GOOD STORIES BEG to be told and retold, and the story of my arrest in Canada on charges with interfering with the lawful operation of a passenger jet is no exception. In fact, I've been telling it again and again for nearly fifteen years—and often I'm not even the one who brings it up!

This is satisfying to me because in 1987, when my legal difficulties were finally behind me and I was transferred back to the United States to complete my term of mission service, my church leaders, my lawyer, and even my father advised me not to talk about what had happened in Canada. But it had been a traumatic experience for a young Mormon missionary to endure—I spent time in jail, after all—and I had to talk about it with somebody.

The first listener was a mission colleague of mine who didn't quite buy my cover story of a medical transfer. After some cajoling, I related the story to him over our traditional evening snack of Tostitos and Pace Picante Sauce. While he received the tale with ever-increasing incredulity, I delivered it with a sense of guilt that changed gradually to grateful unburdening.

As the story subsequently spread through the mission, though, my feeling of liberation turned into a burden once again. Now, everywhere I went my fellow missionaries wanted to the the "Canada story." It started getting old after a while. I began to dread the words, "Hey, Shunn! Elder Jones hasn't heard the story!"

At last, since a proper telling took at least an hour, I sat down one day in 1988 with a tape recorder, a 90-minute cassette, and three other missionaries and narrated my experiences before a live studio, as it were. I called the tape "Terror on Flight 789: The Elder Shunn Story." I seem to recall that each of the three elders in attendance went home with a copy. (I'm not sure whether or not I ever distributed any other copies of that recording, but I do still have the original in my possession.)

I RETURNED HOME to Utah from my mission later that year, and while the requests to hear for my story diminished in frequency, scarcely a party or social gathering went by without someone bringing it up. The events had been covered on the Salt Lake news channels, and it seemed that my resulting fifteen minutes of fame were dragging on longer than I'd anticipated, at least in sleepy little Kaysville. (Not that I'm complaining at all—being a convicted felon was a great way to impress Mormon girls.)

A watershed moment came in 1989 at my five-year high school reunion, when I was asked to stand up and give a brief account of my arrest. I got nervous with the mike in my hand, forgot the meaning of the word "brief," and flopped like a trout. I realized I was much better telling the story to a small group that could ask me clarifying questions than to a large audience. Still, I wanted to be able to communicate to a large audience, and that was when I started to consider seriously the idea of writing a book about my mission experiences.

When Mormons talk about their missions, it's the joyful times they tend to concentrate on, the triumphs. "Oh, a mission is hard work," they say knowingly, "very hard. Sometimes it's very discouraging. But the blessings make the trials worthwhile." Still, the happy events, the uplifting stories, are the ones that get related in detail, while the bad are left as formless generalities. This only makes sense among a people trying to encourage their sons to serve missions, but that kind of story didn't interest me. Inspirational writing rarely makes for compelling literature. I wanted my book to paint a true and unromanticized picture of mission life.

And therein lay the problem. An honest book would necessarily embarrass the church, because for Mormons, in personal as well as institutional history, if it isn't affirmative and faith-promoting then it isn't considered worth repeating. An honest book might very well jeoparize my church membership—which in 1989 was still something I cared about—but anything less than an honest book was not something I could bring myself to write. So I shelved the project before I even started, with the idea that one day I'd reexamine it.

I CONTINUED HAULING out the story as a party trick, and that seemed to be all the life left in it until 1993, when I began an E-mail correspondence with a fellow science-fiction writer on the West Coast. My first professional short story, "From Our Point of View We Had Moved to the Left," had just appeared to some acclaim in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and I was feeling full of piss and vinegar. Hoping that it would make me sound dangerous and mysterious—perhaps like a young Harlan Ellison—I dropped a little reference in one letter to my inability to reenter Canada. My writer friend, with what seemed like great interest, asked me to elaborate.

So I sat down to start recounting the story for her. I typed and I typed, but since the woman was utterly unfamiliar with Mormonism and missionaries, I found that after an hour or so all I had managed to do was sketch in a little background and set the scene. I had barely even begun the story itself. I broke off at a convenient stopping place, promised to continue the tale soon, and hit SEND.

My writer friend wrote back quickly. The prologue had intrigued her, and a day or so later I sat down at my computer to finish the story. After two hours, however, I realized with a sinking heart that I again had not gotten very far. I composed a short apology, typed "To be continued," and hit SEND again.

To make a long story short, this went on for months. When I finally reached the end in 1994, the tale had stretched to 34 installments and over 50,000 words.

