The story of Michael Kent, cyclist and priest, and Sarah Hughes, artist. All four books in the Dancing Priest series are available as a package on Amazon Kindle (or individually).
Dancing Priest
Reflecting on Writing a Novel
Reflecting on Writing a Novel
Dancing Priest, my first novel and the first in the Dancing Priest series, is free on Amazon Kindle this week.
It was published seven years ago, and it was almost a decade in the making. From an image inspired by a song, the story spent three years inside my head. In idle moments, or at night after I’d gone to bed, I slowly worked my way through the story of Michael Kent and Sarah Hughes. Over those three years, the story changed, incorporated new ideas and characters, shifted in its narrative arc, and shifted its location from Italy to Scotland.
When I finally began to transfer the story from head to computer screen, in the early fall of 2005, it came as a torrent. It took about three months, but when I stopped, I had a torrent of 250,000 words, sufficient for three novels. Then began the cutting, splicing, and saving chunks for later. At a writer’s conference or two, I showed excerpts to editors and agents. Editors liked it; agents didn’t. One agent told me that if it didn’t have a vampire or a werewolf, it couldn’t be marketed to publishers (this was at the height of the mania for the Twilight novels).
Dancing Priest eventually found its way into print. From that first behemoth manuscript in 2005, it was likely rewritten 20 times before it saw the public light of day. Writing is hard work. Editing is hard work. Marketing is hard work. Trying to market one book, write another, and hold down a full-time job is impossible work.
I’ve reread the book several times, and while there are a few things I’d like to change or edit, I find myself content with it. I’ve always considered it a love story for men, and the reactions of male readers have supported that. While a few (male and female) readers have thought Michael Kent a bit too perfect, male readers have generally seen the character as to what men aspire to. One reader said it should be required reading for teenage boys, because it offered a sense of “the nobility of doing right.”
The character I still feel the closest to in the story is Sarah Hughes. Her attitude to faith mirrored my own in college, as in, “You’re serious about this stuff?” How she comes to faith is a direct lift from my own experience when I was a senior in college. What happens to her when she begins to talk with the wife of the director of “College Campus Ministry” is an almost verbatim description of what happened to me when I began to talk with the director of Campus Crusade for Christ at my university.
If there is a single theme in Dancing Priest, it is the same theme that you’ll find in the three novels that have followed it: No matter how dark things look, there is always hope.
This week, you can access the free copy on Amazon Kindle here.
Dancing Priest Free on Amazon Kindle This Week
Dancing Priest, the first novel in the series, is free on Amazon Kindle this week.
Michael Kent…
A young man studying to become a priest finds love, and learns that faith can separate.
A university cyclist seeking Olympic gold finds tragedy, death and heroism.
A pastor thousands of miles from home seeks vocation and finds fatherhood.
Sarah Hughes…
A young woman living abroad finds love and loses family.
A university student meets a faith she cannot accept.
An artist finds faith and learns to paint with her soul.
Dancing Priest is the story of Michael Kent and Sarah Hughes and a love, born, separated, and reborn, in faith and hope.
A meeting at the dorm lobby
As Michael entered the dorm lobby with his bike and backpack, the housemaster stopped him. “Mr. Kent, you’ve got a visitor. She’s been waiting a good two hours.”
It was Sarah Hughes.
She stood, clutching a large artist portfolio. He stood still, gripping the bike, as she walked to him.
“I came to tell you how sorry I am,” she said. “After my outburst yesterday, I felt terrible and tried to apologize, but you were gone. I said terrible things, and there was no excuse. If you can’t forgive me, I understand. I just want to die. I felt so badly I couldn’t sleep last night—” Tears rolled down her cheeks. A few students stopped to watch, and the housemaster was definitely captivated.
“Would you like a coffee?” Michael said.
- From Dancing Priest
Photograph by Milan Popovic via Unsplash. Used with permission.
More than a Brother’s Roommate
“This young man was more than just David’s roommate, wasn’t he?” Gran said.
Sarah nodded.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I love him Gran. I love him and I can’t love him. He has this enormous faith in God. He’ll be ordained a minister when he returns from the Olympics and then he goes to Africa.”
“Is it the religion, Sarah?” Grand said.
Sarah nodded again. “I just don’t have it. It just doesn’t work for me. But it’s everything about him.”
— From Dancing Priest
Photograph by Brooke Cagle via Unsplash. Used with permission.
Where Do Our (Fictional) Characters Come From?
My wife has said, more than once, that the main character in my Dancing Priest novels is an idealized version of me. The first time she said it, I disagreed. There were some things I shared with that character, but I never planned to write about making an idealized version of me.
After considering it, I thought, well, maybe. I thought about it some more, and I reverted to my original thought. Nope, he’s not me.
Not one of the characters across my four novels are disguised versions of real people. Instead, they are composites of people and experiences.
In Dancing Priest, Sarah Hughes has a conversion experience that is almost exactly taken from my own.
In A Light Shining, the political operative Josh Gittings is based on several people I’ve known from the political world.
The communications man in Dancing King is based on many of my career experiences, especially in crisis communications. His uncanny ability to spot what’s happening and ferret out what’s behind a crisis is based on too many of my own experiences. (I say “too many” because sometimes I was heeded, and sometimes I was not.)
And certainly the speechwriter in Dancing Prophet comes from my own career background, including sitting with an executive for an entire day to write an emergency speech while he did other work.
I can say my characters come from experiences, but where do their personalities come from? Likely our families, our friends, people who’ve influenced us or protected us, mentors, people we’ve have bad experiences with, even casual acquaintances.
For example, the villain in Dancing King, the PR operative Geoffrey Venneman, is a composite of several people I’ve known over the years. He serves his clients, yes, but he is all about serving himself. He looks for the main chance. He has no qualms about hurting others and that, in fact, is part of the game. He can affect a wounded innocence when it’s helpful to do so. His anger becomes uncontrollable when he’s thwarted. Yes, I knew people like this and had to work with them. It was not a pleasant experience, because you always had to be on guard.
In the writing process, however, I don’t consciously create characters. They seem to emerge as the story develops or when this kind of character is needed. Sometimes I know what kind of character is needed at a particular point, but the birth is an agonizing labor, requiring rewrite after rewrite.
I’ve had one exception to my “no real people” guideline. In Dancing Prophet, one character is based on me, less his experiences and more his personality. I admit it. Almost all of his actions and reactions in the book track with mine (that’s almost all, not all). I didn’t realize this until I was in the middle of rewrite #2 or #3, and then I saw it. The character had emerged, unconsciously, from my own life. He’s not an idealized version of me. In many ways, he is me.
It was a shock. For a time, it stopped all progress on writing the book. I had to take stock. What was I trying to say here, or understand? Was I trying to tell myself something? I had to try to answer these questions and others before I could continue.
The answer I came to was this: this character feels broken. It doesn’t stop him from having a successful career and a loving marriage. But it shapes him in obvious and less-than-obvious ways. And sometimes, in the midst of that brokenness, a character has to step forward and do something courageous.
No one ever said that writing would be this hard. No one ever said it would be this revealing.
Photograph by Hudson Hintze via Unsplash. Used with permission.