Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Writing

Do You Outline, or Do You Write into the Dark?

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A problem developed while I was writing my fifth novel. The problem had to do with what I conceived as a minor character – a four-year-old boy who would grow to adulthood during the story. But he wasn’t the main character; far from it, in fact. He was supposed to have a bit role.

Unfortunately, he had a different idea.

I kept floundering with the manuscript because this kid kept sticking his head in. It was as if he was demanding a bigger part of the story. I was hitting dead end after dead end, and my writing was going nowhere.

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

Photograph by Steven Houston via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Joseph and the Grace of Forgiveness

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The entire spring issue of Cultivating Oaks is devoted to the theme of grace. Published are stories by Lancia Smith, Malcolm Guite, Annie Nardone, Junius Johnson, Adam Nettesheim, Amy Malskeit, Steven Garber, Corey Latta, Tom Darin Liskey, Nicole Howe, Amelia Freidline, Lara D’Entremont, and several others.

For me, reading a very familiar Bible story – the account of Joseph in the Book of Genesis – led me in an unexpected direction of grace. You can read the story, “Joseph and the Grace of Forgiveness,” at Cultivating Oaks Press. 

Photograph by Michael Olsen via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Things That Shape Our Writing

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I read last week that Netflix has attempted to do what I thought was impossible – turn One Hundred Years of Solitude into a 16-episode television series.

I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez when I was in college in the early 1970s. It had been translated into English and published in the U.S., and I bought the paperback edition at the LSU Union Bookstore. It might have been near exam time; I had a habit of buying riveting novels at exam time, when I should have been studying.

I read the novel two more times, both in the 1980s. I was in a masters program at Washington University at St. Louis, with the seminars held at night for those of us who were working (which was all of us). I took a course in the Latin American Novel, mostly on the strength of what I remembered about One Hundred Years of Solitude. We read that, and we also read The Green House and The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa, The Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig, The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes, and several others.

That class was organized to coincide with visits to the WashU campus by Vargas Llosa and Fuentes, and our class got to hear both authors speak. The talks added immeasurably to our reading.

Two years later, in the same masters program, I took a class called “The Nature of Story.” Our first assignment was to read One Hundred Years of Solitude. And in that class, something personally revealing happened.

The professor opened the discussion by asking what we thought of the book. Fifteen of us, all working people with me being the youngest at 35, looked around at each other. Finally, one person said she found the story to be ridiculous. And thirteen other people suddenly erupted in agreement.

The story was unreal. How could you take flying carpets and children born with pigs’ tails seriously? The use of the same names for different characters was confusing, as was the use of different names for the same characters. 

The class went on a group rant. Nobody seemed to have liked the book.

“Did anyone like it? Anyone at all” the professor asked.

“I did,” I said. “I know it’s one of the fathers of magic realism, and story often goes off into the strange and weird. But reading this is like reading about my own family. I grew up hearing stories like these.”

A rather stunned silence followed. I don’t look Latin American, and, in fact, I don’t contain an iota of Hispanic DNA.

“Where did you grow up?” the professor asked.

“I was born and raised in New Orleans.”

He smiled. “The northern rim of the Caribbean culture.” He then launched into a discussion of what that meant and what the territory surrounding the Gulf of Mexico / Caribbean Sea shared as a common culture. And you could see understanding appear on the faces around the table. One Hundred Years of Solitude wasn’t only a novel in the magic realism genre; it was an introduction to countries, peoples, and cultures that shared more in common than people realized. 

I don’t write magic realism. But that day, I understood that, as Anglo (with a bit of French thrown in) as I was, I had been raised in an American / Caribbean culture, and it affects how you think, how you understand the world, and how you write.

Even with the children with pigs’ tails and the flying carpets.

Top photograph: The Cocora Valley in Colombia, photo by Christian Holzinger via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“A Shining” by Jon Fosse: It Does Have Punctuation, Which Helps 

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In 2023, Norwegian author Jon Fosse received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He’s a novelist, playwright, essayist, and author of children’s books; in fact, he’s likely better known for his theater plays than his novels. 

