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Every Writer Needs a Plan, Right?

February 15, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

The inspiration for my three novels, Dancing Priest , A Light Shining, and Dancing King, was a song. The story was gradually written in my head, and only there, for four years. When I began to pound the keyboard, it poured out – gushed, actually – for almost 250,000 words. Eventually, I shaped the equivalent of two novels from that original manuscript and had enough to write the third. But the story arc for the series was set by 2006.

Along the way, the outlines, drafts, and ideas developed for five more novels using the same characters, ranging from a 4,000-word treatment to a 70,000-word manuscript. Somewhere in there two entirely different novel ideas popped up, one becoming a 60,000-word manuscript and the other a 1,000-word summary. And the ideas for three more novels in the Dancing Priest series have been rattling around my head, following the same process as the original – creation in my mind as I go to sleep at night.

Did I mention the 30,000-word novella?

This is not exactly what I would call a deliberate writing plan. Including the three that are published, this would mean a total of 14 books.

It makes my head hurt just to think about it.

I look at these manuscripts, these words, and the characters waiting in the stage wings, and I’m not sure if there will even be another act. I’m working on the fourth novel in the series, but I’m plagued by all the usual doubts.

My plan will likely be something like “just plow right on ahead.”

For most of my professional career, I worked for a company where this absence of planning would have been anathema. Planning means control, and whether they realize or not, all corporations were created with the idea of reducing uncertainty by creating or extending control. Control your market. Control your environment. Control your raw materials. Everything is a process and has a plan. Measure the results of your plan. Repeat.

Corporations took a function like mine – communicating with the great, messy, unruly, uncontainable, obnoxious, and unwashed public – and expected it to control that environment. (“Tell the reporter not to ask that question.” “Tell Twitter to remove that tweet.”) Result: #totalfail. The communications revolution we’ve been living since the creation of the worldwide web has, if nothing else, proven that no one can control anything. In fact, it’s not about control any more, if it ever really was. (Watch what happens when you tell corporate executives that it’s not about control; it’s about letting go of control. Result: #careerfail.)

The way I’ve written my novel manuscripts likely compensdates for the writing rigidity I experienced at work. Now I let inspiration move me. In one form or another, there are likely some 500,000 words of published and unpublished manuscripts, with at least that many words to go if all of these books ever see the light of day.

Yes, I need a plan. And I need to take to heart some words I’ve read about planning your writing.

“Some stories can’t be written now,” says Charity Craig in On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts (co-authored with Ann Kroeker). “They don’t fit together, or they compete…Or maybe the stories refused to be written. Either the story is not ready, or I’m not ready to write it…having a plan doesn’t mean having all the answers.”

Having a plan doesn’t mean having all the answers. That may be one of the most encouraging things I’ve read about writing. Ever.

Top photograph by Matt Artz via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Luke Herron Davis Reviews “Dancing King”

February 11, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Author and teacher Luke Herron Davis is the author of the fascinating and St. Louis-based Cameron Black mysteries. At his blog For Grace and Kingdom, Davis reviews Dancing King.

The novel, says Davis, shows “a main character in Michael Kent who continues to mature in his faith and leadership. He does so remembering with John Donne that no man is an island, and true leadership occurs in community with others, not in isolation. Not a bad picture of what God’s family should be like, incidentally.”

Davis also noted how the structure of the novel differs from its predecessors, Dancing Priest and A Light Shining. He solidly grasped what I was trying to do. (The structure, in fact, was the limiting factor when I was writing the novel; what I had simply wouldn’t work and kept leading me down rabbit holes. Only when I heard one character clearly speak about “writing this down” did what I had to do become clear.)

You can read the entire review here.

Writing: What I Learned from a Gargoyle

February 8, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I was attending a two-day writers’ conference. I didn’t know a soul. I hadn’t heard of any of the speakers, the writers, the agents or the editors attending. I hadn’t heard of the books by attending authors for sale on the display tables. I had nothing to make small talk about.

High anxiety time for an introvert like me.

I’d signed up for an editor’s critique of my work in progress, the prologue of what became my first novel Dancing Priest. I’d also signed up for a pitch session with an agent and a group reading-and-critique session.