That's a lot of writing for a writer to do without getting paid.

It's also a lot of writing for a writer to do for an audience of one, even an attractive one he's striving to impress. I had joined the Science Fiction Roundtable on GEnie—one of the many former online services that AOL would eventually put out of business—and after some of the other writers in that forum learned that I'd been pounding out installments of the Canada story, popular demand forced me to begin posting them there. And believe me, the others really had to twist my arm.

I posted installments to the SFRT every day or so, and it caused something of minor stir. Most readers agreed that it was an entertaining and harrowing story, but plenty of folks took me to task for what they perceived as its moral failings. I had written, of course, as a Mormon apologist addressing an audience of non-believers, and most of those non-believers held uncharitable ideas about Mormonism that I hadn't helped soften any. I probably fielded more challenges to my beliefs in that one month than I had in any equal period of my life.

But at least no one seemed to stop liking me, and in fact several people urged me to try to publish my story. I didn't think the story as it stood was ready for publication, and I still wasn't prepared to tackle a full-length book on the subject, so, like Mary in the New Testament, I simply took those things and pondered them in my heart.

MEANWHILE, MY FORTUNES took several unexpected turns, and by the end of 1995 I found myself living in Brooklyn, New York, completely uprooted from my old life and entirely estranged from the Mormon church. Some kind of feverish battle over the church had been going on in my head for years, mostly without my conscious acknowledgment, and as I had finally come to realize that I no longer believed the doctrines of Joseph Smith and his successors, I had snapped like a giant rubber band. The recoil catapulted me all the way across the country, as far as I could get from the Mormonism-steeped climate of Utah.

Under the not-very-secret nom de plume of William Perry Shunn, I became a vocal critic of the church, founding a Web site called "Mormon Matter" where I posted a variety of rants and diatribes and generally attempted to poke as much fun at Mormonism as I possibly could. I also began posting three or four installments a week of the Canada story—suitably rewritten to reflect my new take on Mormonism. A small but rabid coterie of fans followed my missionary saga as devotedly as young boys once followed the serialized adventures of Flash Gordon at the movies.

Terror on Flight 789, as I continued to call the story, generated reams of E-mail—from fellow apostates happy to learn that someone else's mission had been as miserable as theirs, from rabid Mormons who predicted for me an eternity of hellfire and damnation, and from ordinary folks who knew nothing about Mormonism but had gotten sucked into the story anyway. Through the medium of the Web, my story had probably reached more readers than had seen any one of my magazine stories.

One of the most interesting responses to Terror came from a writer in Hollywood named Christopher J. Rivera. He'd been so fascinated by my story that he tracked me down at the giant Manhattan insurance brokerage where I was working at the time and called me up. It was August 15, 1996, the day after my 29th birthday. "Hi," said Christopher when I picked up the phone. "I loved your story on the Web, and my partner and I think it would make a terrific movie. How would you like to write it with us?"

And thus was born a lightly fictionalized screenplay called The Accidental Terrorist, written by Christopher, James Callan, and myself. For a few days in 1997 we even managed to get it optioned, although the production company pulled out of the agreement just as we were signing the contracts. (If you're looking forward to seeing the adventures of Elder Shunn at your local metroplex, don't despair. We still intend to get this movie made . . . someday.)

But if there was one thing the screenwriting experience taught me, other than how to write a screenplay, it was that I still wasn't satisfied with any of the ways my story had been told. There was still a full-length book inside me, waiting to be born. The prod that finally forced it out came in 1999.

AFTER YEARS OF TRYING, I had finally snared a literary agent, and as she and I were going back and forth about what to do with a novel I'd written called Silvertide, I impulsively asked her if she represented any non-fiction. "Sure," she said. "What do you have in mind?"

I summarized my mission story for her—by then I had learned to tell it very briefly, when necessary—and she flipped out. In a good way. "Write it now," she said. "That's the kind of book that can be a bestseller."

The time must have been right, because that's all the spur I needed. I set right to work. And over two years later, on September 30, 2001—much to the relief of my wife █████, who can barely remember a time when I wasn't working on this book—I wrote the last line of Missionary Man and, with a blessed sense of relief, turned the manuscript over to my agent.

It weighs in at a quarter of a million words. It's huge, but finally I've written the version of my mission experience that satisfies me. At last the story is through begging to be retold.

Although if someone asks Christopher and James and me to rewrite the story, I can probably be convinced to take yet another crack at it.