Emily Graves spoke with Wm Paul Young about his latest novel

Paul: I think that God is a God of an indefinite number of chances: this is a God whose mercy is always enduring, yes I believe that - it took me long enough, I'm a religious kid so I had a lot further to go than most people. I believe that God is good all the time, I believe that God has a high respect for our ability to bring damage to the table and God doesn't just snap fingers and fix things: we get to participate in the messes we create and that's part of the healing process. I think second chances are only the bare minimum: this is a God whose chances never end.

Emily: And Tony finds himself at many different crossroads. Why is finding God at those crossroad moments vital in our life?

Paul: Because most of the time when things are working according to our sense of control we're not going to question anything. When we are controlling and manipulating the relationships around us and getting the kind of responses that feed the holes in our heart, why would we change? So crossroads stop us up short or give us an invitation to stop short and say: Is this who I want to be? Is this who I really believe I am? As soon as you enter a marriage, for example - and you can ask any married man this - you enter a mystery and you lose control. That's the crossroads. What are you going to do? Of course you can re-enact control in a sense of connectedness, or you can leave physically, or you could drive them out, or you could betray, or you could abuse. Those are all things that come out of the crossroads of a relationship that supposedly is one of commitment. I don't think God needs brokenness and evil in order to accomplish good, but we're very good at bringing that part to the table and then God is very good at building something out of it.

Emily: Can you tell us about Molly's son Cabby in the book and why this character is so important to you?

Paul: The fun thing about being a writer or any kind of creative person is that you can make stuff up. You get to just play with imagination and I did something that I thought: "Oh this is a great idea!" In a fiction book, which Cross Roads is, I put a non-fiction person. Cabby is based on a young man named Nathan Vredevelt and Nathan is 100 per cent real: that is, there's nothing in the book about Cabby that is not true of Nathan Vredevelt. And Nathan we knew since before he was born and we knew his parents before Kim and I were married, which is now 34 years, and Nathan was born Down's syndrome.

I was looking for juxtaposition in my storyline; Tony is an outwardly successful business guy, with the world at his fingertips, but he has devastated his personal relationships and he doesn't care about close family. He has great losses in his history and he's found a way to protect it, so Tony has created a mythological world of control. I juxtapose him against Cabby who seems broken on the outside, but who is much more alive on the inside. That begins this experience where Tony is invited to participate and experience inside the world of someone else and it's someone who appears by all intents and purposes as broken but it's really Tony who is broken and so that juxtaposition really helped.

Cabby's mother Pam is a therapist, his father John is a pastor and about four years ago when Nathan was 16, he was going to a professional basketball game and as Nathan's habit, he's a hide and seeker, he loves to play little games and he slipped out of the box where he was being supervised and got out of the coliseum before they could find him and he was hit and killed by two cars. That was just four years ago.

When I was working on the storyline a year ago I thought: "You know what, I've got Cabby in my world that I could fold right into this storyline," and so I spent hours talking to his family and telling them stories which I then folded into the storyline. Cabby is a beautiful human being and Cabby would not have been on Tony's radar at all because he was broken, but Tony was oblivious to the fact that it was him that was truly broken on the inside. That relationship becomes a pivotal bridge for Tony to begin to see things through different eyes.

Emily: Did you find it harder or easier to write by interweaving the non-fiction and fiction together, because you knew Cabby so well?

Paul: It's a matter of degree: I think all fiction characters are some form of interweaving of things that are real and the things that are imagined, just to different degrees. It was just that Cabby was all real. I didn't find it hard at all: every human being is a story so there is so much material inside a conversation with regard to: "What is your story?" As you unfold that, it creates a tapestry on the canvas of something that I didn't know. But all characters in fiction are like that. Even the worst person you imagine is somewhere built on something you heard or some experience of someone's devastation to one degree or another.

Emily: At the start of each chapter in both The Shack and in Cross Roads, you start off with different quotes. Is there any reason why you choose to start off the chapters with other people's thoughts?

Paul: Yes there are. I love music, I love lyrics, I love poets; people who have the skill of reducing a concept and an idea into something that is palpable, that grabs you not just in the head but in the heart at the same time. It's a nod in the direction of those who've been able to say something, but in a brief space of time, that matters powerfully. The quotes are related in some form or another to what's going on content-wise, sometimes very directly. I think it's in chapter 13 where Jonathan Edwards has this beautiful quote from "Charity", which is one of the more beautiful quotes about the love of God that you'll ever read. Yet inside that same chapter there's a conflict between Tony and the embedded lies and one of the significant liars begins quoting a very different sermon of Jonathan Edwards': "Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God". Now you wouldn't know that but I juxtaposed, within Jonathan Edwards himself, a statement about the love of God that is beautiful against a sermon he preached which is rather horrendous. So you can see this difficulty within the character and this challenge within Jonathan Edwards himself regarding what is the character and nature of God, so the quotes aren't just "Let's just look up something and stick it in there": they are related to what's going on.

Emily: The Shack was originally written from a request from your wife in order to leave something to your children. What led you to write this second book?

