Emily Graves spoke with Wm Paul Young about his latest novel

Wm Paul Young

Wm Paul Young wrote a story for his six children, with no thought or intention to publish. That book, The Shack, is now a number 1 New York Times best seller that has sold over 14 million copies. He has now released his second novel, Cross Roads, about multi-millionaire Anthony Spencer that addresses the question: How does grace and transformation get inside the self-created, self-made fortresses that people erect in order to keep others at a distance?

Emily Graves spoke at length with Paul about the process of writing his second novel, belonging, the God of second chances and the lessons he has learned along the way.

Emily: What is Cross Roads about?

Paul: It deals with a different set of questions than The Shack dealt with. The Shack is more about human sadness and the character and nature of God: Is God good or not and how do you understand that within the middle of tragedy? The question in Cross Roads is: What if you've got somebody who is antagonistic against change for whatever reason and doesn't want to go through any kind of a process of dealing with the things that are on the inside, that have become impediments to their ability to experience and have relationships?

The main character in The Shack is a likeable human being; the main character Anthony Spencer, Tony, in Cross Roads is a rather despicable human being. So the question is: How does grace, change or transformation get inside the self-created, self-made fortresses that people erect in order to keep others at a distance, when they then don't care about what kind of damage their choice has made; they just become numbed and their world becomes smaller and smaller?

I know that partly from personal experience and partly because I'm around people who have done that for whatever reasons. I wanted to explore that question. That is what I tend to do; I tend to explore questions. I don't really have an agenda when I write.

Emily: How do you relate with the characters in the book?

Paul: I think with fiction writers particularly, it's hard to write without bits and pieces of your own heart, your own self and your own journey being embedded in this or that character.

Mackenzie in The Shack was very much built around who I am; Tony, not as much. But one of Tony's big issues is the issue of belonging and I'm a third-culture kid. I grew up in a different culture than my parents and the issue of belonging is a front and centre issue for any of us who have been dispossessed of family or have losses like that. Orphans and foster-care kids and children who have grown up in very diverse situations know about that. The issue is: Where do I belong? The hardest question is: So where are you from? And Tony is like that: he comes out of a foster-care system. I can totally identify with the issue of belonging and for a lot of us, if we don't find someone to belong to we never belong anywhere: it never becomes about the place; it becomes about the possibility of relationship.

Emily: So what does belonging mean to you?

Paul: It means that you're comfortable inside your own skin within a confluence of relationships: people actually matter to you. It's part of the process of learning how to love. A lot of us, we shut down our emotions or we created defensive skills to stay alive as children, or to at least try to protect ourselves, or stay safe and those things have to come down to experience trust. I think trust is at the heart of belonging: who do you trust? Well the ones who you trust are the ones where you feel a sense of belonging. For a lot of us we didn't really trust anyone and everyone was leaving soon, so any hello is just a goodbye waiting to happen. I think trust and then the growing ability to love - not just know about it but actually participate in it - becomes central to belonging.

Emily: When it came to choosing a name for the book, why did you go with Cross Roads?

Paul: Because we all face them in one form or another. There are layers to it in terms of entendre, but at its very simplest surface definition, every day we have choices to make and our choices matter. I think that's one of the world's big lies, that you don't really matter and therefore your choices don't matter: but they do and they ripple into the lives of others as well as our own; so the choice to forgive, or the choice to hold a grudge, the choice to be bitter, to remain angry, to hurt and the choice to extend kindness. But then there are major crossroads: we all are going to deal with death in one way or the other. Today I go to a memorial celebration for a man who just passed away who was a significant man in my life. That's a crossroads and it was a crossroads for him dealing with it. The loss of someone through disease, or the loss of a career or a dream, an accident that takes away your ability to do something that matters to you: all of those things become crossroads. So does success and success will bring some of your darkness up to the surface in ways that failure never would, or the darkness in other people. Everything in life is an opportunity to reassess ourselves and the world around us and to say: Do I want to keep going down this path? Is it time to stop? Is it time to look for some help? Is it time to ask a different set of questions? Because this obviously is not working, or it's working in such a way that I don't even know who I am any more: when that happens you hit a crossroads. They can come in many forms: there is exposure to addiction, an affair, a violation of a relationship, a betrayal: these are all crossroads.

Emily: So is God a God of second chances then?