Dancing King

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.

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.

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.

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).

Dance, Dance, Wherever You May Be – A Review of “Dancing King”

January 12, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

“There are few novels I’ve read in my adult life that begged a second go round. These are Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, and Glynn Young’s first two books in his Dancing Priest Series: Dancing Priest and A Light Shining. So imagine my excitement and sheer delight when I learn Young has written a third book in this series, Dancing King.

“It is everything I could have hoped for, and then some!

“The novel continues the story of Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes, with their families and friends, as they embark upon the most challenging journey of their lives.”

To continue reading, please see Martha Orlando’s post at Meditations of My Heart.

Dancing King

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