When I read about the Nobel, I checked Amazon to see what of his works might be available in English. At the time, there wasn’t much; the situation now is considerably different. There was a short story available in translation, A Shining, translated by Damion Searls. 

A Shining is a short story, longish as in – coming in at 43 pages in the e-book version. It tells the story of man who drives from him home with no destination in mind. He simply keeps driving until his car gets stuck in a narrow forest road. After debating what to do, he decides to try to find help in the forest.

The man moves through a series of dreamlike sequences; the shining of the title happens two or three times, when some kind of shining presence is watching him, then walking with him. He also sees his own parents. By the end, he’s in the presence of his parents and the shining presence, still walking through the forest, barefoot. (And it’s cold and snowy; he shivers from the cold several times and wishes he’d stayed in his car.)

The entire story is a metaphor for death; he never says his parents predeceased him, but they’re barefoot, too. The presence is something of a God-like guide, not directing toward any particular end or goal but just being there.

Jon Fosse

It’s an unusual story. It’s also a 43-page story with one paragraph. While the indent feature on his keyboard might have been broken, the effect of a single paragraph is essentially to compel the reader to keep reading; there’s no good place to stop or even pause. The story does have punctuation (another Nobel Prizewinner, William Faulkner, could often be bad about that), and punctuation helps.

The story is rather haunting. It builds a sense of frustration; how long is this guy going to continue to wander in the dark and not find help? The help does come, of course, but it’s not what the reader’s expecting. It’s a story about death, but it’s also a story about faith. The story may have been influenced by his own childhood when he suffered a serious accident and came close to death. He speaks of seeing “a shimmering presence.” He was raised in the Quaker and Pietest traditions, and he’s now a practicing Catholic.

His Nobel lecture is entitled “A Silent Language.” It’s available to watch on YouTube (he’s introduced in English but his lecture is Norwegian) and it can be read in English here.

Top photograph by Casey Horner via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Major Lesson of Five Decades of Writing

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Looking back at five decades of writing, I can say with certainty the major lesson I’ve learned. I was reminded of it while I was reading Writing Better Fiction by Harvey Stanbrough. This is about as no-nonsense, straightforward, this-is-how-it-is discussion of writing that I’ve ever come across. And most of it applies to non-fiction as well as fiction.

In other words, I recognize what he talks about. Fully recognize it.

The major lesson: Writers write, no matter what.

You may be sick. You may have 67 other priorities and pressing demands. You may stare dully at a blank page or screen without having a single thing to put down. You may hear the chorus of constant critics, including your own internal voices. You may watch others write something seemingly effortlessly and wonder why that never happens to you. Twice a day might be tempted to pack it all in and walk away, forever.

But it still comes down to this: writers write, no matter what.

I’d like to say it gets easier, and it does, in a sense. Like anything else, the more practiced you become, the better you get at it. What’s different about writing is that every article, every story, every poem, every novel, and every book is its own singular act of creation. Which means that, each time you write, you’re doing something altogether new.

I learned this lesson early, without realizing it. I was a reporter for my college newspaper, and I had a fair number of stories already under my belt, the result of a semester and a half of reporting. The story was the University Court deciding whether a candidate for student body president had violated the election rules. The session, held a few days before the election in a room in the student union, went late into the night. The editors were (impatiently) waiting for the story; they wanted to go home. It was a big story; the candidate was the favored winner.

The comment session ended; the court retired into deliberation. It was getting close to midnight. I found a pay phone nearby (no mobile phones in those days) and called the editor who said she hoped I had most of the story already written (this would have been by hand; no laptops in those days). The court returned and announced a non-decision. The candidate was outraged and demanded a yes-or-no answer. Back into deliberation they went. 

