Glynn Young

Dancing King Stories: Writing as an Act of Faith

August 6, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Southwark Cathedral

We writers would all love to be Stephen King, James Patterson, J.K. Rowlings, and other successful people who turn everything to gold simply by their touch. For most of us, writing is difficult, frustrating, depressing, discouraging, and lacking any kind of return even remotely like the effort we put into our work. We pour ourselves into what we write, often for a very long time, and once it sees the light of day, the world yawns and moves on to books that are badly written, semi- (or totally) pornographic, or so lacking in anything of value that we wonder why we continue to do what we do.

Writing can be a slog. For most of us, writing is a slog.

A scene inDancing King unintentionally speaks to writers, what we write, our platforms (or lack thereof), and the whole question of “why do we write.” I wasn’t thinking of writers when I wrote it, but I believe it applies to what we writers try to do.

It’s two days before Christmas. Michael Kent-Hughes flies from Scotland, where he’s on holiday with his family, to London. He’s giving the first in a series of sermons on the need to reform the church, and he’s at Southwark Cathedral. It’s an old church, dating back to early Anglo-Saxon times, but it’s a church that has managed to flourish. (Southwark is an overlooked gem for tourists, likely overshadowed by its much larger and better-known brethren like Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral.)

Dancing King Michael gives the sermon. He has friends and staffers visiting among the 400 people in the congregation – his chief of staff, his communications leader, and his security people. People are taken aback, first by the fact of the king giving the regular Sunday sermon, and second, by what he says and how he says it. Jay Lanham, Michael’s communications man, is narrating what is happening. And he learns that Michael is speaking with an authority that seems to come from outside him. Lanham’s there in his communications capacity; he’s what might be called a “cultural Christian.” He can recall the order of the worship service from his childhood, but he finds himself overwhelmed by the truth he hears in the sermon.

Afterward, Michael treats the staff people in attendance to lunch at a nearby pub. His chief of staff, Josh Gittings, asks him if he has any expectations as to how many people might attend the Bible study the next evening being organized by the church, which Michael had just encouraged the congregation to attend.

“I don’t know, Joshua,” Michael says. “And the number doesn’t matter. God can do wonders with one or two just as easily as 400.”

The response will actually be something a bit more than one or two; Michael’s sermon will spark something of a revival in the diocese. But Michael knows that this is less about what he says and how many may or may not respond, and more about what God puts in people’s hearts. Michael is a vessel; he’s not what pours into and out of the vessel.

That is the “how” and the “why” of what I write. Do I want thousands and tens of thousands to buy my books? Sure. But if that was the goal, I would not be writing the kinds of books I write.

And while the number may matter to a publisher, the number of readers doesn’t, in the end, matter. Wonders can be worked with one or two as with 400, or 10,000. We write to tell a story; what happens to that story is someone else’s business.

Top photograph: Southwark Cathedral, with the office building known as “The Shard” in the background.

The Novel That Wasn’t Meant to be Written

July 30, 2018 By Glynn Young 4 Comments

For roughly 14 months, from September 2005 to November 2006, a story idea that had been in my head for four years began to pour out on the computer screen. Once it came, it gushed, some 250,000 words of the roughest sort of rough draft. It would be spliced, diced, rewritten, divided into three parts, added to, and subtracted from, eventually published as Dancing Priest (2011), A Light Shining (2012), and Dancing King (2017), the three novels in the Dancing Priest series.

In November 2006, I stopped, and rested. Two months later, a story from my small suburban town of Kirkwood in metropolitan St. Louis became international headlines. A boy kidnapped in nearby Franklin County had been found by police in Kirkwood. With him was found a boy kidnapped in 2002.

The kidnapper was a man named Michael Devlin, a manager at a local pizza parlor. He had kept both boys at his apartment, on the far east side of Kirkwood and across the street from the town of Oakland. The apartment complex was just north of the trailhead for Grant’s Trail, which I had ridden hundreds of times. Which meant I had ridden past that apartment hundreds of times. I likely had seen the older boy, who after a couple of years had been allowed outside to ride his bike.

This was, and is, every parent’s nightmare. Your child is taken, and you don’t know if the child is dead, abused, or raised as someone else’s child.

I didn’t feel personal responsibility. I felt something else: a deep sense of horror at a great evil happening a few yards away from where I regularly rode my bicycle.

I did the only thing I knew to do. My writing rest came to an end.

I didn’t write the story of Michael Devlin. Instead, I poured the horror of that story into fiction. Some 40,000 words later, I felt I could stop. I had dropped any reference to Devlin or even a character like him. I had moved the story to England. I moved the crime within the Church of England, most likely being influenced by all of the revelations from the Catholic Church in the United States. I added seminary connections.

