Mike Furches: Where do you come up with your stories?
Ted Dekker: I’ll tell you what, my writing is definitely what is called cross genera, much like Dean Koontz, or even Stephen King. Those are probably the two closest writers, Dean Koontz comes the closest to me in the ABA world, American Book Sellers Association as opposed to CBA, Christian Book Sellers Association. My voice is the same in all of my stories. My stories are about a great confrontation between good and evil within a number of different genera’s. You’re always going to get a story, but all stories. Like in When Heaven Weeps, you could almost classify it as almost like a romance, it is a love story in one sense but it’s really a thriller. So there all thrillers but that’s kind of where the genera thing ends. My stories come from my passion to discover, and explore this struggle that we all have. That we all find ourselves engaging between good and evil and I write essentially modern day parables where I take the struggles and I put them on the canvas in big, bright, bold, colors. Those colors can be life and in really sensational ways it accentuates the struggle that we have in an ideal way. In those ideals with both the good and I characterize them in terms of ideally. For example in Blessed Child, there is the story of a noble savage, well there is no such a thing. You can’t find a Caleb, he doesn’t exist. But in the context of the story, he comes to life and we can examine good as it really could be. In the same way Jesus taught, he said; “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” Well he didn’t actually want us to walk around plucking out our eyes. He is talking in ideal terms. He is using hyperbole to make a point and he used parables in the same way. That’s essentially what I am doing, I am characterizing good and evil in a very, a extreme way as I can do it without offending people or to drive away readers. So, my stories are born out of that desire and all of my stories will deal in one way or another with that common theme. What does good and evil really look like? Not the way where Stephen King casts it where there is no redemptive message in the end at all, there’s no redemption. Where good doesn’t conquer evil. I’ll take someone through the valley, and I am going to bring them up to the mountain top and have them look back and be able to say, “Yea, though I walk through that valley of evil, and death, I will fear no evil.” That’s kind of my mission in writing. Here I am rambling again, I’m rambling. So you’ll have to edit. You’ll edit this down, right?
The Hollywood Jesus site didn't edit it down, so we won't either. For the rest of the interview, go to
here
