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I'm struck by how much Steve's premise shares with many other Christian novels, which gravitate toward protagonists who are at the top of the world's game. What will Steve's hero do after his conversion? Steve's answer is vague. "You know, I've thought about writing this as a three-book series, with this book being the first and the other two being about what happens next." Personally, I'm much more interested in the second book than the first, because I'd really like to know what a 30-year-old baby Christian with a Gulfstream and a big company would do. Sell the Gulfstream? Acquire his competitor? Steve doesn't know—at least not yet.

The Christian Writers Guild exists not so much to offer weekend conferences as to enroll writers in a two-year correspondence course with a mentor, usually a veteran of the evangelical publishing world. Every two weeks, there is a new writing assignment, followed by detailed critique. Steve speaks effusively of the value of the course—"I bought this course the same way I buy stocks, as cheap as possible." For an $800 upfront fee, Steve has calculated it's only $16 per lesson—a tremendous bargain for someone who gets a personal editor for two years, reviewing, commenting on, and marking up his biweekly efforts at writing. He is a man with a story, just waiting for the time, and the technical skills, to write it.

At the first of Jenkins' and Scheer's critique sessions, I sit down next to Maxine, a woman in her seventies who tells me her story. She has spent her life on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. The past few years have brought the losses that come with age—first her 92-year-old mother, then, last year, her husband, a hard-working farmer who died of complications from diabetes. But Maxine glows with grace, not grief. Her mother came to Christ in the last years of her life. Her husband, one foot turned black with gangrene (she describes this to me in some detail), died in her arms, old and full of years and faith. Somehow in the midst of this ordinary life Christ has become radiantly present, and she is here to learn how to convey his presence in print.

For a few minutes, basking in her midwestern grandmotherly warmth, there is no one I would rather listen to than Maxine. I thank her for telling me her story, and I wish her well in her writing. Yet in my heart of hearts I know that no amount of Strunk and White, however rigorously applied, will get a story of a dying dairy farmer with a gangrenous foot published. The fiercely competitive world of magazines and books—even the relatively friendly backwater of the evangelical publishing industry—not only omits unnecessary words, it must also omit unnecessary stories, stories that have been told a thousand times. Later I tell a friend and editor about Maxine and the story she wants to tell. "Yes," he says, "every Christian magazine gets piles of those submissions, stories of loved ones who have died. Sometimes they're quite moving—I remember working through a few dozen and by the end I was in tears. But we couldn't use any of them."

During a break after the second workshop session I sit down with Jenkins and Scheer. Jenkins is tired—"I didn't sleep at all last night; when your name is on the event there's a tremendous sense of responsibility"—and I haven't asked for much of his time, but he ends up speaking with me for nearly an hour. I comment—gingerly—on the low quality of the writing that students are bringing to the conference. "Pretty thin stuff, isn't it?" he says. Why spend so much of his time on remedial matters? How much do these writers really have in common with C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers, who appear in the Christian Writers Guild's ads? "We're very careful not to overpromise in our ads," Jenkins says. "We never say you'll be published if you just take our course. We do say you'll learn the tools of the trade, and if you stick with it you'll improve as a writer—whatever level you start from. Beginning writers face so much rejection anyway. We don't want to shatter people's dreams. I don't want to be the one who tells someone, 'You can't be a writer.' "

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