Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Writing

“An Effort to Understand” by David Murray

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It may be the most idealistic definition of communication I’ve ever seen: “With sincere intent and real imagination,” writes David Murray, “all human beings can understand one another.” 

Murray is the editor of Vital Speeches of the Day. He’s the force behind the Professional Speechwriters Association. He leads the Executive Communications Council. He blogs, usually daily, at Writing Boots. He’s spent more than three decades in the communications business; I first met him when he was editor of Speechwriter’s Newsletter, back in the dark ages before social media, web sites, smart phonies, Amazon, and Google. 

He’s also politically blue. But he’s an unusual blue, one who believes that the politically red might actually be worth talking with. And thus his new book, An Effort to Understand: Hearing One Another (and Ourselves) in a Nation Cracked in Half. It’s an optimistic book, reflecting the optimism and general good humor of its author. It’s a book about communications, comprised of short chapters ranging across the breadth of contemporary life – family, work, politics, change, culture, language, environment, leadership, friendship, and more. 

What links all of these things is the idea of communication. Life works because communication works. When communication doesn’t work, things unravel. Marriages fail. Friends stop speaking to each other. People suspect each of other of the most nefarious motives, simply because of what candidate they might for. Or, as Murray might say, communications fails when we stop acting like adults. 

It’s not about civility, he says; civility is not communication. Preaching to the choir and remaining safely inside our political bubbles isn’t communication, either. It’s not screaming names and labels at people to force people to back down and admit we’re right and they’re wrong. 

David Murray

Instead, communication is about understanding. We can have profound and fundamental disagreements about any subject or issue; the United States was founded in the context of profound and fundamental disagreements about government, people, and political philosophy, disagreements which still shape the nation today. But if we’re to hold this American experiment together, we have to make a sincere, sustained, and good-faith effort to understand each other. 

No one said it’s easy, least of all Murray. Coming from the moderately conservative (red) side of the political spectrum, I took him at his word, and I read his book to understand. I knew his politics; I knew we disagreed on a number of very basic things. But I also knew he would have something worthwhile to say, and something I could learn, because Murray is first a communicator. He’s not a political partisan seeking to convert me or any other reader to his way of political thinking. He’s a communicator seeking to understand others and himself, only asking for a similar understanding in return.

The 60 short essays of An Effort to Understand will make you laugh. They will make you think. Most importantly, they will make you look beyond the red and blue labels we use to objectify and categorize people. They will help you understand.

This may be the best book on communication I’ve ever read.

The Birth of a New Story

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Last week, I mentioned on Facebook that I had finished the first draft of a new novel. Tentatively entitled Stonegate, it finished at just over 92,000 words, about the same length as the first four of the Dancing Priest novels. The fifth included a 20,000-word novella, but without it, it would have been about the same length as the others.

The idea for the story was born in early 2019, but I didn’t seriously begin to tackle it until late last year, almost two years later. What had to be finished first was Dancing Prince, the final novel in the Dancing Priest series. I had to get the Michael Kent-Hughes story fully out of my system before I could turn to a new story.

I surprised myself when I started it. First, there were two very strong story ideas I’d been toying with, one based on my own family history and the other a more-than-half-written novel. But as these things will happen, Stonegate grew and became something real. 

I believe the shift from the other stories happened because of the November election. Stonegate is not a political novel; it’s not about politics or red state versus blue state or personalities or anything like that. What it is about is a family, one having the familiar stresses of life in the 21st century. And it’s about what happens to that family when the oldest child is arrested for a hate crime. 

A house that inspired one of the settings

The story is set in a suburb of St. Louis, not unlike the one I live in, but which could be any of about a dozen similar suburbs in our metropolitan area. Some of the houses of my suburb inspired settings in the story. But none of the characters resemble anyone I know or know about in our town. They are invented, fictional people. And nothing like what happens in Stonegate has happened in my town. 

The story is a political one only in the sense of examining what happens when a child is charged with a hate crime – what happens to the child, his siblings, and his parents. The story is told from the perspective of the middle child, an 11-year-old boy, but it’s told as he ages from 11 to 31.

