I get to be a story teller. I know that people write for all sorts of reasons. I write to tell my stories. And I see my stories as parables, in the Biblical sense. Jesus was a lot of things, one of which was that He was a marvelous story teller. It was His way of teaching. And most of the time, He didn’t explain. He left it up to the listeners to decide what the story—the parable—meant. And so each person could take away something different for his or her life.
So I see my novels as long parables. And there is more than one point to each novel. Each reader, I hope, will find something that is meaningful for him or her to take away.
Jesus set his parables in the towns and countryside of where He grew up. I set my stories in the towns and countryside of where I grew up, which is the Panhandle of Texas. But if the story—the parable—is well told, it is universal, that is, it doesn’t matter where the reader grew up.
I’ve reached the age—my seventies—at which I hope I have something worth telling. I’ve seen a lot, done a lot, been a lot of places and met a lot of people. Hopefully, I have learned from all my experiences, and so I have something worth telling people. And my way of telling people is through my novels—my stories, which are actually parables.