While in Uganda this week, I sadly missed the opportunity to help my biological son get ready for his first prom on Saturday.  Fortunately, Joline got a picture of Joshua with his date.  Since Joshua is a junior, I plan to be there for his senior prom.

Joshua and Nina before Prom

Earlier that day, I had a chance to spend several hours with my surrogate son, Henry, as he showed me around western Uganda’s Ishaka, where he is studying medicine at Kampala International University.

Henry rents a modest room about 200 meters from school in a small house where four other medical students stay.

Henry Studying at Home

We also toured the medical school campus where he studies, which is quite primitive, at least by Western standards.

Medical School Lecture Hall

On the tour, we stopped at the wall where the semester grades were posted, and Henry showed me his student number among those who passed the initial semester; about one-quarter of the class were academically dismissed.

Our visit was way too short, but driving at night in Uganda is a bit dicey, so Tango and I got on the road in time to arrive just after nightfall in Kampala after a six-hour journey.

I spent much of Sunday with my God son – Mark Kiryabwire – who is the one year-old son of one of my favorite people in the world, Justice K, as he is known in Pepperdine circles.

Tomorrow begins a long week of meetings, beginning with a morning visit with my friends at the Atlanta-based non-profit called Sixty Feet, which is doing tons of heroic work on behalf of kids here in Uganda.

Also, today’s New Vision carried an article about the meeting I primarily came to Uganda this trip to attend.

Several of you have kindly asked how things are going with Henry – the boy I met during my first visit to Uganda in a juvenile prison and with whom I am (hopefully) in the process of publishing a book.  After being released from prison in May of 2010, he completed eighteen months at Bob Goff’s Restore Leadership Academy in Gulu, where he finished second in his class and was voted as the student with the most “Outstanding Character.”  He then completed his last two years of secondary school at a leading science school – Uganda Martyrs Namugongo.

During the late summer of 2014, he was admitted into Kampala International University’s Biomedical Program.

Despite its name, KIU is not located in the capital city of Kampala, but is instead six hours to the west in Ishaka.

Because Uganda is a former British Protectorate (independence in 1962), its educational system mirrors England’s.  Hence, Ugandan school kids complete thirteen years of post-kindergarten education before beginning university, the last two of which are called “A Levels” and focus on three primary subjects that lead into their undergraduate program of study.  Additionally, both law and medicine are actually undergraduate majors and allow the students to begin their careers earlier than their American counterparts – five years post-secondary graduation for law and six for medicine.

Henry decided when he was young that he wanted to be a doctor after observing the relative scarcity of doctors in Uganda.  Consequently, he focused on Physics, Chemistry, and Biology during his A Levels.  After scoring quite high on his national entry exam, he was admitted to KIU into their Biomedical Program, which began in September of 2014.  During his first semester, he and the other 400+ students provisionally admitted into the program were required to take (and pass) thirteen subjects in order to be officially declared Biomedical students:

Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Entrepreneurship, Behavioral Science, Ethics, Research Methods, Communication Skills, Epidemiology, Biostatistics, Computer Science, Mathematics, and First Aid.

After first semester grades were released last week, 35 were dismissed from the program for failing to make the grade.  Another 35 were also dismissed, but are allowed to repeat all thirteen subjects a second time to see if they can make the grade.  Yet another 102 have been provisionally advanced into the Biomedical program on the condition that they take additional supplementary courses.  The other 300 or so have been officially admitted.

I am pleased (and proud) to report that Henry was in the latter group – passing all thirteen subjects comfortably.  We couldn’t be happier.

This semester, he is taking Biochemistry, Physiology, Human Anatomy, Environmental Health, Nutritional Disorders, and Nursing Practices.  Please continue to pray that his studies are blessed.

We are still “patiently” waiting for the ruling in the appeal I argued on his behalf just over two years ago, and there have been no developments in the ongoing saga concerning his family’s land.

I am heading back to Uganda next week for ten days and really hope my schedule allows me to visit Henry at school.

Earlier today, Uganda laid to rest one of its true heroes – a prosecutor slain for doing her job.  At the memorial service, she was remembered as one who did her job “without fear or favour.”  Her life motto was “Live every day, love every day, love beyond words.”

