Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Writing

When the Story Emerges from the Words

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I’ve been working on a story, and Michelangelo pops into my head.

He has nothing to do with the story. And I’m not writing about art or sculpture on Italy or the Renaissance or anything related to those subjects.

But something happens in the process of writing that story, and it has to do with something Michelangelo said about sculpture.

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it,” he says, “and it it’s the task the sculptor to discover it.”

He follows it up with a slight variation: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved it until I set him free.”

I think the quotes were a bit presumptuous, but it is Michelangelo who says them, so who am I to judge?

And then I have something like a Michelangelo moment.

I don’t see a statue in the rock, or an angel, and I’m writing, not sculpting. But I learn exactly what he means.

It seems like I’ve been working on this story for years, and I suppose I have. Parts of it go back a decade or more. Most of it is new, but it has a history, a past. 

I’m well into the story, working it over and over, editing and adding and deleting, and suddenly something almost jumps out from the page. I’ve typed something that happens in the conflict between a father and a son, and I can’t for the life of me figure out where it comes from, because it isn’t in the outline, in my notes, my mental plan, or in any version previous written. 

I stare at what I’d typed. Why did I write that?

Then it hits me. What I’d written was the whole point of the story. It was what the story was actually about, what it has really been about from he beginning. And it has simply, or finally, emerged from the words.

Completely thrown, I reread the story from the beginning, some 90,000 words worth.

It was almost too obvious, except it isn’t. But it’s there from the very beginning, slightly submerged below the surface, the whole idea that the story has been turning toward, never breaking the surface until it almost couldn’t help itself. 

I did not plan this, I admit to myself. Or did I?

I read through section after section, figuratively smacking myself upside the head. How did I miss this? How am I writing a story with the main point that close to being obvious, yet I still miss it until it starts screaming at me?

That angel in the marble had suddenly broken cover. He was out in the open, shaking his head. What took you so long? I’ve been trapped inside this piece of stone until you finally wised up. A little slow on the uptake, are we?

I go back through the story again, closely reading it, seeing the places where it almost emerges but doesn’t. I start editing, to make a suggestion here, hint a possibility there, make a clear-cut indication in another place.

The story has fundamentally changed, but this is what it has really been about from the beginning.

Michelangelo was right.

Photograph by Akash Patel via Unsplash. Used with permission.

In Praise of Reading

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I was an early reader. I don’t recall how early, but I do remember riding my red bicycle to the dime store when I was six, to spend 59 cents to buy Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion. It was the first of many such trips, for more Trixie Belden mysteries, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, Black Beauty, and Tom Sawyer, among others, published by the Whitman Publishing Company of Racine, Wisconsin. 

When fourth grade arrived, I could participate in the monthly Scholastic Book Club. Few things in school were as exciting as the teacher handing out the four-page order form for the new books available. Most were priced at 25 or 35 cents. One or two would be 50 cents. My mother allowed me a monthly budget of $1.50.

Scholastic Book Club ended with sixth grade, so I was more on my own. I found my way to and around the book sections of department store and local bookstores, including the ones opening at the new shopping malls sprouting all over my suburb of New Orleans. I still have great memories of one called the Dolphin Book Shop at Lakeside Shopping Center. 

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

Photograph by Annie Spratt via Unsplash. Used with permission.

In Praise of Reading Poetry

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Like most of us, I read poetry – a lot of poetry – in high school and college English classes primarily because it was assigned. I was much more interested in fiction (Dickens!) and noir mysteries (Dashiell Hammett!) than I was in Tennyson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Elizabethans. 

My attitude changed with T.S. Eliot and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It was first published in 1915, and Poetry Magazine published it only as a favor to Ezra Pound. The editors were so uncomfortable with it that they placed it at the back of the issue. But it was our first great modernist poem, and it changed poetry forever. A high school senior, I read that poem, and I was mesmerized. I went to the local bookstore and bought a small paperback edition of Four Quartets (I still have it; it’s now more than 50 years old).

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

Photograph by Thought Catalog via Unsplash. Used with permission.

An Incredible Review of “Dancing Prophet”

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Dancing Prophet

Writing a novel is a hard, lonely work. You often struggle through a story, writing and rewriting and editing and deleting whole sections because, well, they’re just bad and aren’t going the way they need to go. And when you finish writing a novel, if there ever be such a thing, you have all the worry and anxiety and disappointment of how people will respond. 

And then you read a review, like “A Prophet Raised Up for Such a Time as This” by Luke Herron Davis.  And you tell yourself this is why you write. 

Poetry at Work, Chapter 5: Poetry of the Boss

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Poetry at Work

More than 40 years, I was handed my college diploma and, two days later, showed up for work at my first official job. I didn’t realize it until much later, but I walked into the doors of my employer that day carrying an assumption. I believed that people in positions of authority – bosses – always knew what they were doing. Why else would they be bosses?

Slightly more than a decade later, my assumption continuing to take body blow after body blow, I was presented incontrovertible evidence that my assumption had been flat-out wrong.

A group of us were sitting in a conference room, waiting for the news to go public that one of the company’s top products had a problem. The first indication would be the stock market. We all knew the news was imminent, and we had prepared for it as if a tsunami was about to strike, which, metaphorically, turned out to be true. The call came, confirming that the news was public, and for a very brief moment we experienced a silence.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

My Interview with Megan Willome on “Dancing Prophet”

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Dancing Prophet

Where does a story come from?

The idea for my novel Dancing Prophetcame from the my regular route for riding my bike, and the nondescript apartment complex I passed. I recently talked with writer and author Megan Willome about where the story came from, the major issue that affected it, and how it began to seem that my fictional story was writing the news. She captured exactly what I was trying to do in telling the story.

You can read the interview here.