Article: When Rolf Zettersten and Tom...
When Rolf Zettersten and Tom Winters, publisher and agent respectively, first asked Joyce and I if we'd be interested in writing a novel together, we both answered the same way. With a resounding 'no.' We're two different personalities. Joyce has a worldwide ministry. I have a solitary life here in the mountains of Jackson Hole. Joyce is driven; she doesn't want to spend a minute working on something that isn't for the glory of the God who healed her life. I'm in a place of easy solitude with my faith; I listen for God's direction while I am hiking the butte or kayaking the Snake River at sundown.
A year or so passed, and I think Joyce began to realize that a novel might be savvy way to bring her message to a new group of readers. I began to understand that the time I'd be afforded to work on a novel of this scope might prove a gift. What if it could be something wonderful that would reach a lot of people? What if I was making this decision based on fear? What if I was saying 'no' because I was just afraid to try?
Joyce and I agreed to revisit the idea. We met in St. Louis. And there, we decided to write together.
I believe God uses signs to let a girl know she's on the right track, that she's loved and that He delights in her. My sign has always been a shooting star. A meteor shower streaked the sky that night I returned home to Wyoming and I had to laugh out loud at God's persistence. He sure wasn't leaving me alone about this one!
When Joyce and I met to work in Malibu a few weeks later, I told her the shooting-star story. She told me that her sign from God had always been a penny. That's the moment the idea for The Penny was born.
It started with the picture of someone stopping to pick up a penny in the street. We intended to tell the story of a young girl who had lost hope because her father abused her. We wanted Jenny Blake, our main character, to overcome her circumstances when she began to understand how much God loved her. Jenny began to leap off the page the minute she started to talk. Her way of seeing things in spite of her circumstances, her sense of humor, her matter-of-factness, led us to a place as writers that we hadn't foreseen. The story, when it began to unfold, surprised both of us.
The Penny is autobiographical to a point. It is a montage of Joyce's own little-girl feelings. ("I'm going to have to hire a therapist after spending the day with you," she said after we'd spent hours driving around her old neighborhood along Wyoming Street.) It is a historical vignette of St. Louis in the 1955, the year Grace Kelly married Prince Ranier of Monaco--we loved the idea of contrasting Grace Kelly's public romance with Jenny's private struggle for survival. Early on, we realized Jenny lived in a city subtly divided by its views of civil rights and school desegregation. That's when Aurelia and her family joined us. Jenny needed to find healing; St. Louis needed to find it, too.
We spent plenty of time reading sentences and laughing. When I'd try to be poetic in my writing, Joyce would ask, "What does this really mean?" When I'd explain what I was trying to say, she'd tell me, "I think people are confused enough in this world. There's no need to confuse them more." That would send us both to rewriting sentences together.
I convinced her that we needed details. Our personality differences came into play in a good way. Joyce's strengths balanced my weaknesses, and vice versa. She called me Pollyanna because I didn't have a bad childhood. I told her God had put me in her life to remind her to take time to laugh. We worked to compromise, to make the picture clearer, to balance the message with the need to keep a lyrical style and a reader engaged and turning pages. The more we wrote, the more excited we became. For me, it was like serving an apprenticeship in journalism all over again. Still, when Joyce read a page of description about her old neighborhood one day, she laughed and told me, "Well Debbi, I would just say 'The girl walked to the store.'"
One of the end results has been a movie option. To date, we're in 'preproduction,' which means we have a studio, a producer, a screenwriter. The studio, as far as we know, will be hiring a director and casting this summer after the screenplay is complete.
We've had so much fun that we've decided to have a second go-round. Joyce and I both know that, because we did this together, The Penny surpasses anything either of us could have done on our own. It has become a true gift of love, to our God, to each other, to those who will be reading it. We hope you'll take Jenny's message and make it your own. Something as small as a penny can change everything. You can be healed. The pain in your past can be used to help others. All you have to do is open your heart and ask God to show you how much he loves you. Your life will never be the same again.
Copyright © 2007 Deborah Bedford