'The Shack' author William Paul Young tells how book changed his life

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When the author of "The Shack" travels the world to talk about his mega-selling novel, the emotional and spiritual depths of responses he gets from audiences make him feel as though he were listening to God.

"When people ask me what I do, I tell them I hang around burning bushes all day," William Paul Young said, referring to the biblical story of how God spoke to Moses from a burning bush. "You get to hear people's stories and you get to listen in on really precious, intimate things."

Young said that from the start of his "Shack" "journey" he felt he was just going along for the ride with God.

And despite skepticism from nonbelievers, that's as logical an explanation as any for the phenomenal popularity of a book about suffering, loss, forgiveness and redemption that Young wrote for his six children.

After family and friends strongly encouraged him to share his book with the world, Young contacted Wayne Jacobsen, a Christian author he had met just once, and Jacobsen saw something exceptional in the manuscript.

Young, who was born in Canada and lives in Oregon City, Ore., was juggling three jobs at the time and spent 16 months collaborating with Jacobsen and Brad Cummings, a pastor-turned-construction worker, to edit the book before sending it to publishers.

The response? Thumbs down all around.

Mainstream publishers told him the book was too religious, and Christian publishers felt it was too edgy -- the Trinity, for example, is depicted as having a large, folksy, African-American woman as God the Father.

Determined to get the book to the public, the trio borrowed $15,000, formed a company called Windblown Media and published "The Shack" themselves.

The first printing was on May 1, 2007. The boxes were stacked in Young's garage and orders were taken only on Windblown Media's website.

The first 10,000 copies sold out in three months, and, fueled almost entirely by word of mouth, the orders kept rolling in. One year after publication, Windblown and the Hachette Book Group in New York signed a deal on distribution to keep up with the skyrocketing demand.

The book went on to spend 40 weeks at the No. 1 spot on The New York Times best-seller list.

What's the latest sales tally?

"Somewhere between 12 and 15 million," Young said.

"I know," he added, recognizing how staggering the numbers sound. "It absolutely is a God thing, there is just no other explanation for it other than that, and I'm just grateful to be along. That perspective really helps. And it helps, too, that I didn't know what I was doing."

Young wrote "The Shack" as a way of dealing with his own pain and suffering, creating a fictional tale of a man named Mackenzie Allen Phillips whose youngest daughter, Missy, is abducted from a campsite on a family vacation.

The girl is feared dead, but her body is not found for years. In despair, Mack travels to a remote shack in the woods where he meets God and unloads his feelings of anger, grief and despair.

Although Young did not lose a child in real life, he has endured much pain and tragedy.

In confronting his failures and his sins, Young said, he decided not to hold back but to reveal the truth no matter how painful. That was the backdrop that led up to his writing of "The Shack."

Through his lectures and correspondence, Young said, he's learned that the openness and vulnerability he's shown in his writing and his talks have been inspirational to many readers.

"As I talked about the possibility of living without secrets, it surprised people because so many of us have guarded hearts and have many things on the inside that we don't want anybody to go near," Young said.

Helping people overcome their fears and encouraging them to stop hiding their failures has had a profound impact on many readers, he said, "and that's been wonderful, absolutely wonderful. To be able to talk about it, all of a sudden you saw hope start showing up in people's lives," Young said.

While parts of the book can push some traditional religious views to the edge, Young said he welcomes the controversy "The Shack" has generated because it gets people to talk about deeper issues and to ask important questions.

"To me, the beauty of what the book's done is it's given people a language to talk about God in a way that's not religious. And that's been very, very helpful. All of a sudden people in the same family or friends are having a conversation that they've never had before because they didn't have a language for it. All they knew was religious language."

Young is working on a movie version of "The Shack," a process he began shortly after the book made the best-seller lists. Although no production deal has been signed, the novel's huge success makes it likely that the movie will get a green light.

"We are moving very, very slowly on purpose, and I'm working on the screenplay right now," Young said. "I want to get that fully completed before we make any decisions in any direction. ... It is really important to me and my family and to my friends that the story line's impact is maintained, and so I'm going to be pretty involved in that whole process."

(Contact David Yonke at dyonke(at)theblade.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)

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