A few years ago, I woke from a dream with this phrase in my mind:
Heaven is running out of angels.
I didn’t quite understand those words, but I could feel them, could sense their import and drama. And I knew they were the premise to a story I would eventually tell.
I grew up on the Bible’s opening book Genesis, and my fascination with its origin stories has only increased over the years. I’ve read far and wide about how these narratives came to exist and why they matter to so many people. One particular line in Genesis has long obsessed me:
“The human race began to increase and to spread over the earth, and daughters were born to them. The sons of the gods saw how beautiful these daughters were…”
—Genesis 6:1-2, Oxford Study Bible
Many scholars think this moment — when the angels prioritized something over God — might be the real reason the angels fell from Heaven. (The idea that the angels were cast from Heaven for other reasons springs largely from the poem Paradise Lost, whose author John Milton took three verses in Revelations and used them to tell an allegory of the English Civil War.)
In the Genesis version, God didn’t like his angels admiring anything but Him, so He cast them out. God, not Lucifer, is the one with pride.
I love the idea of angels giving up their aeviternity for a chance at love. I started to think…what if this became a trend? What if angels dove for love en masse, to the point where Heaven began to feel like a ghost town?
I had the general concept, the problem…but what to do with it? Often one piece of a novel falls at my feet, but it’s missing something — a spark that starts a narrative conflagration, illuminating a new world.
In the meantime, my closest friend had a near death experience. Or she’d had one ten years earlier, but it took her a decade to process it, to be able to speak about it in detail. I’ve since learned this is common among people who survive NDEs. Their experiences transcend language. There are no adequate words to describe slipping past this realm. It takes a while to translate cosmic interactions into earthly speech.
When my friend finally told me about her experience, I wanted to know more. I dove deeply into research about NDEs. I learned about the Life Review — that glimpse many people describe as “life flashing before their eyes” as they die.
I quickly became enthralled with the notion of a final montage that crafts a life into a story, that elevates narrative into a miracle, helping people make sense of their lives and preparing them to move on to whatever they encounter next. It’s astonishing that our minds can do that.
I began to wonder: What if an order of angels was tasked with making these Life Reviews? And what if their leader, the Angel of Death, distributed these films to people as they died? What if he founded a school to teach angels how to make the Life Reviews?
I named these angelic filmmakers “White Lights.” And I called their film school “Acheron.” 
After a while, I wondered: What if the Angel of Death decided to retire? Who would replace him? And how?
I finally had a story. After years of diving through the narrative spheres, White Lights is the novel that I found.
Who knows what new responsibilities I’ll absorb as I sleep tonight?
