Characters

Talking with Megan Willome about “Dancing King”

March 2, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Writer Megan Willome and I had a long conversation about Dancing King, writing, fiction, characters, the use of emotion, crowd scenes, and even bicycles in London. She had read all three books in the Dancing Priest series.

“The stories haunt you, and not in a scary way. They serve as almost an alternate history: What if the Athens Olympics unfolded like that? What if England had a king on the throne instead of a queen? Like any good alternate history, it has enough true details to make it seem real. So real that I find myself thinking The Violence from book 2, A Light Shining, was as real as The Troubles.”

You can read her discussion and our conversation at Megan’s blog.

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.

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.

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).

What I Learn from Readers (Part 3): Required Reading

January 18, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I was learning a lot from the readers of my novel Dancing Priest. Some had read it as the kind of story they’d like to be part of, being used by God in the ways the novel described Michael Kent, the main character, and even some of the minor characters. A pastor had discovered what he called the best explanation of lifestyle evangelism he’d come across.

And then there was the reader who worked for a big, well-known software firm on the West Coast.

I’d corresponded with this man before. We followed each other’s blogs, and we had corporate career experiences that had much in common (good and bad). I didn’t know he had bought Dancing Priest, but he had. And one day, about three months after it had been published, he sent me a note.

“I’ve read your book,” he said. “And I’m moved beyond words. Do you know what you have here? It’s almost an operating manual for how young men should act and behave. It should be required reading in every high school in the country. It tells young men how important nobility, character, and courage are. There’s nothing in the culture today – movies, books, TV, nothing – that does that. Not a single thing. And it’s desperately needed.”

I didn’t write Dancing Priest to be an operating manual. What I had heard from a few readers (including my wife) was that Michael Kent seemed a mite too perfect; he needed some flaws to make him more real. This particular reader (a man) saw the same thing but saw it as a positive, an example of noble behavior that young men could aspire to.

Yes, like with the other readers, I went and reread my own book, trying to understand what he meant and what he had found. (I think I reread that book so much I could almost recite the dialogue and narrative.) And I found it, in many of the same places I had found other readers’ discoveries and in some new ones as well.

But would young men respond the same way this adult man thought they should and could?

A partial answer came a few weeks later. A family of four – husband, wife, and two teenaged sons – had all read the book within days of each other. The wife had read it first and urged it upon her husband, and then he, in turn, urged his sons to read it. It was the wife who wrote to me with the boys’ response. “They inhaled it,” she said. “They said they had never read anything like this, and they loved it.”

Perhaps my friend in the software business was right.

Writing a novel involves a lot of time, focus, and sometimes pain. You think you know what’s in your own book, and then some readers come along who disabuse you of that notion. You tell the story, and the readers decide if it’s written on their hearts.

Previous:

What I Learn from Readers of My Books – Part 1

What I Learn from My Readers (Part 2): A Pastor Buys a Bunch of Books

Top photograph by Christopher Jolly via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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