The editor was encouraging, perhaps even more than encouraging. She wanted to know what happened to the characters. She liked the story. She was positive.

The agent was not. He was looking for the next Twilight manuscript and touting the merits of a novel about a late-night radio host who happened to be a werewolf on the side. I am not making this up.

But it was the group reading and critique session that was worth the price of the conference, at least for me. And it was something I inadvertently taught myself.

Twelve of us, all unpublished writers, gathered around a large circular table. The session was led by a gravelly-voiced woman from New York City who scheduled two smoking breaks (for herself) and who talked like a jaded agent suffering in the book business for 150 years.

We had to bring two copies of our writing with us, one for the agent and one presumably for each of us to read. That turned out to be half right.

The agent received one copy, and the person sitting to our right received the other copy. We were going to read our neighbor’s manuscript. When the agent explained that, with a mischievous smile, 12 faces around the table looked suddenly terrified. Someone else was going to read my words. Aaagh!

Of course, if we were published, someone else would always be reading our words.

That didn’t lessen the terror. It’s one thing to read your own words aloud. It’s quite another when a total stranger is going to read your words aloud, the words of your work in progress that you were, of course, still working on and weren’t quite ready to have someone else read and what am I doing here I feel sick and I better leave before it’s too late.

We passed our manuscripts to our neighbors on the right. I quickly looked over what my neighbor had given me to read. My heart sank; it was bad. Poor sentence construction. Grammar mistakes. Misspelled words. An earnest look on her face said this was the most important thing in her life. She hugged the manuscript to herself before she reluctantly gave it to me to read.

The story started with a gargoyle atop a local cultural institution’s building. The gargoyle decided to come alive by throwing pieces of itself on the sidewalk below. (I thought the manuscript might be a great fit for that agent and his werewolf.)

The readings were rather perfunctory. We were all somewhat unnerved at the idea of reading each other’s words aloud. Eleven of us played it safe and read in mostly monotone voices. I didn’t. I knew I had to do something to save the writing sitting in front of me.

I read it like poetry. I used a mildly dramatic voice, with inflection and emphasis and emotion.

When I finished and looked up, I saw the agent staring at me. She knew exactly what I had done; she had followed along in her copy of the text as I read the words aloud. She knew I had taken Charlie Brown’s pitiful Christmas tree with its needles almost gone and turned it into something his sister Lucy would be proud of. The author sitting on my left was wide-eyed at how her words sounded aloud. “I think he read it better than I wrote it,” she announced to the group.

I realized what I had done – I had taught myself a lesson. And the lesson was about voice and emphasis, about how reading aloud was a very different proposition than reading silently, even with the same words. I taught myself something about point-of-view, and that a manuscript might benefit both by adding poetic elements and by being read aloud.

“At some point, we can make room in the world, and in our lives, for the presence of other writers,” says Charity Craig in On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, co-authored with Ann Kroeker. “Why not? We will sit next to them at conferences, see their names on Facebook, find their comments on our blogs. We’ll recognize their work in the publications that rejected ours. We will buy their books. And find ourselves in their words.”

Craig is right. I found myself in the badly written words about a gargoyle coming to life atop a building.

Top photograph by Pedro Lastra and bottom photograph by Antenna, both via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Finding the emotion in our stories

February 1, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

An email arrives from the other side of the world.

“I finished reading Dancing King this afternoon. Well done, Glynn, I feel it’s the most powerful of the trilogy; I misted up too many times to count.”

This third novel of mine is simultaneously the least and most emotional of the three I’ve written. It includes no scenes that are overtly tear jerkers. But it includes scenes that make me forget I was the one who wrote them.

When I was a child, my mother took me to the movies she wanted to see. My father was not a fan of film; he liked stage theater and even acted in community theater plays. But he didn’t care for movies. My mother did; as a young teenager, she had been shaped by movies like The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind when they were first publicly released in the 1930s. So now, if she wanted to see a movie, she had to drag a little boy with her. Me.

