William Paul Young closes Book Festival
Photo courtesy of the Savannah Book Festival
Written by Emilie Kefalas
Editors Note: This article has been edited from its original version to correctly name the profession of Youngs’ parents as well as the country in which they lived and worked.
William Paul Young has been a writer all his life, but it was not until he wrote a story to give his children as a Christmas gift that he contemplated publishing. That story would ultimately evolve into the literary phenomenon known as “The Shack,” a 2007 self-published book that shot to the top of the USA Today and New York Times bestseller lists and remained there for nearly two years.
This past Sunday Feb. 14, Young delivered the closing address of this year’s ninth annual Savannah Book Festival. President of the Book Festival, Ann Highbee, welcomed the crowd for the last lecture in the festival’s series on Sunday afternoon at the Trustees Theater.
A lifelong storyteller, Young lead a discussion on how the events in his life guided him to “The Shack” and his latest endeavors in Christian-based writing and storytelling.
Young endured a traumatic childhood as the son of missionaries in New Guinea. According to Young, his perception of God was convoluted from his youth. Trust has always been a difficult issue for the writer, who said it took him fifty years wipe the face of his father off the face of God.
“I wasn’t connected to my parents,” Young said. “I had no real connection. I lost any sense of family I had. I lost my color, and at that point I belonged to no one.”
This describes one of the major struggles children of third world cultures suffer. However they can be a huge gift to the world because they already think outside the box, Young explained.
“For me, geography has never been about politics. Geography is about relationships,” Young said. “And if you don’t find someone to belong to, you don’t belong to anywhere. For a lot of us who grew up with a western evangelical mentality, we were so disconnected from our head and our heart. We would function in our head but our hearts were just broken.”
“The Shack” explores the complicated ideas of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an incredibly imaginative way.
“I built a facade outside of the shack so I would never have to invite everyone in,” Young said in describing his process and personal journey writing this book.
Together with a small team of aspiring publishers, Young self-published “The Shack” in 2007.
“We order 10,000 copies which we were told is 8,000 in your garage for two years,” Young said.
However, three-and-a-half months later, Young said he received a call from one of the guys on his team that they needed to print more books.
“We had nothing, no marketing,” Young said. “When we order our first print run, we split the cost.”
Young found out people would consulting the book’s website for orders. In thirteen months, he and his team spent less than $300 on advertising for “The Shack,” and they shipped over 1.1 million copies of it to readers from all over the world.
“It was a God thing right from the very beginning,” Young said. “The book is just human.”
From there, “The Shack” took off, and a major publishing house got involved not long after its success. The book soon became what Young referred to as a juggernaut within the international market and community. It is the number two book in the history of Brazil.
Young believes his books (“The Shack,” “Crossroads,” and “Eve”) appeal to such a wide audience because they deal with questions we all have as human beings. His latest work, “Eve,” tackles the complicated characteristics of the human self through the eyes of a teenage girl. Even his readers struggle to describe his style and plot lines, simply because they are so creative and abstract.
“The books have given people a way to have a conversation about God that’s not religious,” Young explained. “It’s relational, and it’s changed so many things.”