This past weekend, I finished what I call my “first read-through.” When I’m writing, I edit as a go a long, looping back periodically to reread (and edit) from the beginning. When I reach the end, I set it aside for a day or two, and then undertake a series of re-readings. I want to see if the story holds together as a unified whole, if it makes sense, if it seems like a good story, if it holds my attention, and if there are any glaring errors or omissions. If I lose interest in it, I can’t expect others to stay interested. 

My “first reading” report: the story works. It holds together. It reads well, and it’s reads fast. It held my interest to the point where I didn’t want to stop reading. (It’s a good sign when a writer gets so absorbed in reading a work that he forgets he wrote it.) I did see a couple of similarities to my previous books, but they’re minor. This is a very, very different kind of story.

More full readings like ahead. The second reading usually focuses on major gaps, if any, and the third reading on minor corrections. If past novels are any guide, I will have read this story between 15 and 20 times before I submit it for consideration by an agent or a publisher.

Top photograph by Michael Hart via Unsplash. Used with permission.

How Many Writer Hats Do You Wear a Day?

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The hats we writers wear can seem awfully heavy.

The hat we wear every day is the writer’s hat. This is what we do. This is what we’re about. We’re here to tell a story, and that can be difficult enough. It looks like a baseball cap.

We learn to write by listening, memorizing, and repetition. We learn writing by doing writing. We don’t sit time the first time and write stories effortlessly. We wrestle with our plots and themes. We fight and argue with our characters. We imagine scenes in our minds long before someone else reads the scene on a page of text. We’re perfectionists, because we’re not satisfied until we get it exactly right. And while we write, we occasionally have to add a few additional hats – like fact-checker, editor, and researcher. This is the bowler hat of writing.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the American Christian Fiction Writers blog.

Photograph by Joshua Coleman via Unsplash. Used with permission.

A Predictive Manuscript

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My wife has told me that the Dancing Priest novels can sometimes feel creepy because, well, I write the story, and some of things, or similar things, happen in real life. Not long ago, I wrote a post about something specific that happened after Dancing Prophet was published, but there are examples from all five of the books.

She has what I think is a good explanation for this. My reading ranges all over the social, cultural, and political landscapes. Everything I read is potentially research for the books, and I become aware of things happening, things potentially happening, and events that almost happen. When something real does occur, it can look as if I predicted it in a book.

I’ve discovered that this can even happen when I’m in the middle of a manuscript. 

I’m almost 30,000 words into a new novel. It’s something completely different than what I’ve written before. The setting is a lot closer to home than the Dancing Priest novels, and it’s generally along the lines of a coming-of-age story, told by a boy whose family goes through a convulsion that tears the family apart.

Life gets intense when I’m writing like this. I take walks, and I’m working through scenes. I’m in the shower, and I’m rewriting a conversation to add something it needs. I’m at the grocery store, wondering what one of the characters would be buying. I’m driving, and I go out of my way to get a close look at a house that might fit a setting in the story. Everything I read in the newspaper or online is potential grist.

On Wednesday, I opened the newspaper as I usually do when I drink my coffee. The newspaper has become easier to read over time; you can look at a headline or the first paragraph of a story and know almost instantly whether you’re reading news or an editorial disguised as news. (I skip a lot of what goes in the newspaper these days.)  On an inside page there was a local story involving a school and a lawsuit. A fairly lengthy story, I was surprised that it was written as straight news. I was even more surprised when I started reading the last third of the story. It read like it was lifted from my manuscript. 

I could not have predicted these real events described in the story. But I’ve been doing enough reading and research to know that what I was writing about was certainly possible. Things like it have been happening in other places. And now it had gone beyond possibility in my own community. 

In my story, a student is accused of a crime at school. The accusation goes public. The news media, social media, parents, and school officials all assume the child’s guilt. Conventions and laws about media not naming minors involved in crimes are mown down in the eagerness to get the story. Adults and officials who are supposed to care about due process and facts disregard both in their rush for public virtue. And a family is destroyed in the process. 

The heart of the story is about what it takes to bring healing, even when some things can’t be healed. 

It’s not the big sprawling story of the kind that characterize the Dancing Priest novels. It’s about one family in one community and how people and children can be damaged in the tug of war of politics and ideology.

