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Writing to Make Faith Attractive

March 1, 2018 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

It showed up as a comment on a blog post, and it stopped me in my tracks.

“Whatever your plan is…I do hope you continue this series of books. May God direct your thoughts and plans with His plan. I loaned the books to a friend of mine to read, and her comment was after reading the first one (Dancing Priest), ‘If I wasn’t already a Christian, this book would make me want to be one.’ That is a powerful testimony. Keep writing. There is power in the written word when it directed by God.”

A comment like that leaves you surprised, almost shocked, humble, and then almost fearful.

You ask yourself, “What is it I’m doing here?”

I’ve been known to answer that question about the novels I’ve written with “I’m just telling a story.” It’s a story that was on my mind and my heart for years – almost five years – before I typed the first word. By the time I began writing it down, it was almost uncontrollable. I couldn’t type fast enough.

I came to a stop at 250,000 words. I still hadn’t poured it all out.

The Dancing Priest series is now three published books. More may come. One is in process. But I read a comment like that and I tremble.

The books haven’t exactly been blockbuster bestsellers. I’d starve in about four days if I had to live off the royalties (and the royalties would cover only food for four days). But when you hear things like “the best description of lifestyle evangelism I’ve ever read” and “that scene, that scene of Sarah’s speech in the hospital, I cried” – and you hear them from men – you know something else may be going on.

At the end of 2013, I almost stopped writing. Two novels and a non-fiction book in three years, my mother increasingly ill and reaching the end of her life, absolute craziness at work, keeping up a blog, writing two weekly columns – it all nearly did me in physically and emotionally. When Michael Kent-Hughes says in Dancing King that giving a sermon physically exhausts him, in many ways that’s me saying writing physically and emotionally exhausts me.

But after three novels, I know that I’m about more than “telling a story.” It’s that comment: “If I wasn’t already a Christian, this book would make me want to be one.” These may be “Christian novels” but they’re not really written for Christians (although Christians seem to like them). Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes may be attractive and sometimes inspiring heroes, but it is their faith that’s the real hero of the story. It carries them through separation, through tragedy, through mistakes they make, through literal attacks on their lives, and through constant attempts to smear their reputations. If this series continues, their faith will carry them through a lot more. And they don’t emerge from all of this unscathed; Michael bears literal and figurative scars. But it is faith that inspires these characters to carry on.

It took a reader to help me understand that a good part of what I’m about is making faith attractive.

Photograph by Samantha Sophia via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Can Fiction Predict the Future?

February 22, 2018 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

The comment came in a tweet: “Finished my reread of A Light Shining last night. I found the section ‘The Violence’ to be remarkably prescient.”

The section has to do with a relatively short-lived religious upheaval in Britain – short-lived but turning the country upside down. Even when I reread the section, I see the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, in London in 2017, in Brussels, in Orlando, in San Bernardino, and other places.

Except that section of the novel was written in 2005.

My wife says there are some things in my novels that give her the creeps, as if I knew what was coming.

I didn’t. I just wrote the story that was in my head. It’s all fiction.

In 2012, I outlined the main ideas of the rest of the Dancing Priest series to my publisher. The fourth novel (now in process) would be about a specific issue, taken largely from a similar issue in the United States but transported to Britain. Two weeks later, he sent me reports from several British news media. My idea was sudden news in Britain, and it wasn’t fiction.

I didn’t predict what happened. Instead, what I think was happening was picking up an idea here, a suggestion, there, and something related over there, and then the ideas fusing into something that became part of a fictional story.

This is not unlike the situations I found myself in during my professional career. Developments, trends, and emerging issues would often look obvious to me, and they wouldn’t look obvious to anyone else. I wouldn’t “predict the future” but I would say “This is what we’re dealing with, and this is what I think we need to do.” It became even more difficult with the arrival of social media, because the company would need to respond in minutes when the company often didn’t think social media mattered at all. Until it did. Which was almost all of the time.

I can see the same processes working through my novels. I read a lot – magazines, blogs, social media, books. I read people I agree with and people I don’t. I try to break out of my worldview bubble to understand what people are thinking and, more importantly, how they think. If there’s any predictive element to any of this, it’s understanding how people think.

The chief villain in my third novel Dancing King is a PR operative named Geoffrey Venneman. The character is not based on any real individual. But how he thinks comes from a composite of people I’ve known. He’s not a type but a composite of types, and not all of them bad. He’s resourceful, does his research, and verifies things himself. He’s also an astute judge of character, except when he sizes up Michael Kent-Hughes, the story’s hero. While the reader (and author) are appalled at what he does, the fact is that he’s operating in a time when it’s not about right or wrong but about winning.

In 1898, an author named Morgan Robertson published a novella called Futility. He created a ship called the Titan, loaded it with wealthy people, and wrecked it on an iceberg. Fourteen years later, people remembered it, and drew the uncanny parallels (including ship length, top speed, and claims of being unsinkable) to the Titanic. Robertson didn’t predict the sinking of the Titanic; but he more likely considered the culture and how people thought, which shaped the story in his head.

Fiction can’t predict the future. But it can give the future a good run for its money.

Top photograph by Aziz Acharki via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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.

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