And then I set the story aside. It had done what it needed to do. It was a kind of exorcism of the horror represented by Michael Devlin and what he had done.

In 2012, in a conversation with my publisher about writing life after A Light Shining, I mentioned this story. A few days later, he sent me a press story from England. A small pedophile ring had been uncovered within the Church of England. He wanted to know if I had “pre-written history.”

In late 2017, I returned to the story and began to work it over. It grew; new elements and characters were added. The abuse story remained at the center; two additional story lines were added – one about a city government collapse and the other about a mother showing up after eight years. Only when the draft was done in early July did I realize that this had become a story about the collapse of institutional authority – family, church, government. It was exactly the institutions that Michael Kent-Hughes, the hero of Dancing King, had committed himself to during his coronation ceremony.

I’m not sure why I chose to develop the original manuscript into a full-blown novel. But I did. It was a story that was never intended or imagined to be written, but it was, because of the shock of a hometown horror.

The manuscript is now in the hands of the publisher for consideration.

Top photograph by Warren Wong via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dancing King Stories: Researching a Novel

July 16, 2018 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

I’m looking at a web site called English Historical Fiction Authors. Its audience is authors who write period historical novels. The various posts are written by the authors themselves. So, you can learn about how ice cream was made in the 18^thcentury, what pieces of furniture would have been found in an upper-class hoe in the 16^thcentury, who the Lord Proprietors of Carolina were in the 17^thcentury, the friendship between the British Saxon Osulf and one of Charlemagne’s sons; and similar kinds of really detailed information. If you want your period novel to show authenticity, you need authentic historical details.

I don’t write historical novels. Mine fall into the more contemporary genre; actually, they’re set a few years ahead of our own times. So, I don’t have to be concerned with a lot of historical detail, like what Osulf really thought of his friend Charles a thousand years ago.

But it doesn’t mean I’ve escaped the research yoke. Far from it.

I do two kinds of research for my novels. The first is the reading kind – books, articles, web sites, blogs, even social media. The second is the foot-power kind – research by walking around.

A section of A Light Shining is set in Tuscany and Umbria; I’ve never been but I almost went in 2007, and had read so much and studied so much that I had the map of Florence memorized. For Dancing Priest, I had so many books and travel guides on Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh that I could have opened a travel library. That’s the reading and study kind of research.

bookshelf Dancing King — The bookshelf above my computer

And then a crucial scene in Dancing King happens in Southwark Cathedral; I’ve been there three times, walked around, bought and read the guidebook, took pictures, and talked with the nice lady in the gift shop. I stood in the pulpit and looked at where people would be sitting in the nave. And that hill in downtown San Francisco where Michael Kent rides his bike in Dancing Priest? I’ve walked up that hill.

Walking-around research is extremely valuable. You see and feel what the streets look like, you peer into windows, you see a barrister’s gown and wig on sale for 550 pounds, you notice how Essex Street slopes toward the Thames River. A pub in London may superficially resemble a pub in St. Louis, but if you sit long enough, you begin to notice the differences.

Both kinds of research are critical, even for a contemporary novel.

On the bookshelf above my computer sit the guidebook to Buckingham Palace; four volumes of Peter Ackroyd’s history of England (the fifth is to be published later this year), a guidebook to London, a book entitled Crown, Orb & Sceptre which will tell you everything you want to know about every coronation in English history, a history of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, a booklet on the royal line of succession, a guide to Southwark Cathedral, a brochure about the guards associated with Buckingham Palace, and related books. I turn to them often.

I been to England five times in the last six years, and every trip has been both vacation and research. Whatever place we visit – the British Museum, Canterbury Cathedral, the Museum of London, All Hallow’s by the Tower Church, the Imperial War Museum – I buy the official guidebook, which is always packed with information. I see art exhibitions to enjoy the exhibitions and to imagine what they would be like in a novel. I take photos of favorite paintings.

And I take walks. I’ve walked London’s South Bank countless times, along with Piccadilly, the City, Westminster, Hampstead, Pimlico, Belgravia, Mayfair, the Temple, Lambeth, Covent Garden, Charing Cross Road, the West End, and Spitalfields. I’ve walked Oxford, Cambridge, Salisbury, and Windsor. Every walk is research.

I pay attention to contemporary British artists and writers. I read novelists like Paul Kingsnorth (Beast) and Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time). I read contemporary British plays. Contemporary literary culture provides a take on the pulse of the country and insights you can’t get from non-fiction.

