a sort of macro sense, the book should end with a beginning in mind. Not a beginning of your book—though often you might re-write your beginning once you have reached your ending—but a beginning of something on the part of your reader. What will they now do, how will they now live, in what ways will they think differently? What new beginning in them will be sparked by the end of their journey with you? I hear you say, “But those sorts of questions seem more fit to be asked by a traveler than a teacher.” Ah, good point. It is mine exactly.

4. Write like a tour guide not like a telegram
My biggest early writing tendency was to approach a subject like I did my senior paper: with loads of research, quotes, and references, and an obnoxiously argumentative tone. That simply won’t do. There is a reason so many who have spent their lives in academia find it impossibly hard to communicate to the common person. Conversely, all the best-selling books by Ph.D’s are usually scoffed at in academic corridors as cheap, anemic pop-culture redactions of a complex subject. Responsible research aside, if we are going to write in a way that people will read, we must take them on a journey.

In this sense, non-fiction writing ought to mirror its fiction counterparts. Where is the tension in the ideas? Where is the human struggle to live out these truths? Guide them from point to point like a great tour guide. Make them see each scene, smell each moment. Use stories to make abstractions actual. Don’t talk about how small actions can trigger enormous consequences. Tell them about Rosa Parks. (There’s a page—literally—out of my own book.) I read a book on Sabbath that was written as elegantly and delightfully as a day at a quiet lake. How appropriate. I might not remember all the points, especially since his writing was not very linear. But that was a journey I’ll never forget.

Samuel Goldwyn once remarked, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.” If you want to write, you’ll have to learn to become more patient. People don’t change by convincing arguments. They are changed by a compelling journey. That is why you write.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Last month my good friend Glenn Packiam made the following comments as we discussed the book, Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England by Lynne Olson. We were reading the book for a book club to which we both belong and discussing Winston Churchill’s use of his political capital during various phases of his career.

While many remember Churchill simply as the man of the hour during WWII, the fact is, his rise to power was not such a smooth road. Rather, it was the result of many people who looked beyond some earlier questionable decisions, believing his leadership style to be exactly what was needed as Britain prepared to face Nazi Germany.

With this discussion in mind, Glenn made the following points on leadership that have continued to remain rambling around in my mind, causing me to weigh my words and thoughts more carefully and look at leadership as something to be spent wisely rather than splattered over every life situation with reckless abandon.

a thought i had a while back on churchill’s moments of low political profile that came as a result of his impulsive and poorly chosen soapboxes: leadership is a currency that must be spent wisely. once it is spent poorly– on weak causes that ought not be supported– it is horribly devalued and becomes considerably less desirable. when parliament and the rebel torys needed churchill the most, to speak up for anti-appeasement, to represent the growing public concern over the shabby state of england’s military forces….churchill was forced to lay low. why? because he had chosen to speak up about keeping India a colony– a ridiculous idea that was difficult to defend. churchill’s judgment– or lack of it– devalued the currency of his leadership so greatly that his opinions became as precious as a mexican peso.

so, the next time you– or i– consider launching into a tirade at a meeting about the color of carpet, the length of announcements, or any other trivial matter that you really shouldn’t care so much about, ask
yourself if you really want to spend your leadership currency on that issue…how will your choosing to exert your influence on behalf of a certain cause value or devalue the currency of your leadership? that
is not to say we shouldn’t speak up for something we believe in regardless of popularity…in fact, my point has nothing to do with whether something is popular. it is all about whether the causes we
lend our voices to are the kinds of things we really want our lives to be defined by.

thankfully for europe, churchill’s life and legacy weren’t defined by
the imperialization of india.

After so many lists and how-to books on leadership its always refreshing to hear a very original idea on the subject. You can read more of Glenn’s awesome work here.

Popularity: 3% [?]

“To be conduits of change, we must be faithful stewards of the small, ordinary moments.” -Glenn Packiam, Butterfly in Brazil

Great insight at a time when the individual has the most opportunity to create change in the history of the world. Sometimes big dreams overshadow the small details that will allow us to get to where we want to go. A life of impact is lived out everyday, making lots of good decisions over a long period of time.

Popularity: 2% [?]

History is full of the narrative fallacy, our desire as humans to package well-known events and people into pithy, oversimplified stories. It makes sense for us to think that great things happen due to great people rather than ordinary people doing nothing more heroic than showing up to work every Monday; or that events are shaped by a few moments of incredible magnitude rather than a series of seemingly insignificant and otherwise dull sub steps. It is this weakness in human logic that Glenn Packiam takes aim at in his book Butterfly in Brazil: How Your Life Can Make a World of Difference, stressing that greatness is not achieved by that “one moment in time,” but rather over years of faithfulness in the small things…an idea not too attractive in today’s culture of instant success.

Packiam delves into this idea with precision, using the story of Nehemiah as an example of, “an ordinary man who ended up making an extraordinary difference.” Showing how God has chosen to intertwine himself and His supernatural nature into our mannish and gritty lives, Packiam paints a clear picture of how we should go about living a life of lasting impact…as participants in a divine improv, not chained to a script, but nonetheless completely ineffective and awkward outside the director’s basic framework.

Most of all this is a book about creating lasting change. His main points: 1) change is small 2) change is local 3) change is gradual 4) change is costly. He explains that while Christian culture often encourages its youth to change the world, “Trying to change the world is the surest way to guarantee that we won’t.” Instead Packiam encourages us to be faithful in the small things over a long period of time and as Jim Elliot so simply, but profoundly put it, “Wherever you are, be all there.”

Popularity: 2% [?]