Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Glynn Young

The Birth of a New Story

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Last week, I mentioned on Facebook that I had finished the first draft of a new novel. Tentatively entitled Stonegate, it finished at just over 92,000 words, about the same length as the first four of the Dancing Priest novels. The fifth included a 20,000-word novella, but without it, it would have been about the same length as the others.

The idea for the story was born in early 2019, but I didn’t seriously begin to tackle it until late last year, almost two years later. What had to be finished first was Dancing Prince, the final novel in the Dancing Priest series. I had to get the Michael Kent-Hughes story fully out of my system before I could turn to a new story.

I surprised myself when I started it. First, there were two very strong story ideas I’d been toying with, one based on my own family history and the other a more-than-half-written novel. But as these things will happen, Stonegate grew and became something real. 

I believe the shift from the other stories happened because of the November election. Stonegate is not a political novel; it’s not about politics or red state versus blue state or personalities or anything like that. What it is about is a family, one having the familiar stresses of life in the 21st century. And it’s about what happens to that family when the oldest child is arrested for a hate crime. 

A house that inspired one of the settings

The story is set in a suburb of St. Louis, not unlike the one I live in, but which could be any of about a dozen similar suburbs in our metropolitan area. Some of the houses of my suburb inspired settings in the story. But none of the characters resemble anyone I know or know about in our town. They are invented, fictional people. And nothing like what happens in Stonegate has happened in my town. 

The story is a political one only in the sense of examining what happens when a child is charged with a hate crime – what happens to the child, his siblings, and his parents. The story is told from the perspective of the middle child, an 11-year-old boy, but it’s told as he ages from 11 to 31.

This past weekend, I finished what I call my “first read-through.” When I’m writing, I edit as a go a long, looping back periodically to reread (and edit) from the beginning. When I reach the end, I set it aside for a day or two, and then undertake a series of re-readings. I want to see if the story holds together as a unified whole, if it makes sense, if it seems like a good story, if it holds my attention, and if there are any glaring errors or omissions. If I lose interest in it, I can’t expect others to stay interested. 

My “first reading” report: the story works. It holds together. It reads well, and it’s reads fast. It held my interest to the point where I didn’t want to stop reading. (It’s a good sign when a writer gets so absorbed in reading a work that he forgets he wrote it.) I did see a couple of similarities to my previous books, but they’re minor. This is a very, very different kind of story.

More full readings like ahead. The second reading usually focuses on major gaps, if any, and the third reading on minor corrections. If past novels are any guide, I will have read this story between 15 and 20 times before I submit it for consideration by an agent or a publisher.

Top photograph by Michael Hart via Unsplash. Used with permission.

How Many Writer Hats Do You Wear a Day?

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The hats we writers wear can seem awfully heavy.

The hat we wear every day is the writer’s hat. This is what we do. This is what we’re about. We’re here to tell a story, and that can be difficult enough. It looks like a baseball cap.

We learn to write by listening, memorizing, and repetition. We learn writing by doing writing. We don’t sit time the first time and write stories effortlessly. We wrestle with our plots and themes. We fight and argue with our characters. We imagine scenes in our minds long before someone else reads the scene on a page of text. We’re perfectionists, because we’re not satisfied until we get it exactly right. And while we write, we occasionally have to add a few additional hats – like fact-checker, editor, and researcher. This is the bowler hat of writing.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the American Christian Fiction Writers blog.

Photograph by Joshua Coleman via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Grandson Loved It

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Authors sometimes get letters that completely warm their hearts.

A reader sent this to me via email, letting me know what his grandson thought of Dancing Priest, the first in the Dancing Priest novels. 

“My grandson is in 8th grade in a Catholic elementary school.  His class was given an assignment to read an adult level book (as opposed to a children’s book) during the current quarter.  He asked me for some ideas.

Dancing Priest reader response

“I looked over my home library of novels that I have accumulated over the years.  Unfortunately, many of them aren’t appropriate for his age due to excessive violence or offensive language.  So, I gathered three Grisham books and your Dancing Priest and gave them to him while encouraging him to read your book.  

“Early this morning at 12:50 am he sent me this text: ‘It’s 12:50 and I have just finished reading Dancing Priest.  That book was one of my favorite books that I have ever read.  Thank you for lending it to me.’  His comment made me smile and I responded that he’d really like the next book, A Light Shining, just as much.  He said he really wants to read it even though it wouldn’t be required at that point.  I plan to lend it to him once I get it back from our neighbor who’s reading it now.”

I can picture Michael Kent right now – with a big grin on his face.

Top photograph by Joel Overbeck via Unsplash. Used with permission.

A Predictive Manuscript

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My wife has told me that the Dancing Priest novels can sometimes feel creepy because, well, I write the story, and some of things, or similar things, happen in real life. Not long ago, I wrote a post about something specific that happened after Dancing Prophet was published, but there are examples from all five of the books.

She has what I think is a good explanation for this. My reading ranges all over the social, cultural, and political landscapes. Everything I read is potentially research for the books, and I become aware of things happening, things potentially happening, and events that almost happen. When something real does occur, it can look as if I predicted it in a book.

I’ve discovered that this can even happen when I’m in the middle of a manuscript. 

I’m almost 30,000 words into a new novel. It’s something completely different than what I’ve written before. The setting is a lot closer to home than the Dancing Priest novels, and it’s generally along the lines of a coming-of-age story, told by a boy whose family goes through a convulsion that tears the family apart.