Paul: Life has a peculiar way of bringing different events and strings of possibilities together. This happens every day. In the course of trying to figure out: "What do we do now? Where do we go with this?" there was a process in which we were going in different directions. The fellows who had helped me publish The Shack in the first place put it in print and they wanted to do other books. I wanted to go in a different direction so we were working all those details out. Hachette Book Group who took The Shack internationally, via Hodder for example in the UK, they approached me as part of this going in separate directions to do a one-book deal and I said, "There really isn't anything here: I don't have a title or anything", and they said, "That's ok".

If you know my story, you know that I am deeply committed and connected to the understanding that God is a relational being and that there are three persons who make up the oneness of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are all included into that affection whether we know it or not and because of that, that's where prayer and conversation for me comes from. So I get into a conversation and say, "All right, what do you think about this opportunity to write another story?" I talked to Kim about it, who is my wife, I talked to my friends and we all feel like it's a green light, so I sign the papers and I have a year.

About two weeks later I found out that seven or eight languages have already bought it and its nothing: I'm thinking: "You do know this is all just smoke and mirrors, right?" Suddenly there was a temptation to feel the pressure of an expectation. You know it would be ludicrous to try to write something to compete with The Shack. The Shack is just this monster phenomenon that nobody saw coming, but there is a pressure to change your identity from who you are to what you do. And my prayer was: "God, you know, I don't understand your purposes and frankly I don't really want to know what they are because I'm a religious kid and I can turn anything into an agenda - that's our training - so I don't want to know. But if your purposes are now better served by me falling flat on my face in front of the publishing world and the writing world, I'm in." I don't have a desire any more to try to get God to follow me around and bless what I'm doing. I know who I am: I know I'm the child that's in the centre of the affection of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I live in love with my wife and my children and my grandchildren and their spouses and my friends and the community and humanity. I don't need to ever do anything in order to validate myself. And that freed me up.

When I write it's like stepping in a river and it's about timing, so I didn't worry about it until about four months into it and then I stepped in the river and wrote 35,000 words of an 80,000-word novel in 11 days and another little gasp and I wrote about 20,000 words in six days and I had the first full draft done in the middle of April - it was due in August - and it turned out beautiful. I love Cross Roads; Kim likes it better than The Shack so it's just one of those little things: it's a part of life. It would have been fine if there had been nothing there - that would have meant that the purposes of God were going in a different direction than that. I'm just thrilled to participate.

Emily: What is your prayer for the readers of the book?

Paul: I think good creativity creates more space than it uses up. If I had any prayer - because, like I said, I'm not an agenda person - I want every human being to take a deep breath inside the space that I participate in creating so that they can hear something for themselves that is true about who they are and about who God is and about this relentless affection that God has toward them. I've watched that happen both in The Shack and Cross Roads where people are hearing for themselves. I think every human being matters and I want them to have that sense that their questions matter, their journey matters, their confluents and situations and losses, their tears are collected by God. God is at work to heal the broken-hearted, but does it in such a way as to never become an abuser. My prayers are that we will all become more fully human and more fully alive inside this relentless affection.

Emily: Do you have any other plans to write any other books or have you got any other projects on the horizon?

Paul: I have lots of projects on the horizon. I've always been a writer, but who knew that anybody else would care! So yes, I've got one that's right at the top of the heap at the moment that I am working on and there are about five behind that and four behind that. So there are a lot of things to explore and it's all timely: if I'm alive and God wills, we'll get to explore some of those things, but for today I live inside the grace of one day.

Emily: At one point there was a rumour of The Shack being turned into a film. Is this something that could still be a possibility?

Paul: Oh yes, absolutely. In fact the folks with the rights for The Shack have a period of time yet. They've announced it on their production schedule, but whether it gets green-lighted in Hollywood is a question that nobody can answer at the moment so we will wait and see. But yes it will eventually become a film. And there are conversations already about Cross Roads regarding that too - Cross Roads is actually easier as a story to put onto screen. We'll see.

Emily: That's great! Looking back, Paul, on your whole journey from The Shack to this book, what is the one thing that for you God has really shown you and taught you?

Paul: There are many "one things", but if I was just to squeeze it all into one thing, for me it is becoming a child finally. If you know my story, you know that I have come from a lot of damage and becoming a child, where I get to live inside the grace of one day: everything else is just imagination. I've learnt to live inside just one day because this is real, this day is real, this grace is real, and I'm not going to spend today's grace any more on things that don't exist. Then I can be present to what's around me, what's going on in my world. These things are not obstacles and impediments; they are situations within which the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are active and asking me to participate. So this grace of one day is huge and it really is constancy for me built over my relationships and that's a beautiful thing.

Emily: Paul, it's been lovely speaking with you. If anybody wants to find out more about you how do they do that?

Paul: If they want to connect with me a little bit more they can go to www.wmpaulyoung.com and that'll hook them into Facebook and Twitter. They can go on YouTube to see some of my stories if they'd like.

You can buy Cross Roads from Cross Rhythms Direct for only £7.59.