Running from Fear to Faith

In April of 2023, my mom was in town. While we were driving back from lunch, my phone rings. A man named Andre Levrone is on the other end.Andre played football at the University of Virginia and played a few seasons in the NFL. He’s also married to Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, a World Champion sprinter, two-time Olympic gold medalist, and world-record holder in the400-meter hurdles. Andre asked me if I’d be willing to meet him and Sydney for lunch. Sydney had signed a book contract with Harper Collins. The manuscript was due in just about two months, and because a series of unexpected circumstances, they had a long way to go to finish it.

           At the end of our lunch, Sydney asked me if I could finish the manuscript in eight weeks.Writing 60,000 words in that short of time sounds insane to me now, but at the time I was excited about the challenge and, strangely, I thought such a tight deadline might actually make the manuscript better. It would force me to focus and stick to the structure we would put together the following week. That turned out to be the case.

           After my initial conversation with the Levrones, I first needed a structure for the book. To get that, I needed to know the big idea of the book. After all, a memoir can’t be about an entire life. It has to be about a certain aspect of someone’s life, whether that’s a particular journey they go on, a challenge they overcome, a relationship triumph, or a career success. Sydney wanted her book to be about her journey from a teenager struggling with fear to a young woman living by faith. Once I knew that the story was about the journey from fear to faith, I next needed to figure out where the fear was most extreme.That would be a great place to start the book. Then I wanted to know when the triumph of faith was best seen. That would be the climax of the book. For this journey, the three-act structure commonly used in movies was invaluable. Int hat structure, act 1 is the status quo. It’s the place the main character lives before they begin on their journey to change. In Sydney’s case, fear was the status quo of her life. It dominated her. Act 2 is the journey from fear to faith. For Sydney, that started in 2020, just before she met Andre, when she realized she couldn’t live with so much fear for the rest of her life and she determined to change. During act 2, she meets Andrea, goes back to church, repents of her sins, and faces her fears at the 2021 Olympics. In Act three,Sydney experiences the blessings of a life of faith. She faces the challenges of a family health crisis, the triumphs at the 2022 World Championships, and she responds the right way to a health setback in 2023 that causes her to miss that year’s World Championships.

           Once I had that structure figured out, and I knew where I was going and what were the key plot points along the way, I knew I had everything I needed to write the book in eight weeks. Sydney committed to meeting with me a couple times a week during that time in order to flush out the details. Then I wrote furiously. By the end of the summer, we had a manuscript we were both proud of. The book was published in the winter of 2024, in time for readers to get to know Sydney better before the 2024 Olympics in Paris, where she will be one of the favorites to win gold for the U.S. Track and Field team.

If you’d like to read Sydney’s story, and see the three-act structure in action in its 12 chapters, you can purchase Far Beyond Gold wherever books are sold.

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