In his eulogy today, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Mike Chibita, mentioned the tributes to Joan that have poured in from around the world this week, including the one from Pepperdine.  Here is the text:

“Justice Chibita,

Our community was blessed just over a year ago to welcome Joan into the Pepperdine University family during her visit here in Malibu, California.  On behalf of that Pepperdine family, I would like to extend my deepest condolences to Joan’s loved ones, her dear and adoring colleagues at the Department of Public Prosecutions, and to the entire practicing bar and judiciary of Uganda.  As a result of this senseless act of cowardice, the world today has one less champion fighting for the cause of justice, and those of us who were privileged to know Joan have one less faithful friend.

While Joan’s earthly work in pursuit of truth of justice has reached its end, Joan now resides with the heavenly author of all truth and the dispenser of all justice.  Nothing would be a more fitting tribute to Joan’s life and legacy than for her work here on earth to be carried on with the same passion and integrity she so beautifully modeled for us all.

Those who carried out this evil deed, and those whom Joan was in the process of bringing to justice, must not prevail.  Just as Joan held her head high and refused to blink in the face of evil, so, too, will those who follow in her broad and deep footsteps.  Though the struggle between good and evil rages on, we know how the battle will ultimately end.  We know that good will prevail because we have a Savior who has gone before us and secured our victory.

Joan has fought the good fight, and she has run the race set out before her with perseverance and grace.  Though it is far too early, we know that Joan has achieved the prize.  The Creator of the universe is waiting to receive her, and He will greet her with these simple words: “Well done good and faithful servant.”

With overflowing hearts of sorrow and love,

Jim Gash

Global Justice Program Director

Pepperdine University School of Law

In the summer of 2011, a Pepperdine public relations officer contacted Guideposts Magazine — a Christian version of Reader’s Digest – and got them interested in doing a story on the relationship between me and Henry.  A few weeks later, Rick Hamlin (Executive Editor) came out to Pepperdine from New Jersey to meet with me.  During lunch, he asked if I’d considered writing a book about my relationship with Henry and my experiences in Uganda.

As previously described in Confessions of an Amateur Writer, Part I, and Part II, I was in the process of doing just that and told Rick.  He kindly offered to read what I’d written thus far.  I was, of course, honored and shared with him what I had.

Over the course of the next year, he was more generous with his time and energy than I had any right to expect.  He made gentle suggestions and answered numerous questions along the way.  Like the literary agent I was pursuing, Curtis Yates, he explained what I was writing needed to read like a novel – “and that means dialogue, Jim, lots of dialogue.”

As a Torts professor, I teach students that anything a reporter places within quotes that knowingly fails to accurately reflect – word for word – what was actually said can potentially subject the reporter to a defamation claim.  I told Rick this and asked, “These conversations took place more than a year ago – how can I possibly write them as dialogue with any level of integrity?  And won’t that destroy my credibility with readers?”

Like so many others who graciously assisted me along the way, Rick was both patient and direct.  “I understand your concerns and you’ll have to decide for yourself how comfortable you are with how much dialogue you place in quotes.  But you won’t have readers to worry about if you don’t have a book.  And you won’t have a book if what you write is almost entirely narrative.  Just think of all other nonfiction books you’ve read – do you think all the dialogue in those books is word for word?”

All the other nonfiction books I’ve read.  That again.  I had just begun my initial foray into actually reading books, so I understood at least some of what he was saying.

He continued, “In fiction, writing dialogue isn’t a problem – the author is making up everything anyway.  But in nonfiction, readers understand that dialogue that took place in the past won’t necessarily be reflected ‘verbatim,’ but instead accurately captures to the best of the author’s recollection the substance and tone of what was said.”

This made perfect sense, and was quite liberating.

And as I delved deeply into reading nonfiction books, I saw exactly what he meant – Unbroken, Boys in the Boat, Wild, etc., are littered with dialogue that I, as the reader, accepted without questioning the integrity of the writer even though it’s clear there is no way the conversations are recorded exactly how they occurred years (or decades) before the book was written.

This epiphany freed me from the shackles of boring narration and empowered me to tell the story in a much more readable manner.  Converting dense block paragraphs into light and fast-paced dialogue cannot be described as “editing” without robbing that word of its meaning.  I essentially started over.

As I voraciously consumed most of the NYT bestseller list, I started noticing patterns and commonalities in the writing.  While each of the books generally moved along chronologically, none of them began with the earliest event reflected in the book. Instead, most started with an inciting event and then back-filled along the way with flashbacks and memories to provide context and depth.

Monkey see, monkey do.  I, the monkey, tried to give this a shot.  As I was discovering at nearly every turn in my amateur writing foray, this is much harder than good writers make it look.  As I was struggling with this, I had a conversation with a close and trusted friend at work (Dana Hinojosa) whose husband Jason is a real writer, and who knew I was trying to write a book.