They say life imitates art. It may be more a case of art mirrors life and art mirrors things that can be expected to happen. This is not an easy story to write. It’s also not an easy story to live. And some people are living it. 

Top photograph by Andreas Brunn, middle photograph by Waldemar Brandt, both via Unsplash. Used with permission.

How Long Do You Write Before Writing It Down?

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I spent almost four years writing my first novel before I put a single word on screen or paper.

Writing a novel wasn’t intentional. A song had captured my imagination, a single image formed in my mind, and gradually a story unfolded to accompany that song and image – all in my imagination. I mentally nursed the story for years, changing the characters, adding scenes, and altering the story line.

How you imagine a story, or create it in your imagination, is very different than what happens when it’s time to actually write the story. In my case, what I was imagining was a cinematic story, moving from scene to scene while developing a story line. Writing that down had two benefits: it forced the story out of my head and on to the screen, and it made me realize how big the gaps in the story were. 

I could imagine a character participating in a bike race, for example, and gloss over the details in my mind. But to read it on the screen showed the gaps and shortcomings. It was missing color and depth. The imagined account has left out the emotion, because I could imagine the emotion in my mind. It took six years of rewriting to get the draft to a point where it not only made sense but also told a complete story. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog. 

Photograph by Mitchell Hartley via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Meet a Dancing Novels Reader

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He won’t remember, but I first met Randy Mayfield in the gymnasium of Central Christian School in the early 1990s, located across the street from Central Presbyterian Church, where Randy was on staff. I was a part of a non-denominational program called the Salt & Light Fellowship, and Randy was one of the movers behind it. With his guitar, he led us in songs, including one called “Lord, Don’t Send Me to Africa.” And I thought, who knew Presbyterians could be funny?

Ten years or so later, I was attending Central Presbyterian (still my church now), and Randy was still on staff, leading one of the church’s most successful outreaches – missions. The program involved a host of countries, an outreach to the St. Louis County Jail and a prison outside of St. Louis, schools and universities, a seminary, and more. 

Randy believed in hands-on ministry, and he maintained a travel schedule that was exhausting just to read: Honduras, India, Philippines, Iraq, Ukraine, Russia, France, Italy, Hungary, Albania, Israel, Guatemala, Haiti, Cuba, Kenya, Sweden, Albania, Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia, Portugal, South Africa, Poland, Thailand, Tanzania, and a few places that can’t be mentioned because it would jeopardize people’s safety. He also led numerous vision trips for church members, for them to see first-hand what was happening. 

Randy Mayfield performing

At some point, Randy heard about Dancing Priest. He bought the Kindle version and read it while flying to some far-flung mission field (I think it was Iraq). He came a fan of the series, and the five novels about Michael Kent-Hughes have traveled all over the globe. He talked the series up with other church members, and others began to read it, creating still more fans.

Authors know what that does. Yes, it sells some books. But it also touches an author’s heart. 

Randy has now published his own book, One Life, and I’ve reviewed it on my Faith, Fiction, Friends blog. It’s part autobiography and part stories about some remarkable things that have happened with church missions. He’s also a husband to Sharon, a father to Amanda and Justin, and a grandfather to a little girl named Afton who owns him and soon to be a grandfather again to Afton’s brother. 

Randy does concerts; he can sing rock, country, and just about anything else, including Nessun Dorma. He’s had a band, called the All-Star Band, that’s performed in St. Louis and all over the world (my tenuous claim to fame with it is that my next-door neighbor is the band’s saxophonist). He’s performed at the Grand Ole Opry, and he’s opened concerts for Stephen Curtis Chapman, Jaci Valesquez, and the Imperials. 

He’s been a chaplain to the St. Louis Cardinals. He’s come under military gunfire while on mission trips. He’s met with presidents and paupers, and if you know Randy, you know he treats them exactly the same – with a handshake, a smile, a laugh, a hug, and a song.

Randy’s retiring as Missions & Outreach pastor at Central Presbyterian; he gave an official farewell sermon this past Sunday (it won’t be his last sermon; Randy doesn’t retire from ministry). But it’s gratifying and encouraging to know him, and it’s been encouraging to know how much he’s liked the stories of Michael Kent-Hughes. 

Top photograph by Paola Chaaya via Unsplash. Used with permission.