Writing Archives | Philip Yancey

Learning to Write

September 2025

I’ve recently begun a book about writing. Now and then I’ll include a brief excerpt from this work in progress as a blog post. These days, everybody is a writer. Several billion of us connect daily through a variety of social media platforms and email programs. For the first time in history, something you write today may, against all odds, go viral, filling your inbox with messages from faraway places such as Kazakhstan or Paraguay. Once a respected profession, writing ...

Word Play

July 2025

Visitors to my Facebook page and website have proved that they love words. Here’s a test: Do you know what an eponym is? Homonyms are words with more than one meaning, such as rock, or fall. Synonyms mean nearly the same thing as another word, while antonyms mean the opposite. Acronyms combine the initial letters of a group of words to form a new word: NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) or laser (from light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation—sure, ...

John Donne Redone

October 2023

I have an ancient poet to thank for my first book. During my mid-twenties, while serving as the editor of Campus Life magazine, I came across John Donne’s book Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. I knew of Donne from fragments taught in high school—“No man is an island…”; “for whom the bell tolls…”—but I almost avoided opening the book, which could compete for a dullest-book-title award. I’m glad I persevered. Along with most people, I had often puzzled over the problem ...

Now More Than Ever

September 2023

I wrote What’s So Amazing About Grace? more than twenty-five years ago, at the close of the twentieth century. I feared that some parts of the church were growing so shrill and divisive that bystanders no longer heard the gospel as good news. In fact, I submitted the book to my publisher with the proposed title What’s So Amazing About Grace and Why Don’t Christians Show More of It? A wise and gentle editor persuaded me to shorten it. “That ...

The Secret of Memoirs

July 2022

When I decided to write a memoir, I went to the library and methodically made my way through every memoir on their shelves. For years I had been writing idea-driven books, and now I had to learn how to write pure narrative. A memoir should simply tell a story, without analysis or commentary. Before long, I found the kind of memoir I didn’t want to write. Some people live such adventurous lives that they merely recount the facts. A fine ...