AUTHOR INTERVIEW With Lauren Hildebrand

Lauren Hildebrand is author of The Weeping Knight, a novel which she self-published in January 2021. Today, I am excited to learn more about Lauren and her book. She graciously agreed to let me interview her here on my blog (Thanks so much for being my guinea pig, Lauren!). Let’s get to know a bit about Lauren, shall we?

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Hey Lauren! Thank you so much for agreeing to let me interview you. I am super excited for this, and I hope you are too. To start off, could you begin by telling us a little bit about who you are, and why you write? 

Hi Lily! Thank you so much for having me. I love sharing about my writing journey.

I have always loved stories. When I was young, we had a copy of Disney’s 101 Dalmations as a kid’s book as well as a cassette tape of it being read aloud. I listened to that tape so many times that I had a good chunk of the book memorized (I can still recite the opening). My mom tells a story of one day when a friend of theirs was over, I brought him the book and “read” it to him. He was wildly impressed that this three-year-old could read. Had no idea I was merely reciting the book until I got to the middle and started faltering.

Good stories have always been a part of my life. Mom read aloud things like the Little House on the Prairie books and all the homeschooling classics that I bet a bunch of your blog readers grew up on. Dad read aloud Narnia and the Little Britches books. And in between I was reading everything I could get my hands on—when I wasn’t reading aloud to my younger siblings as an excuse to reread my favorite stories. (I have six younger siblings, with a twenty-year age gap between me and the youngest. They are an ever-giving excuse.)

In addition to living in a house overflowing with books, my Dad was a big verbal storyteller. Dinner-time conversations involved stories of his escapades in college (he was his school’s mascot—my crazy make-people-laugh-by-being-ridiculous streak comes straight from him) or from global missions trips or of the dove that flew through his truck window that day, hit him in the chest, and about scared him silly.

I learned about people, places, history, my family tree, my faith, and how to do life itself from stories. And while, as a teen, I never expected to be an author let alone a writing teacher, I found myself more and more drawn to telling stories.

My home has always been filled with stories–in book form, but also in oral form, both real and make-believe. These stories don’t just originate from my house, they come from my extended family as well. Family dinners and the like are always a time for storytelling. 

We swap true stories of how my great-grandfather worked in a lumber camp and slept on the ground with all of the other men under one huge quilt made up of each man's blanket fastened to the next until they could erect some sort of more permanent sleeping quarters; or of the time so-and-so booted a skunk across the yard and had to bury his clothing after the skunk thoughtfully shared his perfume.

I come by my storytelling skills honestly. I write stories down, sometimes tell them out loud, and I listen intently to the many true tales that my relatives love to tell.

It seems to me that storytelling is at the very core of both your family and mine. With a family who values stories so highly, it seems fitting that you grew up and became an author!

You obviously began “reading” at a very young age, but how old were you when you actually began writing down your own stories?

Apparently too young to actually write. I have a set of notecards that contain fragments of a story I narrated to Mom and she wrote down for me. It’s about a little girl who sleds down a hill and finds a giraffe at the bottom.

I began intentionally making up and verbally telling stories around ten, when I would tell bedtime stories of “Heckelra the albino parrot” and “Jim Crenshaw, mountain man” to my siblings. I started writing snatches of stories as a teen, but was still in firm denial about ever being a writer. I wanted a job that had some guarantees for it, one where working X amount of hours would lead to Y result, not this risky thing of spending hours of your life working on a story that might not be any good, was never guaranteed to be published, and nobody might like anyway.

Guess how that worked out for me?

I’d say it certainly didn’t work out the way you intended, from what I know of you, your book, and other things that you are involved in (the Author Conservatory and, until very recently, the Young Writers’ Workshop). Obviously the Lord had plans for your life…plans that included a lot of writing! 

Look at where you are now. You’re writing & publishing stories, as well as coaching other writers at many different stages. Did you have core people who encouraged you and helped you to keep at your writing, ultimately helping you to the place you are at?

Oh yes. God’s blessed me with many friends, family, and mentors who came alongside me on different seasons of the journey. I’m especially thankful for the ones who saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself.

As a young twenty-something, I was clearly having a “writer identity crisis.” At the time I worked as a house cleaner with my sister, which is a great way to spend 2-4 hours a day solving the world’s problems with someone as you both dust nicknacks.

I recall spending a number of cleaning sessions in that season crying while insistently sharing all the reasons I could never be a good writer. My sister finally went “Look, clearly you care about writing a lot or you wouldn’t be so upset.” She asked “If you could write like anyone, who would you want to write like?” I answered (I think it had something to do with wanting to write deep themes like C.S. Lewis and engaging characters like Austen and humor like Dickens. Hey, if you’re already certain you’ll fail, why aim small?) and she looked me in the eye and went “I think you can do that.”

