Carolyn Givens is a good friend of FH editor, Janna Barber. They met at Hutchmoot several years ago, but got to know each other better when they attended a writer’s conference together last year, and stayed in the same cheap motel. Carrie recently self-published a book for middle grade readers called The King’s Messenger. She works at Church at Charlotte in North Carolina and does freelance writing and editing. In addition, she works with Story Warren, allies in imagination for families, and with ArtsCharlotte, which seeks to nourish the soul of the city through the arts.

What’s the inspiration behind The King’s Messenger?  

I tell people that I “meet” my characters, because they have a tendency to arrive fully formed in my imagination just waiting for a story to live out. Smuggins is no exception–one day in a Great Christian Writers class in college we were studying Milton’s sonnet “On His Blindness”–that begins, “When I consider how my light is spent…”–and we got to the final lines: “His state is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed/ and post o’er land and ocean without rest:–/ They also serve who only stand and wait.” And there stood Smuggins, an over eager messenger for the King who needed to learn that sometimes waiting is the hardest task of all. It started as a short story, and for a while that was how stories came to me–one at a time, usually whenever there was some lesson I was learning. Most of them were triggered by a specific line of poetry or Scripture, or a sermon or message. Over time, they grew into chapters, and when I had nine, and one was a final chapter, I knew I needed just one more to round it out. Later on, I went to chapel at the college where I worked and when it was done, my flat mate Christine came running up to me, “That was a Smuggins story!” she said. I’d though the exact same thing and had been sketching out the penultimate chapter in my notebook, rather than taking notes on the message!