LSU’s newspaper some 13 years before my time

I sat in a chair in the meeting room, writing the story by hand. I guessed what they outcome was going to be, because it was clear that the candidate had indeed violated the rules. And then we all waited. For an hour. I kept tinkering and editing the story, knowing my editors were going nuts, because I still had to type the thing. 

Right at 12:30 a.m., the court read its decision. I’d guessed right. I waited just a moment for the explosion from the candidate (now former candidate) and then ran (I did not walk) the roughly three blocks to the Journalism building. I shouted the decision at the editor and sat down to type like a crazy person. I’d type two paragraphs, and she’d grab the page from the typewriter as I typed the next two paragraphs.

Somehow a coherent story emerged. Nobody said thanks, or good job, or good story, or anything else. I watched the editing and the finishing of the front-page layout. I was asked to check the headline for accuracy. And then it was rushed off to the back shop six blocks away for typesetting. I also had to indicate what could be cut if space was too tight. I got back to my fraternity house (where I was living) about 2 a.m., only to discover half a dozen people waiting for me to return, because they wanted to know what the outcome had been.

Under horrendous deadline and pressure conditions, the writer wrote. 

And it wouldn’t be the last time.

Top photograph by Nik Shuliahin via Unsplash. Used with permission.

When Your Characters Take Over the Story

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The title for this post is something of a “Well, duh” kind of title. For a story to work well, it’s the characters who have to take over and knock the author from his perch.

I’ve been reading Writing Better Fiction by Harvey Stanbrough, and he says that he almost called his book Writing Better Character-Driven Fiction, until he realized it was rather redundant. “All good fiction is character-driven,” he writes. He’s not big on outlines, plotting, character sketches, erecting signposts, or anything else that might smack of planning. Instead, he says, “like real life,” he says, “authentic fiction is not planned. Like real life, authentic fiction unfolds naturally.”

Stanbrough has an acronym for this – WITD, or “Writing into the Dark.”

As I’m reading this, I keep asking myself, is this how I write?

The answer is, yes, almost entirely.

I’ve written before about how a minor character became the heart of my fifth novel, Dancing Prince. He was supposed to stay in place. I thought I had a plan for the book in my head. But as I began to write, four-year-old Thomas kept sticking his head in where he was wanted or, I thought, needed. I finally relented and expanded his role a bit. That’s all the encouragement he needed. He took over. 

The book turned into a very different story from the one I’d originally intended. Good thing, too.

I’m currently in the thick of a new story. It’s a rewrite of an earlier manuscript that didn’t work. I’m not rereading the old manuscript as a guide. Instead, I’m letting the characters tell the story, and it’s becoming very different from that old manuscript.

But something similar to Dancing Prince has happened. A new character unexpectedly showed up. The main character is still the main character, but I was typing a scene where he’s leaving an apartment one morning. And for some unknown, crazy reason, this is what I typed next: “As he walked out the door, he saw a young man leaning against a motorcycle parked on the sidewalk.”

Where did that come from? I stared at the line. I read it out loud. I kept staring. And then I knew his name. I knew what he was doing. I knew what would happen next and how the entire story had just shifted. I set the characters free; they let me come along for the ride. Several complicated issues waiting for a solution suddenly were solved, because I let the characters solve them.

I said above that “writing into the dark” is almost entirely how I write. That qualifying phrase has to do with how a story forms in my head, long before (years in the case of Dancing Priest) before the first word lands on the computer screen. The stories I write essentially begin as short scenes in movies. I visualize them happening, slowly connecting the scenes until I can say a “whole story” has been visualized. 

But each scene in my head is character driven. And I mentally repeat each scene to watch what the characters do, and to see how the characters themselves change the scene. 

What’s clear is that I’m not the movie director. I may not even be the script writer. I think I’m more a technician standing in the shadows, assisting if needed, moving props around, painting a backdrop. 

But the characters are in charge.

Top photograph by Steven Houston via Unsplash. Used with permission.