Her belief in me when I was too afraid to believe in myself made all the difference.

Your sister has a good point! If we get upset about something, that’s good evidence that we care about it. You cared enough about writing to stick with it in the long run. You’ve even self published a novel as proof of that. Could you give us a quick summary of what this novel is about?

Certainly. I'm going to cheat and read off the book's blurb. I worked too hard on it to waste it!

Sir Edric de Pleure is the bravest, noblest, kindest knight in the world—according to his twelve-year-old squire, Taliesin. His view of himself is far different. After an unnerving encounter with God’s holiness, Sir Edric knows the true darkness in his heart and that he cannot defeat it.

When Taliesin is kidnapped by a sinister knight, Edric must fight to win him back. Wounded and weaponless, his quest is doomed to fail. But a slender chance presents itself in a mystic sword, carried by a strange friar. This is no ordinary blade—only the pure may wield it.

As Edric struggles through dangerous forests and his every attempt to gain righteousness fails, he begins to understand that saving Taliesin is impossible if he cannot save himself.

I love the theme that runs throughout your book. We are incapable of saving ourselves–only God can do that. Only He holds the power to save us from sin and to grant us righteousness. 

If you don’t mind sharing, what–or who–inspired you to write The Weeping Knight?

Oh man. So many things. The story began with an image and a question. The image was of a knight having an encounter with the glory of God (akin to Isaiah’s in Isaiah 6) that about killed him—but it also left him longing to return. The question was “What does it even mean to live pure and holy lives, when sin surrounds and flows from us like an ocean of ink?” 

The story itself wandered away from that starter question in development, but the image remained and became a key part of the story’s theme. Other inspirations included my own walk with Jesus and grappling with my legalistic and perfectionist tendencies, a deepening awe of Jesus’ love for me (I could not have written that book even two years before. I didn’t know God in the same way then), snatches of stories and images from the Bible such as Peter and John healing the lame man, and walking alongside my friends as they wrestled with life and faith questions.

Isn’t it neat how much God can teach us in just one or two years? He can stretch us, change us, form us into a being more like him in so many ways in even a short amount of time. 

Speaking of time, how long did it take you to write The Weeping Knight? Did the project simmer for a long spell before you began putting anything down on paper, or did you latch onto and begin fleshing out the idea pretty quickly?

Usually my stories do have a long “simmer time” before being written down. The Weeping Knight broke all my normal habits in this regard. The image of Sir Edric’s encounter with God sparked in my brain in January of 2019, and I started drafting the story immediately, even though I really only had ideas for a few disconnected scenes.

For some reason, this story took root in my head and I believed in it in a way I hadn’t believed in my older projects. That, in and of itself, scared me. What if I was deluding myself? I was already breaking so many rules that I taught as an editor. If any writer had shown up to me going “I am trying to write a semi-allegorical Arthurian fantasy about a quest for holiness where the MC literally can’t accomplish his own goal in the end. It’s inconsistently written in third-person limited and third-person omniscient PoV, and oh! It’s going to have 5-10 thousand word flashbacks in the middle where side characters narrate their own formative encounters with Jesus,” I would have up and died. That is not how you write a working novel.

But I couldn’t shake this story—nor could I figure out an ending. So instead of trying to figure out what on earth I was going to do with this book, I sat down and wrote it. My writing habit was to get up at 6 a.m. five days a week and write for an hour before I went to work. I didn’t know where this story would go nor if it would work, but I knew I could show up and put pencil to page. And every time I showed up, there were words. Sometimes I didn’t know what I was going to write beyond that scene, but that was okay. I was writing a story about faith and the Lord had me write it by faith. The first person that story ministered to was me, and I’m so grateful.

It took me sixteen months to finish the first draft of Weeping Knight, in part because I draft by hand then type it up after, so really my “first complete draft” was already draft two. I had a dream of publishing it on the two-year anniversary of when the idea first sparked, so I sped-run edits, beta readers, revisions, and formatting. The last sprint in January was intense, but I hit my publication goal with the help of the Lord and an army of His people.

Wow. I admire that you wrote that story by faith, and also that you wrote the first draft by hand. One day I’d like to do that, but I haven’t gotten there yet. It’s something I aspire to, though. 