“Jason struggles with this also.  All writers do.  But there are books about how to do it.  You should get one,” she suggested.

So I did.

While this book was quite good, what was most helpful was to re-read a book I recalled doing this well.

Serendipitously, another book I read at about this time, provided another excellent how-to guide for me.

Distilled to its essence, this process is all about transitions.  Good writers create connections – images, words, thoughts, locations – that bridge the present with the past, or with what is currently happening on one continent to what happened in the past or in the future on another.

So what finally emerged when I weaved what I learned together is the opening sequence of my “manuscript” (I hesitate to call it a book until a real publisher does).  Here it is, in its current form:

CHAPTER ONE — THE CATALYST

“Is that really Africa, Dad?” Jessica asked.

My thoughts floated somewhere across the water stretching out before us as my family and I stood along the cliff’s edge.

“Dad? DAD? Are you even listening to me?” my inquisitive thirteen-year-old daughter persisted.

“What, sweetie?” I said, snapping back to the present.

“Is . . . that . . . Africa?” She was pointing at a smudge of brown on the horizon separating the water from the sky.

“Yes, it’s Morocco, and that’s the Strait of Gibraltar in front of it. We’re standing on the southernmost tip of Europe.”

“Are we going there?”

“No, sweetie. We’re going to drive around Spain for a while before heading to London for six months.”

My eight-year-old, Jennifer, took off her rainbow-rimmed sunglasses and sighed. “When can we get some ice cream?”

“I want some too,” my burr-headed middle child, Joshua, added.

“No, dad.” Jessica stood on her tiptoes until she and her furrowed brow were centered in my field of view. “I mean, are we ever going to Africa?”

“Nope. I have no plans to go to Africa. Ever.”

“Why not?”

All she got in reply was a shrug. I turned her shoulders around to face the horizon and placed her head under my chin. What would we ever do in Africa?

“Hey Jim, let me get a photo,” my wife Joline said as she lined us up against the rail and we squeezed together to fit in the frame of the picture. This was the only memory of Africa I expected our family ever to share.

Jim, Jennifer, Joshua, and Jessica – Europa Point, June 2008

Had Joline’s camera lens been able to focus over my shoulder on a small village 3,358 miles south of Gibraltar, it would have captured a deceptively innocuous scene – a dusty peasant farmer hiring an itinerant herdsman to tend his nine cows.”

With this transition, the story moves to Uganda and into the inciting event in Henry’s life that set us on a collision course – the mob killing of a herdsman that led to his initial arrest.

I had finally figured out how and where the story would begin.  I had no idea, however, it would be just as difficult to decide how and where the story should end.

In the next installment in this Confessions of an Amateur Writer series, I will describe what a Book Proposal is, how critical it is in the publishing process, and how I learned the hard way how to write one.  I will also discuss how I decided what the last chapter would be.

Thanks for reading.

Five years ago this week, I checked into Buffalo Bill’s Hotel and Casino on the border of California and Nevada.

I was going to write a book – or at least a big chunk of one.  Two months earlier, my life had changed during a January, 2010 two-week visit to Uganda – my first foray into anything that could be remotely called a “Mission Trip” in my first forty-two years of life.

While in Uganda, I spent a week working in a juvenile prison in Masindi with four other American lawyers and an American non-profit worker.  What happened that week was later dubbed “The Masindi Project.”

It was, perhaps, more appropriately referred to by my oldest daughter Jessica as “Dad’s mid-life crisis.”  While there, I struck up a highly unlikely friendship with a sixteen-year-old Ugandan prisoner named Henry and we became lifelong friends.

During these two weeks, I sent daily e-mail updates to family and friends about what we were experiencing.  I found the process of capturing feelings and experiences and distilling them into written form to be equal parts challenging and gratifying.  After we returned home, I talked to Henry every few days as the juvenile cases we prepared for trial were taken to court.  Kids were being released almost daily, so I continued sending regular e-mail updates to the growing list of those eager to hear what was happening. Some of the recipients encouraged me to write a book about my experiences.  I laughed.

Soon thereafter, I read Donald Miller’s book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.

In Chapter One, Don writes about Bob Goff: “I have this friend Bob who writes down everything he remembers . . . He’s the only guy I know who remembers his life.  He said he captures memories, because if he forgets them, it’s as though they didn’t happen; it’s as though he hadn’t lived the parts he doesn’t remember.”

