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Chandler J. Birch

Goodreads Author

Born

in The United States

Website

http://www.chandlerjbirch.com

Twitter

chandlerjbirch

Genre

Fantasy

Member Since

November 2011

URL

https://www.goodreads.com/chandlerjbirch

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Chandler J. Birch grew up ignoring the Rocky Mountains in favor of Narnia, Middle Earth, and Temerant. He started writing stories of his own before he was old enough to be ashamed of it, and kept up the habit through high school and college.

Birch signed a publishing contract with Simon & Schuster when he was 23. The book he sold, The Facefaker's Game, was written over the course of three months, during which he also graduated college, moved across the country, started a full-time job, and got married. (It was not a relaxed summer.)

Birch lives in Colorado Springs, with his wife, Kelsey, and their dogs, Winter and Bandit. He is currently working on the as-yet-untitled sequel to The Facefaker's Game and hoping very, very hard that the publishe ...more

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Popular Answered Questions

What are you currently working on?

Chandler J. Birch The Empire of Bridges. That's a tentative title, but I definitely can't use the one in my head. I could get in copyright trouble if I named a book "Th…moreThe Empire of Bridges. That's a tentative title, but I definitely can't use the one in my head. I could get in copyright trouble if I named a book "The Breakfast Club Goes to Narnia."(less)

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What advice would you give to aspiring authors?

Chandler J. Birch SO MUCH

The most important one by a long way, though, is: write bad books. I burned years and years of potential energy working on the first three chap…moreSO MUCH

The most important one by a long way, though, is: write bad books. I burned years and years of potential energy working on the first three chapters of books I never finished, because I couldn't stand the thought of them being bad (and because I hate writing middles). I didn't manage to write an actual ending until I got comfortable with writing something that I knew was bad and promising myself that I'd fix it later.

Next up: be really good at taking criticism! And, related: get you some friends whose taste you respect and who will tell you honestly when they think something isn't working.

Lastly: don't fall too much in love with the recommended structures. Three-Act, Five-Act, Hero's Journey, all that crap. They're fun when you want to impress people at a party but using them to put your story together is like eating food someone else has already chewed—yes, you're going to get some calories out of it, but it's going to be pretty gross and you've got to learn how to chew for yourself at some point anyway.

In my experience, it's easier to push your story along tracks of desire, need, and drive. Figure out what your character wants and what they actually need (they are almost always interrelated, and they are almost always different); then figure out how the character will pursue the thing they want and how you can make that challenging for them.

Really. That's all it takes. Every time you can't figure out what to do next, check:

1) What does my character (or characters, if that's your thing) want right now?
2) What's keeping them from having that?
3) How do they solve it?
4) What goes wrong? (Either their solution failed and they need to try something different, or their solution worked—and now things have somehow gotten even worse.)

Just keep repeating those as much as feels appropriate before giving your character their reward. If your story is tragic, they get the thing they wanted and nothing else. If your story isn't, they get the thing they needed, and maybe some other stuff.(less)

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Chandler J. Birch’s books

Average rating: 4.03 · 425 ratings · 96 reviews · 2 distinct works • Similar authors

	The Facefaker's Game 4.03 avg rating — 424 ratings — published 2016 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Darkened Doors liked it 3.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 2017	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.

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Chandler J. Birch's Blog

The Darkened Doors Short Story Bundle

Happy Halloween and/or Reformation Day, depending on what scares you!

In celebration of the spookiest of holidays (and also the door of Wittenberg’s venerable All Saints’ Church), I’ve put together a little bundle of short stories having to do with sanctuaries, and the things that threaten them—from outside, and from within.

It’s called The Darkened Doors, and hopefully it can distract you for half

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Chandler’s Recent Updates

Chandler Birch entered a giveaway Lights Out (Into Darkness, #1) by Navessa Allen 20 copies available, ends on May 08, 2026 Enter to win »
Apr 27, 2026 05:34PM · like · see giveaway
Chandler Birch entered a giveaway Lights Out (Into Darkness, #1) by Navessa Allen	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Mar 10, 2026 03:11PM · like · see giveaway

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Nothing But Readi...: Team Don Quixote	929	355	Aug 23, 2020 11:46AM

Chandler’s Quotes

“One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.
The tale is the map that is the territory.
You must remember this.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

380 likes

“We are apt to imagine that if Jesus Christ constrains us and we obey Him, He will lead us to great success; but He does not. If our Lord has ever constrained you, and you obeyed Him, what was your dream of His purpose? Never put your dream of success as God’s purpose for you; His purpose may be exactly the opposite.”
― Oswald Chambers, God's Workmanship: And He Shall Glorify Me

tags: obedience, success

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“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play

tags: boots, economics

2158 likes