It’s not just the historical or period novels that demand research. Contemporary ones do, too. And I think I’d rather eat ice cream in 21^stcentury England than what the Georgians considered ice cream in the 18^thcentury.

Top photograph by Gaelle Marcel viaUnsplash. Used with permission.

Dancing King Stories: Unexpectedly Writing a Series

July 9, 2018 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

I never intended to write a series of novels. In fact, I never really thought about publishing what I was doing, first in my head and later on paper. Dancing Priest existed only in my head for almost five years. It began with an image and gradually progressed to a story.

You can tell a story in your mind much faster than you can write it down.

But I did eventually push it on to a computer screen, all 250,000 words of it. It was too big for a novel, too unwieldy, shooting off in too many directions. Metaphorically speaking, I took an ax to the manuscript at about the 110,000-word mark. And then I spent the next two years culling those 110,000 words down to about 90,000. I rewrote the story at least once. And that was what was eventually published as Dancing Priest.

The manuscript carcass – what was left over – had piled up. The publisher suggested a sequel. Out came the metaphorical ax again and chopped off about 65,000 words. Because of changes in Dancing Priest during the rewriting and editing process, those 65,000 words had to be reworked even more than the first manuscript. The story grew.

The editor suggested an additional villain And he was right. He didn’t suggest what kind of villain, only that one was needed. I created an assassin. Thinking I would come back and give him a name. After trying out various possibilities, I saw something else. Leaving him nameless actually heightened the tension of the story, and my nameless assassin carried that tension right to the end of the story. And the story was published as A Light Shining.

And there I stopped. My day job became crazy. I actually published a non-fiction book (Poetry at Work) the year after A Light Shining. At first it seemed easy. It was much shorter than the novels, but on top of the day job and my mother’s growing infirmities, it became increasingly difficult. And I was writing to a deadline. I made it, but I nearly collapsed from the effort.

Four years passed. And then at a lunch with the publisher of my novels, I mentioned I was trying to sort through a possible third novel. The manuscript was something of a jumbled 50,000 words, the last part of that original 250,000 words that came pouring out of my in the fall and winter of 2005. I had to reread Dancing Priest and A Light Shining – twice – to see how to shape and reshape, write and rewrite those 50,000 words. And this wasn’t the book I wanted to be working; the one I wanted to be writing would fall fourth in the series. But I couldn’t get to the fourth because too much would be missing after A Light Shining.

So Dancing King eventually saw the light of day. It started off as a kind of orphan; it ended up being my favorite of the three.

Now I’m deep into the fourth in the series. I have a working title in my head but I don’t know if it will stick or not. The manuscript is somewhere in the vicinity of 70,000 words at the moment, heading toward 90,000. It’s in two pieces – the new, rewritten and revised version, and the old manuscript (or what’s left of it). I’m reading and revising, reading and discarding, reading and adding something new.

I didn’t intend to develop a series of related novels, but there was simply too much story that I needed to tell. And so, there it is. A story about a priest dancing on a beach because a story about priest who was also a cyclist with a jumbled family and who eventually became a king.

And now he’s on his way to become a reformer, but not in the way he expected. And not in the way I expected.

Top photograph by Patrick Tomasso via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dancing King Stories: Sarah Kent-Hughes

July 2, 2018 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

The story of Michael Kent and Sarah Hughes begins in Dancing Priest, the first novel in the Dancing Priest series. And while other narratives will stream through the series, the love story of Michael and Sarah remains the core.

They meet at the University of Edinburgh. She’s an art student at the University of Southern California, studying a year abroad with her brother David Hughes. She and Michael share a class in medieval church history; he sees her sitting a few rows away and is instantly smitten. He introduces himself after the class, she thinks she’s been hit on for the fourth time that day; and she dismisses him with an Anglo-Saxon profanity, believing his statement about studying for the priesthood to be a come-on line.

But they both get passed that, and at a school festival, dance what comes to be known as the “last tango in Edinburgh.” And it’s during that dance that the dancing priest of the title is born.

Dancing Priest is the story of how Michael and Sarah find each other, lose each other, and then find each other again. In the process, they are both growing and maturing, Sarah moving steadily toward the faith that divided her from Michael and Michael learning that the priesthood of study and preparation may not be the same as the priesthood meeting life on the streets.

In A Light Shining, the second novel in the series, Sarah almost becomes the main character. She and Michael are married, living in San Francisco, and soon expecting their first child. And then comes The Violence, a planned and coordinated terrorist attack on Britain’s royal family, Michael’s brother Henry, and Michael and Sarah. The attack on a very pregnant Sarah is thwarted by their two adopted son, Jason and Jim, but Michael almost dies. Sarah goes through childbirth while Michael is in surgery. And while he’s recovering and still unconscious, she assumes responsibilities far beyond the typical new young mother.