Perhaps the most memorable movie event was when she took the eight-year-old me to the Saenger Theater in downtown New Orleans to see The Last Voyage, starring Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone. A passenger liner is sinking, and rescue ships are too far away. The movie was filled with tension, and I cried through most of it.

We stayed through the end of the movie, but my mother was so upset with having me sit through what was really an adult film that she walked us across Canal Street to the Joy Theater, and we saw our second movie that day – Some Like It Hot, with Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Marilyn Monroe. It was probably even more of an adult movie, but it was funny. No tears, this time.

I sat with my mother through countless movies, both in theaters and when the television networks started broadcasting them. Watching The Wizard of Oz on television with my mother became an annual ritual. We watched so many movies together that I attribute to, or blame, her for the fact that I cry at movies.

I went with a blind date to see Love Story with Ryan O’Neil and Ali McGraw when it opened. I cried; she didn’t. It was rather embarrassing. To this day, my wife brings tissues when we go to the movies. And not for her.

The scenes evoking emotion in my books usually involve crowds: the closing ceremony of the Olympics in Dancing Priest; a press conference in A Light Shining. In Dancing King, two scenes evoking emotion start quietly enough but then grow into something else – a sermon and a scene involving the Victoria Memorial near Buckingham Palace (the book’s cover photo is of the memorial). Neither of the two was part of the first draft. But during the rewriting, characters changed, the narrative changed, and both scenes emerged.

Emotion is the place, and in writing it is a place, where we connect directly and almost intimately with readers. I can’t consciously write emotion into a story I’m working on; I’ve tried, and it never works. Instead, emotion seems to emerge, slowly or quickly, during the process of telling the story. What I’m learning, and usually from my readers, is that they see it almost from the beginning of each story.

Emotion in my stories functions like a pulse rate or a heartbeat, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, but always there. Who knew what a child could learn from a movie-loving mother?

Top photograph by Jake Hills via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Curious Responses to Faith-Based Writing (Including My Own)

January 25, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I’ve published three novels, all faith-based, and I’ve had an unusual experience with all three – readers are roughly divided 50-50 between Christians and non-Christians. Equally interesting is the gender divide. I expected more women than men to read the novels simply because women tend to read more faith-based fiction than men do. And yet my readers seem split 50-50 here, too.

The element of the novels that all readers seem to respond and react to is the role that faith plays. It’s a significant role, especially in the first and third novels (the three form a trilogy). In Dancing Priest, the first novel, faith forms the central tension between the hero and the heroine – he has it, and she doesn’t. They’re in love with each other, but faith is the stumbling block – and it eventually drives them apart.

How the heroine comes to faith is a key element of the story. It’s also pretty much how I came to faith – I fully used my own experience to create hers, including an initial rejection of faith. But come to faith she does, and she finds it leaves her more open and vulnerable than ever before.

Most readers (including non-Christians) appeared to like the tension that faith creates in these stories and understand it. Some do not. One sent me a long email in which he objected to the heroine, Sarah Hughes, finding faith; he didn’t think it was necessary and he was pretty adamant about not liking it in the story. I had to point out that without her finding faith, the story would have stopped, or she would have been written out of it. The central character – Michael Kent – is a young Anglican priest, and a conservative Anglican priest, and he would have no choice but to marry a believer.

Faith plays a subtler role in the second novel, A Light Shining. Michael and his wife Sarah are caught up in religious violence, part of the larger global religious conflict we see happening today. How they respond to what happens is infused with their Christian faith, and their responses include stepping off into the unknown. They’re able to do that because of their faith.The third novel, Dancing King, continues the story of Michael and Sarah, but it’s set within the growing conflict between Michael’s faith and the institutional church.

When I wrote the first two novels, I didn’t think of myself as writing “faith-driven” stories. I was simply writing the stories I had to tell. Looking back, I can see that’s exactly what I was writing. And yet I can’t say these stories are what we associate with “Christian fiction.” They’re not. They don’t tightly fit any one genre, and that’s a problem, especially for marketing. And they’re not “crossover” stories, because the faith element is simply too strong, even if it’s not obvious. Perhaps another way of saying this is that I don’t hit people over the head with the faith element in the stories, but it’s clearly there.