After reading that, I had a strong conviction that I didn’t want to forget the memories I made in Uganda – I lived those moments (deeply and intensely) and I didn’t want them to disappear.  That’s how I found myself (taking the advice of some friends and family) as an amateur writer locked in a cheap hotel with my laptop, an ice chest full of diet coke, and a card table I brought with me (it is a really cheap hotel).  I wanted to make sure I never forgot what happened in Uganda.

That’s when I learned a lesson that real writers already know – the first page is the hardest to write.  Where does the story begin?  Using my mammoth reasoning skills, I concluded it should start at the beginning.  But where did this story begin?  Was it when we arrived in Uganda?  Was it when we decided to go?  Or did it begin before we decided to go – at all the times I had previously decided not to go anywhere outside my comfort zone?  I knew that Henry’s story was entwined with mine, so was the beginning when he was arrested?  But the story of how and why he was arrested itself started sooner – much sooner.

From reading Don Miller’s book, I knew the story needed to have an arc – an inciting incident resulting in crisis with rising and falling action, ultimately culminating in a resolution where the main characters experience change.

So I mapped things out along these lines.  Henry’s inciting incident would be his wrongful arrest, which led to his harrowing two years of imprisonment, culminating in his release from prison with the assistance of our team.  My inciting incident was Bob Goff’s conference speech entitled “Love Does” (later a best-selling book) that caused me to cede a bit of control of my life and go on this one-time trip where I met and helped Henry and some other juvenile prisoners get home to their families, and in the process grew spiritually.

If I could only get started, I reasoned, then I could pound this puppy out over the course of a few months, at most.  I was accustomed to writing lengthy and complex legal briefs and law review articles, so I should be able to do this.

Foolishness.  Utter foolishness.  Though I was entirely oblivious to this at the time.

As I often did with legal writing, I decided not to get bogged down at the beginning – I just started writing about what happened – I would organize these into chapters later.

Over the course of those three days, I got about fifty pages written – less than I hoped, but about what I realistically expected.  I would finish the spring semester of teaching two months later, then spent June finishing the book.  I was pleased with my plans.

But by April, my plans were obliterated.  My neat little story arc for Henry shattered.  While he was acquitted in the original murder charge that landed him in juvenile prison, he was convicted on a second charge associated with the tragic death of another prisoner who died shortly after a failed escape attempt.  Henry wasn’t going home.  Instead, he was very likely facing an extended prison sentence.  And my story arc collapsed just as hard – I found myself back on a plane headed for Uganda to be with Henry and questioning where God was in all of this.  So much for neat and tidy.

Fortunately, things got back on track again in May.  After lots of prayer and legal wrangling, Henry was released on probation and resumed school.  So I resumed writing.

I also began researching how the book publishing process worked.  I bought a book off Amazon and started reading.

I learned that the first step in getting a book deal was securing an agent.  Makes sense.  And the way to get an agent, I learned, was through what’s called a “query letter.”  This one-page letter describes the book, the audience, the author, and the author’s platform.  But I didn’t just want an agent.  I wanted a specific agent, and none other would do.

From the beginning, I had my eye set on the Yates & Yates literary agency.  Sealy Yates and his two sons Curtis and Matt are all Pepperdine Law grads, and Sealy was on Pepperdine’s Board of Visitors.  I knew they represented lots of high profile writers and that they were stellar at what they did.  Serendipitously, I found out that Sealy and Matt would also be attending the inauguration of Ken Starr as Baylor’s President in September of 2010, so I decided to skip the query letter phase and directly approach them about representing me.  By that time, I had finished the first seven of what I believed would be fifteen chapters.

During a pre-inauguration lunch with a bunch of Pepperdine folks, I sat next to Matt and slyly broached the subject.  He was kind and agreed to take a look at what I had, but was also honest with me about the fact that Yates & Yates worked almost exclusively with “established” authors.  The subtext should have been clear — amateurs need not apply.  Later that day, I handed him the first seven chapters.

Looking back now, I cringe at my audacity and laugh when I think about what was going through his head.

As expected, this plan crashed and burned.  I’ve been too embarrassed to ask Matt if he ever read what I gave him, but I sincerely hope he placed it on the six-story-high pile of unsolicited manuscripts from wannabe writers he gets each year.

Mercifully, Matt didn’t follow up with a rejection letter.  If he had, I probably would have quit right then.

In my next post, I will discuss how and where I learned just how little I knew about storytelling and where I found some very helpful answers.