I’ve been working on a project for my day job centered around this idea: “What does it mean to be courageous?” And it got me thinking about the beginnings of the Heart of a Warrior series.

This series began in a fourth-grade classroom while I was substitute teaching. They were taking a quiz, and I had just watched a news update on the Haiti earthquake. And an idea hit me. I grabbed a sheet of notebook paper and wrote a few paragraphs about a young American woman standing in the middle of Haitian rubble, looking for her friends, and questioning how a good God could allow something so devastating to happen to people who already had nothing.

I set that piece of paper aside until a teacher in my writing clinic (who turned out to be the wonderful DiAnn Mills) told me I couldn’t show up to class without three chapters.

My response: three chapters…of what?

In college, I had dreamed of writing a book. But I figured it would be someday—when I got married, had kids, and could maybe write from home. (Spoken like someone who wasn’t yet married and didn’t have kids and had no clue that those two things would actually create less time to write.) But someone challenged me to just start. Then DiAnn challenged me to show up.

So I sat down in my parents’ den and tried to figure out what to write. Those meager paragraphs came to mind. To be honest with you, I didn’t start with plotting. I didn’t know where I wanted the story to go. Truthfully, I didn’t envision the paragraphs becoming a book, let alone a series. But I asked myself a couple questions:

• What do I love?
• What am I familiar with? (Aka can write about with confidence)
• What do I want to learn more about?
• What do I want to say?

I love a big, fun family dynamic. I love that people are so different, which makes families unique. I love missions and traveling. I love deep friendships, the kind built on love and care and not unrealistic expectations of one another. I love down home Southern culture and school pride.

At the time, I was a recent college graduate, so I understood the fear over life plans, the excitement of celebrating, and the anxiety of the unknown and the bigness of life after college. My cousin, who was in college with me, was studying to be a dietician and had already worked in a third world country with her education, so I had access to knowledge about next steps for my character’s job. I live in the South, went to a college with a lot of pride, have a close family, and had served on multiple mission trips.

But I still wanted to learn. I wanted to learn more about Haiti. I wanted to write about the earthquake I had been following in the news. My brother had once considered the Navy SEALs, so I wanted to learn more about this elite brotherhood. And I wanted to learn more about how God could be good in the midst of our personal earthquakes.

Which led me to what I wanted to say. I wanted to say women are warriors, too. Even if they never don a uniform. I wanted to celebrate our uniformed warriors. I wanted to talk about courage in grief. I wanted to explore growth in a season of change. I wanted to better understand God’s goodness, because I was wrestling with it myself. I wanted to explore family dynamics, friendship, pain, and ultimately hope.

So three paragraphs became three chapters. And I headed off to my writing course.

Little did I know that the story was just beginning.