Bret Anthony Johnston has now published three books, including his recent “We Burn Daylight,” a reimagining of “Romeo and Juliet” set during the 1993 Branch Davidian siege near Waco. But as a kid growing up in South Texas, he didn’t even realize there were still writers out in the world, much less that he could be one.

“It always sounds like a joke when I say this, but it’s not. I didn’t understand that books were still being written,” Johnston says. “I thought all the books were written, and our job was just to make our way through them as readers.”

Everything changed when Johnston attended an event at his community college in Corpus Christi, where, for the first time in his life, Johnston saw a living, breathing writer — the novelist Robert Stone. He walked into the auditorium knowing he loved to read and write and walked out an hour later knowing he had to be a writer.

“I had no reason to believe, no real hope that it would work out for me, but I knew that I would never forgive myself if I didn’t try,” Johnston says. “In some ways, I still basically feel that same way. I’ve had a lot of success, and I’m very grateful and surprised by that, but I still feel like I’m trying to be a writer.”

Johnston published a collection of short stories, “Corpus Christi,” in 2004, and his first novel, “Remember Me Like This,” in 2014. In addition to his writing, he has served as the director of the Michener Center for Writers for seven years. Spending time with fellow writers and staff at the University’s creative writing MFA program is Johnston’s “absolute dream job” and raises the bar for his own writing.

“I get to spend my days with faculty, staff and students who care so deeply about language and the imagination that it’s humbling and inspiring,” Johnston says. “I go home eager to read and write because of this community.”

When he wrote his story collection, Johnston wasn’t even sure if it would be published, much less reach an audience. With “We Burn Daylight,” published in July, he found himself more aware of the reader during the writing process. He discovered that knowing people will read his work can be both invigorating and distracting.

“You want to be held accountable, like what you’re doing matters. If someone is going to give you the precious gift of their attention, you want to reward their attention,” Johnston says. “(But) what you should be doing, in my opinion, is thinking about the characters and are you being accountable to them.”

The idea for “We Burn Daylight” revolved around the characters, especially after Johnston met a Waco resident who lived there at the same time as the Branch Davidian religious cult. Johnston watched the 1993 massacre unfold on television — a siege by U.S. and Texas law enforcement on the group’s compound that ended in the deaths of dozens of members and four federal agents. But on a book tour a decade ago, Johnston learned something about the oft-covered tragedy — many of the people who lived at the compound also had jobs in nearby Waco. Johnston heard a Waco resident talk about how he had worked alongside a Branch Davidian member but didn’t realize who they were until he saw their picture on the news reporting their death.

“That really made an impact on me, and it made me start to wonder what would it be like to spend so much time beside someone and not know anything about their life, and then to find out everything about their life in this really tragic way,” Johnston says. “I just sat with that, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.”

Johnston started thinking — what if the story wasn’t about a middle-aged man like the resident Johnston met, but a 14-year-old boy, and what if he had a crush on the new girl in school but had no idea she was part of this religious cult?

“I didn’t know the answer to that question, so I wrote the book to find out. What would that feel like?” Johnston says. “And it took me 10 years and hundreds of pages to figure it out.”

Johnston didn’t set out to write a reimagining of “Romeo and Juliet,” but after a few years of working on the book, he started to notice some ways that the story and characters paralleled the Shakespeare classic. After making that connection, Johnston went back through the novel to put references to the tragedy in the story of Jaye and Roy. The title, “We Burn Daylight,” comes from the play as well.

“I want this thing to exist on its own, but if you know the tragedy really well, you’re going to see certain references,” Johnston says.

At this point, Johnston says he has read most of the books written about the Waco massacre. “Some of them are brilliant, and some of them are really bad, and they have an agenda of their own,” Johnston says. He wanted to write something different, something that grappled with many of the same questions that came out of the true event but told through a fictional story.

“I would like to believe that in reimagining it, we can engage with material differently than if it’s a straight reported history,” Johnston says.

Through his years of research, Johnston took over five trips to the site of the compound. What he had never realized from all of the books he read and news he watched was how far outside of Waco the compound was, surrounded by miles and miles of pasture.

“When you go out there, you feel very, very removed from any kind of municipality, and you feel very, very small because it’s just flatland and huge Texas sky,” Johnston says. “It really does change your perspective of this narrative that we’ve been given of like, ‘They were dangerous to someone,’ or ‘They had these big plans.’”

Were the believers dangerous? Did they really believe the world was ending? Was the leader a con artist? Did the government use unnecessary force? Johnston might have his own thoughts, but as a fiction writer, he wanted to explore the gray areas and leave room for different interpretations of the story.

“I tried not to have my thumb on the scale at any point in the book,” Johnston says. “What I tried to do was to present the story and the geography and the characters in such a way where the reader can come up with their own answers.”

Johnston’s next book, another collection of short stories, is already written and will be published in 2026.

“I’ve been so very lucky with the way that readers have embraced this book and the reception that it’s gotten,” Johnston says. “That is a gift that no one would dare dream of. But I am ready to move on.”