Kindness Stones– Q and A

Last updated on: September 7, 2026 at 1:07 am by Ben Witherington

Kindness Stones– Q and A 2026-08-29T21:13:40-04:00 Ben Witherington

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1) How long did it take to write these stories? Did they all sort of spill out of you in a short period of time or have they been marinating for a while in your imagination?

Short answer—most stories were written in a single day—but of course there’s more to it than that.

I started with the characters. I created four main characters with satellites of “minor characters” (some of whom became pretty major) in the orbit around each. I made up back stories for those characters and gave them personalities—lots of stuff that never explicitly makes it into the book. Almost every day I walk for a few miles along some desert trails and I would use that time to think about these characters, imagining what each of them would do if they found themselves in this or that situation.

Then my dear wife Melissa would give me a “story prompt”—write me a story about “somebody celebrating an anniversary” or about “somebody suddenly getting a lot of money” etc. so, then, on my desert walks I would think about each character with regard to that circumstance and see what developed in my mind. I would eventually settle on one of the characters for that “prompt” and then try to work out the story – basic plot details but mostly trying out dialogue – rehearsing what characters would say to each other. When I say I “thought about this.” I actually mean I talked about it out loud as I walked – often with gesticulations. Anyone who saw me walking through the desert talking to myself and gesturing wildly . . . well, I don’t think anyone did, and I wouldn’t have cared.

After a while—maybe a week, maybe a month, it varied—I would shut myself away for a full day (often in a cabin we rented for this purpose) and write the story beginning to end. Then it was basically done, though there would always be revisions each time I re-read it. And, of course, when I put all the stories together into the book, I made revisions intended to make them entire set read well together (while still allowing for some disparity of genre).

2) At the beginning of the book it appeared that you and Melissa were dreaming these stories up together, but I gather you wrote them all, perhaps with her kibbitzing?

No I wrote all the stories without any input from Melissa—she just provided the story prompt and left me to go with it as I would. But, while I was developing and then writing my story, she would be developing and writing a story as well—she had also created four characters and she would apply the chosen prompt to one of them and write a story for me to read. We made a point not to discuss our stories in any way until they were finished—that way I had no idea what she was doing with the idea (which character she was using, etc,) nor did she have any idea what I was doing. That surprise element made the “unveiling of the stories” more fun—and prevented unintentional cross-pollination.

We published her stories with lulupublishing as Out of the Box: Stories by Melissa.

3) I like the way the final story kind of brings various of the story threads together and brings a fitting closure to the collection. Was this your intent from the outset?

Not from the outset—but as the stories developed, pretty early on, I began imagining how the characters might be related to each other in non-explicit ways. I toyed with the idea of “crossover episodes” but rejected that—it would have come off as forced and artificial (as do such episodes on television—at least frequently in my opinion). But still . . . I thought that “the backstories” for the characters might connect in ways that the characters themselves did not necessarily recognize.

None of the four main characters ever meet (near the end, two of them are about to meet but that doesn’t happen within the narrative and the reader is left to imagine the encounter).

Still . . . the homeless man in the park once had a profound effect on a young girl (story cycle 3) who would end up being the wife of a man whose father had once been the boyfriend of a woman who became a first grade teacher (story cycle 2) and who was also the stepson of a man who couldn’t figure out how to make love work (story cycle 1) until he met a woman who had spent her life dedicated to loving a man who could not have her (story cycle 4).

I made spider charts to keep track of all this—and parallel timelines for every character to make sure it made sense. The point, I guess, was to express the notion (at a mythic level) that “we are all in this together.” Our lives are often affected and influenced by people we don’t even know exist—and of course our lives (our words and actions) affect the lives of others who affect others—and so, in ways we would no doubt be surprised to discover.

4) Are there other stories in the works, with equally interesting and sometimes strange characters?

No other stories intended for publication. As I say in the Introduction, I’ve written hundreds of stories over the years—featuring a large cast of characters I developed. It’s all a way of exercising my imagination. I leave them on the computer for a while, re-read them and delete them. It was Melissa’s idea for me to write some for her and, by extension, for whoever else might want to read them. Will I do more? I don’t know.

5) One of the themes or sub-themes in these stories is various different forms of religion, mainly some form of Christianity. Did you intend these stories to involve a critique of some of the foibles of Protestant and Catholic praxis, failings, hypocrisy, and yet honesty?

I did not intend for the stories to endorse, critique, or even examine any particular religious systems, movements, or impulses—but, reading them, I can see how they might do that. I guess it was inevitable since I am a person who has studied religion and listened to people’s accounts of diverse experiences with different sorts of religion.

In this case, I simply created the characters and then I tried to let them do and say what they would do or say—something I learned from Stephen King who says his characters always determine plot development—sometimes things happen in his books that he would never have wanted to happen, but he had to let the characters do what they would do—and then he had to narrate the consequences. He creates characters – fashions a situation in which they are to be placed – and then just recounts what they do in that situation and what happens as a result. My approach to these stories was similar to that: I created the characters, Melissa suggested a situation to put one of them in—and then I just recounted what they would do or say and what would happen. as a result.

So why do religious/spiritual themes come up so often? It’s because the characters are all people who have some sort of religious or spiritual aspect to their identity (as do just about all the real live people I know or have known). So that just naturally comes into play in either positive or negative ways. Basically, for Jasper it’s Greek mythology, for Father McCloskey it’s Roman Catholicism, for Angelika it’s a fundamentalist strain of Holiness tradition, and for Jimmy Haizlet it’s romantic love (which is like a religion for him since for him “being in love” is a form of worship—as Audrey astutely points out). I think all of these people (even Angelika) would say that their chosen “religion” or “brand of spirituality” has been essentially a positive force and influence on their lives—though the reader can form his or her own opinion as to whether that has actually been the case.

This is analogous to another common motif in the stories: sexual development. There isn’t much actual sex in the book (that is, sex *per se–*ha ha that’s a joke for those who’ve read the sexiest of the stories) but almost everyone thinks about sex or talks about it or dreams about it—and at various points sexual experience is linked to love, to lust, to guilt, to shame, to joy, to fun, to duty, to simple distraction, and eventually even to worship (after J. Haizlet decides it is a sacrament). I’m really not trying to comment on the variety of these perspectives (certainly not to offer any moral or ethical critique)—attitudes toward sexual experience and interest in such experiences, real or imagine, are simply defining qualities of the characters (as, I thin, they are of most people I know or have known). Sometimes (more often than I thought would be the case) those aspects of the characters’ identities came to the fore.

Bottom line: I never intended to write stories dealing with the motifs of religious experience or sexual development—I just created characters who were then placed into situations where those aspects of their identity ended up playing a bigger part than I would have imagined. I’m sure a therapist could make something of that.

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