Life gets intense when I’m writing like this. I take walks, and I’m working through scenes. I’m in the shower, and I’m rewriting a conversation to add something it needs. I’m at the grocery store, wondering what one of the characters would be buying. I’m driving, and I go out of my way to get a close look at a house that might fit a setting in the story. Everything I read in the newspaper or online is potential grist.

On Wednesday, I opened the newspaper as I usually do when I drink my coffee. The newspaper has become easier to read over time; you can look at a headline or the first paragraph of a story and know almost instantly whether you’re reading news or an editorial disguised as news. (I skip a lot of what goes in the newspaper these days.)  On an inside page there was a local story involving a school and a lawsuit. A fairly lengthy story, I was surprised that it was written as straight news. I was even more surprised when I started reading the last third of the story. It read like it was lifted from my manuscript. 

I could not have predicted these real events described in the story. But I’ve been doing enough reading and research to know that what I was writing about was certainly possible. Things like it have been happening in other places. And now it had gone beyond possibility in my own community. 

In my story, a student is accused of a crime at school. The accusation goes public. The news media, social media, parents, and school officials all assume the child’s guilt. Conventions and laws about media not naming minors involved in crimes are mown down in the eagerness to get the story. Adults and officials who are supposed to care about due process and facts disregard both in their rush for public virtue. And a family is destroyed in the process. 

The heart of the story is about what it takes to bring healing, even when some things can’t be healed. 

It’s not the big sprawling story of the kind that characterize the Dancing Priest novels. It’s about one family in one community and how people and children can be damaged in the tug of war of politics and ideology.

They say life imitates art. It may be more a case of art mirrors life and art mirrors things that can be expected to happen. This is not an easy story to write. It’s also not an easy story to live. And some people are living it. 

Top photograph by Andreas Brunn, middle photograph by Waldemar Brandt, both via Unsplash. Used with permission.

New Review of “Poetry at Work”

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Poetry at Work Poetry of the Workspace

U.K. poet James Sale has posted a review of Poetry at Work at Amazon UK. Here’s what he had to say.

“There are at least two reasons why this is an important book on poetry, as relevant now as when it was published some 6 years ago. First, Glynn Young realises that over the last 30 years poetry has been hijacked by academics; it’s no longer a poetry by the people for the people. Rather, every second poet you hear about nowadays is Professor X or Dr Y doing research on language somewhere you have never heard of. This is pernicious as it has created a cartel of influence in which the ‘experts’ congratulate each others’ books, but in reality very few people are reading them. Why would they? I cannot think of any academic poet of the last 30 years who has written one poem that stands comparison with Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.’

“The thing about poetry is that it is not written by ‘experts’ – its origin is very different. Which leads on to the second reason why Young’s book is so important. If poetry is highly unlikely to be found in academia, where is it to be found? The answer of course is that it will be found in real life, and more specifically, as Young shows, at work. What Young does is re-examine how poetry is everywhere around us, and that it is the poet’s at work who have so much to contribute. That said, as Young observes, ‘Poets, if they remain creative, can find themselves as road kill on the organisational highway.’ It would be good to see these ideas developed further and not allowed to remain fallow; poetry deserves to be widely disseminated and read, and this will never happen so long as the ‘academics’ have it ‘in thrall’. Read this book – it’s worth it.”

The Character of Michael in the Dancing Priest Novels

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After Dancing Priest was published in late 2011, I received an email from a reader in Seattle. He liked the book. He liked the book so much that he said it should be required reading for young men under the age of 20. 

He said this, he said, because the character of Michael was all about standing firm and true in the face of adversity. “There’s a nobility in the character of Michael Kent that we should all aspire to.” That character is demonstrated in large things, like an Olympic tragedy, and in smaller things, like taking in a motherless eight-year-old boy.

By the second Novel, A Light Shining, Michael Kent has become Michael Kent-Hughes, husband of Sarah. He wears his wealth lightly. Finding his family in Italy, instead of doing the legal thing, he does the right thing. And he faces the great personal adversity of any in the five novels, when he nearly dies. In fact, for a significant section of the book, Michael is unconscious, and the focus shifts to Sarah. 

In Dancing King, with Britain in physical shambles, Michael could have walked away from family responsibilities and the royal invitation that’s fallen to him. But he doesn’t take the easy way out. Months before the coronation, he learns that he’s facing serious opposition and a pile of dirty tricks. He and the staff he’s selected to work with him meet each one head one, turning potential adversity into advantage. 

Michael, as head of the Church of England, finds himself engulfed in a church mega-scandal in Dancing Prophet. The church scandal begins to erupt at the same time the Greater London Council reaches a political impasse, budgets expire, and the transport and sanitation workers go one strike. Michael is all of 30 years old in the story, but his sense of responsibility carries him forward. 

As the last of the series, Dancing Prince, begins, Michael is 35. He’s effectively the nation’s czar, parliamentary government having collapsed some years earlier. His sense of responsibility is still carrying him forward, but there are cracks, especially in his family life. He and Sarah have grown apart; trouble is brewing in their marriage. The flashpoint becomes their youngest child, Thomas, and one incident will haunt the family for the next 20 years. 

This is a somewhat different Michael than the theology student and cycling enthusiast in the first story. He knows that the pressures of his position are allowing his family to slip through his fingers. He’s physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. People are talking about Sarah avoiding evening activities at the palace. And one person, their youngest child, will bear the brunt of the estrangement.

Much of the younger man remains, but this is a man who’s been shaped, and sometimes mauled, by the job. In the previous stories, he was something of an idealized character. In the last one, he becomes more real. 

Top photograph by Benjamin Rascoe via Unsplash. Used with permission.