While my characters talk about faith, what’s more important is what they do because of their faith. They give villains a second chance; they reach out to abandoned children; they give people (and themselves) room to doubt; they’re kind, even to people who don’t deserve kindness. Faith is more about what they do, and less about what they say. And that may be a clue to my 50-50 split between Christian and non-Christian readers.

I didn’t begin writing with these themes and ideas in mind. I never consciously decided that these are things the characters would do because faith is more about what you do rather than what you say. Instead, they came from the story I had to tell.

Photograph by Karl Frederickson via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dancing King Stories: Heathrow Airport

January 23, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

In Dancing King, the arrival of the Kent-Hughes family at London’s Heathrow Airport is one of the early scenes of the book.

Heathrow is the fifth busiest airport in the world. It averages about 1,300 flights a day departing or arriving, and more than 75 million passengers every year find their way to and from those planes.

Arrival at Heathrow usually means you arrive with jet lag. Flights are arriving from America, the middle East, Australia and New Zealand, and Asia. There are long corridors to walk from the plane, and the British had conveniently placed bathrooms along the way.

As you walk from your plane, it’s not unusual to see some passengers moving as fast as possible. Their goal is to arrive at UK Border Control before everyone else does. Lines can be long, unless you’ve flown business or first class and get a card for expedited entry. The difference in waiting in line can be an hour or more. There are also different sections depending upon you nationality – UK residents, EU residents (that may change with Brexit), and everyone else.

The Border Control agent asks your purpose in visiting the UK, where you’ll be staying, and sometimes if you’ve brought any farm products with you. Once he stamps your passport, you head for baggage claim (there’s more bathrooms there, too). The waits for bags aren’t usually too long; your baggage is unloaded while you wait in line at Border Control.

Wellington Arch Dancing King — From atop the Wellington Arch, looking toward Apsley House

Once you have your bags, you follow the signs to Customs, which had two signs – nothing to declare and something to declare. Most people have nothing to declare and walk right through Customs. The agents have the right to stop you and do a search, but I’ve never personally experienced that nor have I seen it happen to others.

You exit Customs and go through the Duty-Free Shop and then find yourself inside the terminal. The diversity of people can be staggering; you can and will see all kinds of dress and hear all kinds of languages. Follow the signs to ground transportation bus, cars, taxis, and tube. The Piccadilly Underground line will take you all the way into central London; a taxi will cost about $120, including tip. If there’s a line of people already waiting for a taxi, join it at the end; the British don’t like queue breakers and it’s acceptable to be extremely rude and abusive to anyone who breaks in line.

Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes and their boys fly commercial – British Airways – to London from San Francisco, which is not the usual way royals travel. (Michael explains why in the book.) And upon arrival at Heathrow, they walk with the other passengers to UK Border Control, again at Michael’s insistence.

From Heathrow, the Kent-Hughes family travel the A4 highway east into central London. The road typically gets increasingly congested the closer you get into the city. The A4 becomes Cromwell Road, and right as you reach the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Brompton Oratory next door, Cromwell Road merges into Brompton Road. A few blocks later, you pass Harrods department store and then Brompton Road reaches and ends in Knightsbridge Road, right near Hyde Park. Michael, Sarah, and the family travel this way on Knightsbridge, pass right by Hyde Park Corner and Apsley House (home of the Duke of Wellington), and then turn right at the Wellington Arch and then take an almost immediate left on to Constitution Hill. It’s here that Michael points out the wall to his two adopted sons, Jason and Jim. He calls it the wall of their new back yard.

Constitution Hill Dancing King — From atop the Wellington Arch, looking at Constitution Hill

The family travels down Constitution Hill and turns right in front of Buckingham Palace, and then through the first set of entry gates. This area is a central location of the city – the palace, the Victoria Memorial directly across from the palace, Green Park, St. James’s Park, The Mall (the street that leads from the palace to Trafalgar Square), and Birdcage Walk (the street between St. James’s Park and Wellington Barracks, which has a rather nifty Guards Museum and gift shop, and leads right to Whitehall and Parliament Square).

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