Do you ever feel that where you are today is the result of a series of events you never would have seen coming?
Michelle Medlock Adams calls them “divine mistakes.”
Adams is an award-winning children’s book author, freelance writer, speaker and teacher with 123 published books. Now, she has her own children’s imprint, “Wren & Bear Books,” and consulting business, “Michelle Medlock Adams, LLC.”
It all started when she was doing her hair in the bathroom while listening to the TV playing in the other room.
An avid Cubs fan, Adams had tuned into WGN to watch the game. What she didn’t know was that it would launch a career that would fulfill her life’s greatest calling.
Adams was working as a journalist for a small-town Indiana newspaper, The Bedford Times-Mail, after graduating from Indiana University in 1991 where she started off doing broadcast journalism.
“I liked it, and I was decent at it, but I never felt like you could tell the whole story,” she said. “I was much more enthralled with just the words, just the written word.”
Switching over to news and magazine work, Adams wrote for several different sections while her husband was working as a certified public accountant (CPA), and together, they began to raise their two daughters, born nearly 20 months apart.
Adams felt this lifestyle was too much to keep up; something needed to shift.
“So I just began to seek God about, you know, ‘How can I be used in writing?’” she said.
His answer came through an unlikely channel.
A voice came out of the TV. It was a man with a Christian magazine publication called “The Believer’s Voice of Victory.” His team was looking for freelance writers.
“He’s never done that before or since,” Adams said.
Divine mistake number one.
Number two happened when, in 1998, Adams got a call back after sending her resumé into the publication. A woman named Stephanie called and asked her to come to their Texas location the next day. Being from Bedford, Indiana, Adams had to decline — she couldn’t drop everything and make it all the way to Texas in one day.
What Adams didn’t know was that Stephanie figured she was from Bedford, Texas, a town nearby to the magazine office. After this realization over the phone, Stephanie still wanted Adams to come interview for the position.
Both women felt like it was just supposed to happen.
One interview later, Adams and her family decided to move to Texas, even though her husband had a good job in Indiana.
“You don’t just walk away from a (CPA) partnership…and yet we both had such peace about it,” Adams said. “We were like, ‘We know God is directing our steps like it says in Proverbs.’”
Just a month after she began working for the magazine, they asked her to take over the children’s section.
This was an age group she had never written for before.
“And I was like, okay, well, just because I have (children) doesn’t mean I know how to write for them,” she said.
Still, Adams took it as a challenge. She joined a children’s writing group called the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and took off running.
The woman that ran the group began to suggest books for her to read and study.
“I bought every book she suggested, and I just devoured them,” Adams said. “And the more I got into them, the more I was like, ‘This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’ I loved it. And I felt like it had taken all these turns to get me to sort of what I felt I was called to do.”
Adams says that her journalistic training — knowing how to write with accuracy and fast — has made her a better and more well-rounded children’s book writer.
She had enjoyed writing before, but now she felt she was truly in her sweet spot.
“I would wake up, and I couldn’t wait to get to work,” she said.
Today, Adams writes her own books and content, speaking at writing conferences and working on ghostwriting contracts for celebrities and individuals who come to her with an idea for a story.
Adams believes every writer should learn to ghostwrite. Even though it was difficult to unlearn writing through her own voice, she has come to see the process of humbling herself enough to become someone else’s voice as invaluable.
Some of her greatest achievements have come from the books she’s written that she can’t tell anyone about due to non-disclosure laws.
“I’ve written two New York Times Best Sellers,” Adams said. “I could put that in my resumé, but I couldn’t tell you what books they are.”
In 2006, Adams was asked to speak at Taylor University by a professor that she had a connection with, and she’s been coming back ever since.
This semester, she is teaching a Children’s Writing Seminar for writing and illustration students.
Teaching at Taylor is a fulfillment of a dream that Adams has had for a long time, to share with others the craft she’s come to love so much.
“It’s always such a privilege to get to work with the professional writing students at Taylor ... so many of these kids that are such successes in life and also in the writing world,” Adams said. It’s just cool to have played any small part—to just have been able to know them and read their work early on and know, ‘That person’s going somewhere.’”