Before doing this interview, I bought and read The Weeping Knight. It touches a lot on hard stuff (death, injury, sin, etc.), and if I’m honest, your novel wasn’t a super ‘easy’ read, yet I was still left thinking, “that was a good book.” 

Oh yes, I get that a lot. The prose style I chose tends to be the first “barrier of entry” for readers. I deliberately modeled the language after the old Arthurian stories, especially Le Morte d’Arthur, that I was reading for research during writing. It’s not a direct imitation, as they use a lot of narrative styles and verbiage that would be too foreign to be engaging to my audience. But I wanted to create the same feel.

The second barrier of entry is the main character, Sir Edric, is not super relatable to many people. I knew this going in, and thus populated the supporting cast with a wide variety of characters that would have a broader appeal.

And finally, yes, Weeping Knight is heavy in many places. It’s not an easy read. I did my best to intentionally give readers reason to hope and keep going through the most painful segments. I wanted them to feel that things would turn out alright in the end even before they got there. But at the same time, that book deals with suffering and asking “Why God? Why?” In order to respect the people who are living in that place of pain and questioning, who can’t yet see the end nor any glimpse of what redemption will look like, I felt it important to not rush past the place of questions and hurt, to not skip the experience of going “Lord, I don’t know how a good God could possibly allow this. Help me to still believe that You’re good.”

I'm no expert, but it seems to me that you did a pretty nice job of writing in an Arthurian (or "medieval," if you will) style without having it be practically impossible to read and enjoy. It is really well done.

That's super smart to intentionally add a wide array of characters to help draw your readers in. I liked Sir Edric's friends very much.

I think that some stories that grapple with tough stuff definitely have a place in the world, but I’d be curious to know why you chose to write a ‘tough’ book, as opposed to something a little more lighthearted. Don’t hear what I’m not saying—I think that both kinds of story have purpose!

Oh goodness, don’t mind me laughing. I find it wildly ironic that I’m even getting asked this! As a teacher and a writer, I’m a non-stop advocate for stories filled with joy, humor, and light. Again and again, I tell my students “There is a place for pain, tears, grief and hurt in books. Those are all real. But they are also finite. Pair and tears will end. We need even more stories that have joy, laughter, hope, and light. Those are equally real and will be eternal. Tell more stories of the eternal rather than the temporary.”

If you were to look at my published short stories or the many unfinished works hiding out on my computer and in notebooks, you’d find that I usually default to writing comedy. I tend to introduce myself as a comedy adventure and sci-fi writer. I love making people laugh and when I’m going through the hardest things myself, I read comedy and lighthearted books. I need their reminders of joy to keep me going through the pain.

So, I’m really not sure why I wrote a “tough” book. In some ways I would have rather written something else (looking at you, urban fantasy series about paranormal pest exterminators). But in other ways, Weeping Knight does speak directly to the things I value. I want people who are going through the most unimaginable pain to know that Jesus Himself is in it with them. I want to offer hope that has nothing to do with understanding why we suffer, but instead with understanding Who cares for us in our suffering. 

In this story, I wanted to capture a tiny glimpse of Jesus’ love and show it as so beautiful, so life altering, that even when we never see an earthly “good ending” to the brokenness we experience, we can still cry out “He is worth it.”

“We need even more stories that have joy, laughter, hope, and light. Those are equally real and will be eternal. Tell more stories of the eternal rather than the temporary.” I quite like what you said there. Sad and hard stories have a place, but so do joyful, happy stories. In a world already filled with so much evil, we should be bringing light into that darkness.

Amen!

So glad we agree. :) 

As we wrap up this interview, would you mind sharing where can we find you and your writing (specifically your book)?

You can find short stories I’ve published on Havok’s website (though you'll need to be a member to access those) as well as a number of their anthologies. I think I was in the first one then numbers three through ten? I also have a short story in The Sun Still Rises anthology that was recently narrated for a podcast, so if anyone wants a taste of my style, they can find it here: The Weaver and the Dragon by Lauren Hildebrand.

My book is available on Amazon, both in ebook and paperback, and I have a giant stack of paperbacks in my room that I will mail to folks (website here: Lauren Hildebrand)  or drag around to sell at writers conferences. I sign those with gold or blue markers. Because it matters.

Of course it matters! Gotta match that book cover! :) 

I listened to The Weaver and the Dragon while prepping for this interview, and I thought it was pretty cool. Reading about the dragons was fun!

Thanks so much for sharing your time with me, Lauren! I’m so glad that we got to do this today. Working with you was a pleasure! God bless you and your writing.

Thank you so much for inviting me to share today!

Of course! Thanks again, Lauren! I had an amazing time collaborating with you.