I’m going to detail the timeline behind the love story that I’m about to publish in the next week entitled Every Breath You Take. This will hopefully be interesting for those of you who are in the process of trying to get published. As I’ve said a thousand times before, the key in being successful as a writer is persistence. While I wasn’t successful in landing a six-figure advance for Every Breath You Take, I feel I was fortunate to find a good story and guide it to publication.

My hope is that this will show you the journey of one book—how one idea leads to another, the process of writing and rewriting, and the task of trying to sell it to a major publishing house.

The first few nuggets of ideas for Every Breath You Take came probably in 2006. The story had several other titles and storylines. The one idea I wanted to explore was that of a wounded and broken young girl—her journey. That idea, or more like character, ended up getting scrapped from this love story. Instead, she ended up on the pages of another novel: Broken, which comes out this May.

I began working on TREATMENT #1. I won’t mention the working title because I still love it and want to use it sometime down the road. The prologue opens with a woman in her twenties thinking about killing herself (a little dark for Hallmark love stories!!). Then it goes ahead a few months where she’s living in the Chicago suburbs and meets a young man. They will fall in love, of course. But their storyline is not the only storyline in the book. I had the backstory of a father praying for his daughter after she was born. At the end of the novel the reader would understand the power of these prayers, and how God had answered them many years after the father uttered them.

So I wrote about 120 pages on that story (about 20,000 words). My idea was that I would give it to the publisher I worked for and have them look at it. They had published my first two novels and knew that I could hand a story in on time and also deliver a decent product. At that time, we were having some trouble getting some of our fiction authors to actually deliver manuscripts on time or deliver what we wanted.

So write a decent love story and get a decent contract. Easy, huh? I’d already published seven novels with more in the works, so I had a decent track record.

So on November 25, 2006, I gave the acquisitions director at the publisher a cover letter suggesting the idea for my story along with 50 pages. I worked hard on this proposal and thought it was really something worthy of publication. (This came in addition to the other novel I was working on at the time.)

In early 2007, probably around February or March, the acquisitions director finally met with me to talk about my proposal. She was kind and I knew she didn’t want to hurt my feelings, but the basic gist was this: the material just wasn’t strong enough. It needed to be a strong and a special story.

I went back to the drawing board and tried to figure out why it wasn’t strong or special.

I came to the conclusion that it didn’t have a GREAT HOOK. So I spent a while trying to come up with a GREAT IDEA and a GREAT HOOK.

Easier said than done.

The acquisitions director had mentioned that she liked the father-daughter idea, and thought I should build on that. I liked that idea too since I was a new father and wanted to write a love letter to our daughter.

I thought back to simple love stories like The Notebook and tried to figure out what made them special. The writing on that novel was simple, so what was the draw? For that story, the GREAT HOOK came from the Alzheimer’s angle. Yes, it was a moving love story, but it cut deep when you realized why it had been told.

So middle of 2007, I arrived at my GREAT HOOK. I’ve been told it’s a great hook and I still believe it is. If I pulled it off—well, that’s another story for readers to decide.

But I took that initial story idea and basically split it in half.

The story of the broken and wounded young girl went somewhere else. At the time, I just held on to that character. She would make her appearance in another novel. But the other story, the love story with a father-daughter theme, ended up getting changed when I came up with a supernatural twist.

That was the summer of 2007. I started writing what eventually became Every Breath You Take.

I was still at the start of a long journey.