Mark Lee – His Words

CCM:Wives are good that way! What was the process like from there?
ML: I was talking with a buddy of mine about Young Adult books and how everything is edited in that direction, so I actually went to the library, looked at the first Harry Potter book, and figured out how long it was. It was something like 76,233 words. I decided, “I’m going to start writing, and when I have 76,233 words I know that it’s going to be done.”

CCM: Did you actually do that?
ML: Yes! But then I got connected with a great literary agent, and she said, “Okay, there’s a great book in there, but you have to just trust me. I’m going to encourage you to go do some real hard editing on it.” We cut out at least a third of it in that first editing process.

CCM: Wow, that’s painful.
ML: I’ve learned from being a musician, it’s never just me. There’s me, there are the other guys in the band, there are producers, there are A&R guys. You know, even the label president will call sometimes and say, “This song is too slow, you need to change the tempo.” There are always people with their opinions, so that was not weird to me. I was expecting and hoping that they would do that because, while I’ve made a lot of music, I’ve never written a book before so I’m going to trust their opinion on those things.

CCM: You’ve worked a couple of overarching themes throughout the book: the importance of landmarks, and the illusion of “happily ever after.” Did you have those in mind from the beginning or did they emerge as you were putting the story together?
ML: They really kind-of emerged. I had thought through the “happily ever after” concept a lot, but I had never really called it that. It came out when I was telling the story of my wife and our wedding. Everybody thinks about happily ever after and fairy tale weddings. Our actual wedding was great, but there was all these things that happened (like getting robbed during our wedding!) and I literally wrote, “so much for ‘happily ever after.”

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