In Dancing King, the third in the Dancing Priest series, Sarah becomes one of the narrators of the story – the arrival in London, the upheavals with palace staff, the creation of a new staff, and the growing attacks by people determined to drive Michael and Sarah from the throne.

Sarah is self-confident and assured, but she is also shy. She’s also slightly terrified at dealing with all of her new responsibilities. Physically, she’s about 5 feet 7, golden-brown hair, brown eyes, with high cheekbones. Michael thinks she’s absolutely dazzling. Her favorites clothes to wear are jeans and a man’s dress shirt (which is what she was wearing when she and Michael first met).

She also is an artist, with an artist’s soul and temperament. Sarah had been on her way to establishing a successful career in painting when she met Michael again and married him. She will continue to paint, in addition to all of her new responsibilities. Her painting style is Realism; people often think her paintings are photographs.

At the very beginning of Dancing King, as the family is leaving their life in San Francisco and flying to London, the man who will become Michael’s chief of staff is sitting on a jump seat across from Michael and Sarah in the car to the airport. Reflecting on the events detailed in A Light Shining, what he says about Sarah and her husband is the key theme of the book:

“This young woman, this young queen with a new baby sitting across from me in the SUV, had been the pivotal player. The PM knew that. I knew that. And I had had to insert myself into her fear, confusion, and shock. I didn’t expect to be inserted into the middle of her faith. And her husband’s faith.”

Photograph by Andrei Lazarev via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Have You Tried Writing by Hand?

June 29, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

In the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I taught myself to type, and for a very good reason. I was starting my introductory journalism classes in the fall, and typing was a requirement. So, in whatever free time I had that summer (I was also working a summer job), I could be found sitting at my desk in my bedroom, following a self-instruction manual, pecking away on an electric typewriter my parents had bought for me.

I took my electric with me when I returned to college. My first day in my basic news reporting course, I discovered we had typewriters at every seat – old Royal manualtypewriters. My fingers, used to the needed light touch on an electric machine, had to learn how to pound on a manual.

Gradually, I got used to typing on a manual for journalism writing. All other writing – papers, research texts, history and English assignments – were typed on my electric in my room. At times I felt I had a bit of a split personality, but I made do.

I graduated, and my first job was as a newspaper copy editor. The copy desk used IBM Selectric typewriters, which, fortunately, I was familiar with from my father’s printing and mailing business. For the next decade, the IBM Selectric was my friend, first at the newspaper and then my work in corporate communications.

In 1984, my IBM Selectric was replaced by an IBM 286 computer, with a floppy-disk drive. In the days before email and networked computers, I could copy a document to the dick, hand the disk to a secretary, and watch her print what I had written. For someone like me, with speechwriting and regular revision of texts was standard operating procedure, that IBM 286 was something close to miraculous. We bought our first home computer, an Apple IIGS, in 1988.

In the late 1980s, I was working on a speech. It wasn’t just any speech; it was one of those groundbreaking speeches that would likely change a lot of things. (It would eventually turn an industry upside down and become known as “the speech that refused to die.”) And I was having trouble – how was I going to bring the speech to a close? Up to the last two pages, the text moved and soared – and then went completely flat.

I had seen a program on PBS whose subject related to the subject of the speech. We obtained a copy of the program, and I brought it to the television and cassette player in our conference room. My desktop computer stayed where it was – on the desktop (this was before laptops had appeared). I watched the program, and I suddenly knew how to end the speech. With nothing to type with, I started writing by hand.

And I learned something. I wrote differently when I wrote by hand as opposed to typing on a typewriter or computer keyboard. The revelation startled me. Could technology affect how I wrote?

After typing the new conclusion to the speech and sending it off to the executive for review, I took a hard look at the text. And, yes, I could see the difference. The most emotional part of the speech – the part that packed the biggest wallop – was the part I had written by hand.

I tried this with other speeches and other kinds of writing. And it held true. From then on, if I needed an emotional section, I would write it first by hand.

I still do that. Virtually every poem I write is written first by hand. Several sections of my three novels were first written by hand. Even parts of my non-fiction on poetry at work were written by hand.

I can’t explain it, but writing by hand connects me far more emotionally to what I’m writing than simply typing the text. I’ve also found that writing by hand helps when I hit a wall or dead end.

It’s one reason I carry a journal with me wherever I go, including church.

Have you tried writing by hand, or using writing by hand to help you through difficult parts of a text?

Photograph by Adolfo Felix via Unsplash, Used with permission.

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