It’s a lot of hard work and takes a long time, and of course the author has to put in his fair share of the process and know what he’s about.

Yet there really does exist a mysterious dynamic in it all. Once you set some foundational momentum in motion, characters actually do sometimes pull you along almost as if they were setting the pace and direction. Your only job is to follow where they lead!

My wife, Judy (who is intrinsically involved with me in the development of nearly every book bearing my name), and I, along with our friend Judith Pella, were all three aware of that process throughout the writing of Robbie Taggart. Robbie himself proved such a captivating fellow that we quite literally followed him all over the globe, waiting—and maybe here’s where it gets spooky—to see what would happen to him next.

In the writing of the Stonewycke books, the two main characters, Maggie and Ian, did not even exist in the three of our minds when we began. They wandered into the story sort of accidentally, and then proceeded to take the whole thing over. Before long they were setting the course for the entire rest of the series!

Characters do that. Plots and situations and relationships do that too. There can be stories that quite literally compel themselves to be told.

The Secret of the Rose is such a story.

We love roses. I gave Judy yellow roses before we were married, and we have been exchanging them ever since.

The other day, in the dead of winter, Judy picked a stray red bud that didn’t seem to know the season for blooms was past off one of the bushes in our yard. The leaves were a little small, sort of a brownish green, not the lush and brilliant shapes and textures of spring. Though nicely formed, the flower itself was stinted of size, and it seemed clear this specimen would never mature to full stature. It was a “wintry” rose.

Judy clipped it with about twelve straight inches of stem, put it in a slender vase, and set it on the bathroom counter.

Something about it, however, was unique. This was no ordinary rose.

Perhaps its charm was heightened by the tiny bud-shape, which would never open into full-petaled array. Perhaps it was the strong odor of red which, in spite of the petals being tightly folded, warmed by coming inside the house, began to spread its perfume out through the bathroom and beyond. Perhaps it was the symbolism of its brave flowering in the midst of the two weeks we had just had of driving rains and frigid, fierce winds.

How did it come to find life in the midst of all that? Yet there it was, sticking up its proud, tall head—let the rain and wind do their worst.