"Why fiction?" they ask me.

My husband drove, one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding mine on the center armrest. It was late, nearing midnight, the black outside interspersed with lit-up exits as we made the I-20 trek from Atlanta to Birmingham. Toward home.

“30 years old,” he said with exaggerated ponder, his face faintly glowing from the dashboard lights.

As the birthday girl, I grinned contentedly, saying for the 10th time that it was the best birthday I’d ever had. It had started with a leisurely stroll through the Georgia Aquarium, complete with a behind-the-scenes peek at whale sharks, dinner at an Irish pub, followed by a Cirque-du-Solei show where a clown picked me out of the crowd, pulled me onstage, and included me in an entire scene before dragging me backstage and kissing my hand with an affected “Merci!”

Having planned the day, my husband grinned in the way one does when he’s knocked the whole “gift-giving thing” out of the park. The puzzle he bought me from the circus gift shop rested against my leg in the shiny tote he had to pay extra for. As far as I was concerned, it was a perfect day.

“A new decade,” he declared, “What is something you’d like to do before your 40th?”

I tilted my head. I’d been 30 for less than a day. My husband is known for asking such questions—the kind you haven’t thought about yet. But I heard an answer launch from my lips without my permission: “Write a book.” My husband’s eyebrows raised, and my eyes widened in shock. Who’d said that? Me? Couldn’t be.

After the initial shock of having words fly from my mouth as if cast out by an invisible spirit, the idea settled, and I realized it was true. I wanted to write a book. And turns out, I’d wanted it for quite some time but had kept that desire hidden, even from myself.

 “What kind of book?” my husband asked.

Another question I’d given exactly zero thought to. As a voracious reader, I consumed an equal amount of fiction and non-fiction. “Well, of course, fiction would be the greatest honor and highest accomplishment,” I said as if it were common knowledge uncontested in all of time and space, “but I’m not smart enough to write a novel, so I guess non-fiction. Maybe something combining my training as a counselor and Christian faith.”

Yes, that was my answer. I will pause here to let the multi-layered ridiculousness of that statement sink in. I may have been newly thirty, but the heady cocktail of immaturity and pride that domineered my twenties still laced my veins and addled my brain. That statement contained truth but not much wisdom. That would come later, the way wisdom usually does, through hardship and pain.

The truth was, I, indeed, was not smart enough to write fiction. I wasn’t even smart enough to articulate what I meant by “smart enough.” Having read hundreds of works of fiction at that point, many of them classics, I had an inkling of fiction's advantage over non-fiction. Don't get me wrong. I love non-fiction. In fact, it's the genre I've consumed the most. Which is why I am convinced fiction is more potent for persuasion. A well-crafted story can harness the ideas studiously debated within the pages of non-fiction and render them unforgettable. Science, philosophy, theology: they entice the mind, and if the work is good and the reader is motivated, with enough thought and pondering, the truth of non-fiction can find its way into the heart, so long as there's conviction. Some concepts even have the ability to enter the soul. But story goes for the gut. Like sugar, it enters the bloodstream and, from there, touches everything. Fiction is sticky. Themes, symbolism, characters, and emotions will linger long after facts have faded from memory. Fiction can change a person in a moment, a scene, a sentence.

And indeed, I was not smart enough to create such fiction, but I was prideful enough to think nonfiction would be a cinch. To this day, I am still amazed my husband didn’t laugh at me. He probably should have. But no. He smiled at me with, of all things, respect in his eyes. He truly does love me, poor guy.

A few days after my thirtieth birthday, I sat at my computer, figuring I better get to work. I had a decade before my 40th, and it might take a while to become the Brene Brown/Beth-Moore hybrid of my dreams—or rather, my delusions.

After banging out a first chapter that I was convinced would move people to tears and altar calls, I closed my computer. Despite my self-assuredness, I had read somewhere that writers should always allow space between them and their work. Having a pretty hefty rap sheet of poorly worded emails and regrettable blog posts, I took that advice and set an alarm on my calendar for one month away. The bell went off sometime in June, and I opened the Word Document containing that Christian/psychology chimeric monstrosity. It took me only one read-through to realize that the last thing anyone in God’s creation needed was my thoughts on any given matter. Who knew you could feel embarrassed while sitting totally alone? I had always thought that required other people to be around. But reading what I’d written a month prior, my face and neck burned a cringing maroon, redefining for me the term “shame-faced.” With a couple of chastened mouse clicks, that incriminating document borne from pure ego was buried in a folder with the other regrettable writings of my life (mostly one-act plays and poems that will NEVER SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY. Seriously, there’s a person in my life whose sole job on the day of my death will be to open my computer and destroy this folder. Incidentally, there is a second person who will burn my prayer journals. My capacity for truly awful literary navel-gazing is astounding. Lord, forgive me.

(Why leave it in a folder, you may wonder? Why not delete it? Well, I figure in my 70s, I may want a giggle. I’ll have plenty of fodder for wise old Alison to get a kick out of.)

So, the non-fiction route was dead. Taken out back by God himself and mercifully put to rest. But I still wasn’t “smart enough” to write fiction. In my humbled and humiliated state, I put the whole matter into the Lord’s hands and moved on with my life.

A few years later, I was pregnant and minding my own business, believing my writing days were over (having a swollen computer file to prove it) when an idea popped into my head. After a few weeks, the idea wouldn’t let up, so I wrote it out. This wasn’t entirely uncommon. After all, how do you think all that nonsense wound up in my Embarrassment File? I figured this little ditty would be the next installment. This time, I let it sit for longer than a month. I wasn’t keen on another humiliating read-through. After a year, in which I gave birth and nursed a newborn, that idea still wouldn’t let up. My baby wasn’t the only thing keeping me up at night. So, I grabbed my computer during naptime and opened the year-old document. To my utter astonishment, I didn’t cringe. Was this good, I wondered? No, it couldn’t be. But, it was...something. I didn’t know what, but it was something.

For six years, I’ve worked on this something. Turns out, I was totally right. I wasn’t smart enough to write fiction, let alone a whole novel. It’s taken me five drafts, the kind where you open a blank Word document and start completely fresh. The first chapter alone has been re-written 25+ times. I’ve spent a lot of time with a blinking cursor on a blank page. Now, with the first book in the publishing process and my second novel in the first draft stage, I still don’t think I’m smart enough for fiction. But I know way more than I did before, and that’s not nothing.

The master fantasy writer, JRR Tolkien, once wrote a letter to a “Dora Marshall” about his exceeding difficulty in getting his story published and how surprised he was when The Lord of the Rings finally made it into the hands of readers like her. In this letter, he told Dora how his good friend, C.S. Lewis, once said to him, “If they won’t write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves, but it is very laborious.”

Consider Tolkien and Lewis, with all their intellect and wit. If these giants of the pen struggled to write fiction, only imagine how difficult it is for someone like me who has the constant distraction of YouTube videos about Labradors and turtles becoming best friends.

But, God, in his mercy, has allowed me to accomplish a dream of which I have no right, considering my own merit. As Lewis said, it has been “very laborious” and the highest honor.

On my 30th birthday, I couldn’t imagine myself writing fiction. Now, I can’t imagine writing anything else. And I can’t wait to get it into the hands of readers.

Next month, I will release my first chapters for free to anyone who wants them.

Pre-orders start sometime in October.