Writing

Have You Tried Writing by Hand?

June 29, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

In the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I taught myself to type, and for a very good reason. I was starting my introductory journalism classes in the fall, and typing was a requirement. So, in whatever free time I had that summer (I was also working a summer job), I could be found sitting at my desk in my bedroom, following a self-instruction manual, pecking away on an electric typewriter my parents had bought for me.

I took my electric with me when I returned to college. My first day in my basic news reporting course, I discovered we had typewriters at every seat – old Royal manualtypewriters. My fingers, used to the needed light touch on an electric machine, had to learn how to pound on a manual.

Gradually, I got used to typing on a manual for journalism writing. All other writing – papers, research texts, history and English assignments – were typed on my electric in my room. At times I felt I had a bit of a split personality, but I made do.

I graduated, and my first job was as a newspaper copy editor. The copy desk used IBM Selectric typewriters, which, fortunately, I was familiar with from my father’s printing and mailing business. For the next decade, the IBM Selectric was my friend, first at the newspaper and then my work in corporate communications.

In 1984, my IBM Selectric was replaced by an IBM 286 computer, with a floppy-disk drive. In the days before email and networked computers, I could copy a document to the dick, hand the disk to a secretary, and watch her print what I had written. For someone like me, with speechwriting and regular revision of texts was standard operating procedure, that IBM 286 was something close to miraculous. We bought our first home computer, an Apple IIGS, in 1988.

In the late 1980s, I was working on a speech. It wasn’t just any speech; it was one of those groundbreaking speeches that would likely change a lot of things. (It would eventually turn an industry upside down and become known as “the speech that refused to die.”) And I was having trouble – how was I going to bring the speech to a close? Up to the last two pages, the text moved and soared – and then went completely flat.

I had seen a program on PBS whose subject related to the subject of the speech. We obtained a copy of the program, and I brought it to the television and cassette player in our conference room. My desktop computer stayed where it was – on the desktop (this was before laptops had appeared). I watched the program, and I suddenly knew how to end the speech. With nothing to type with, I started writing by hand.

And I learned something. I wrote differently when I wrote by hand as opposed to typing on a typewriter or computer keyboard. The revelation startled me. Could technology affect how I wrote?

After typing the new conclusion to the speech and sending it off to the executive for review, I took a hard look at the text. And, yes, I could see the difference. The most emotional part of the speech – the part that packed the biggest wallop – was the part I had written by hand.

I tried this with other speeches and other kinds of writing. And it held true. From then on, if I needed an emotional section, I would write it first by hand.

I still do that. Virtually every poem I write is written first by hand. Several sections of my three novels were first written by hand. Even parts of my non-fiction on poetry at work were written by hand.

I can’t explain it, but writing by hand connects me far more emotionally to what I’m writing than simply typing the text. I’ve also found that writing by hand helps when I hit a wall or dead end.

It’s one reason I carry a journal with me wherever I go, including church.

Have you tried writing by hand, or using writing by hand to help you through difficult parts of a text?

Photograph by Adolfo Felix via Unsplash, Used with permission.

Writing: Follow Your Passion?

June 22, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

We see a lot of advice these days about following your passion. Determine what your passion is, pursue it, and you will find happiness. Huffington Post even has a whole section on the subject. It’s a subject usually but not always associated with “Gen Y” or millennials – those who were born roughly between 1980 and 1995. Yet I’ve heard Gen X-rs and Baby Boomers embrace the same idea. It’s usually tied in with the idea of quitting your existing job and pursing that desire or dream that’s been rattling around in your head.

However the idea got started, the inevitable pushback has followed. “Follow Your Passion is Not a Career Plan,” says Business Week. George Washington University professor Cal Newport says it’s bad advice. Mashable reposted the Cal Newport video and then elaborated on why it’s bad advice. So did the Minimalists. So did Fast Company. (That Cal Newport fellow has had a considerable influence.)

The appeal of the idea of following your passion is understandable. You find yourself in a boring job, or a job that’s taken turns you didn’t expect, or the organization reorganized itself three months after you walked in the door, or that great new boss you were working for suddenly quit, or the company was acquired and layoffs are coming. Or perhaps the layoffs have started. None of this leads to happiness, and it is happiness that has come to be the main goal of life in Western culture.

What I think we do is confuse passion with desire, or even dreams.

I have a great desire to spend more time in London, seeing cool stuff, like we did on our recent vacation, and preferably staying at the hotel we stayed at. It’s a desire – and a quick way to spend a lot of money.

I have a dream of being a full-time writer, writing what I would like to write. It’s been a dream since I was in my 20s (it’s an old dream). I didn’t begin getting really serious about it until about 10 years ago. Yes, I’ve published three novels and a book about the poetry of work. I won’t be living off the royalties any time soon. The dream is still a dream, and one that I believe I’ll be closer to realizing in a few short months, when I retire from the day job.

Ideally though, you never quite realize the dream. You keep reaching for it. The reality of the dream is in the reaching.

And then, say John Lynch, Bruce McNichol and Bill Thrall, the authors of The Cure: What if God Isn’t Who You Think He Is and Neither Are You, there is destiny.

Their definition isn’t what you might expect. Most of us today would define destiny as fate or perhaps providence. What The Cure suggests, however, is that we typically look at this from the wrong end of the telescope.

“Destiny,” the authors write, “is the ordained intention God has sacredly prepared with your name on it.”

That’s the desire we should have, the dream we should reach for, and even the passion we should follow.

Yes, it’s about you, but it doesn’t start with you.

And it won’t end with you.

But you do have a destiny.

Photograph by Tim Marshall via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dancing King Stories: Michael Kent-Hughes

June 18, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Michael Kent (married name, Kent-Hughes) started out fictional life as an unnamed priest dancing on a beach in Italy. He was inspired by a song, “Luna Rossa,” sung by Mario Frangoulis. I first heard the song on an airplane flight to San Francisco in 2002. The image of a dancing priest stuck in my head and wouldn’t let go.

The priest stayed in my head for the next three years. He moved off the beach and into a tourist group. He changed religions, from Roman Catholic to Anglican. He had a mild flirtation with a young American woman who was part of the tour group. The beach, Italy, and the tour group were left behind, and the priest was moved to Scotland. He was finishing his theology studies at the University of Edinburgh. He gained a named, Michael Kent. He gained a reason for being English but living in Scotland – he was raised by guardians.

In August 2004 I started biking, which meant Michael started biking, too. Except he was training for the Olympics. Michael and I had a lot of conversations on various biking trails around St. Louis, the Lachine Canal Trail in Montreal, the Katy Trail in Missouri, and the Yorktown-Jamestown Colonial Parkway in Virginia.

From 2002 to 2005, the story arc of Michael Kent was laid out – in my imagination. Nowhere else. I said nothing about the story to anyone, including my wife, because I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. In the fall of 2005, inspired by Hurricane Katrina, I began to type it. It took two months, and when I finally stopped, three months later, I had a 250,000 word manuscript and the entire story line that would eventually become Dancing Priest, A Light Shining, and Dancing King.

For the next five years, the manuscript was rewritten, edited, split into three pieces, re-edited, re-rewritten, and continually worked over. More pieces of the story, extending beyond Dancing King, were added. Query letters went out to agents and publishers, with the net result of zero interest. An editor and an agent read a chunk at a writers’ conference; they offered enough encouragement that I kept working on it. Dancing Priestfinally found a publishing home in 2011.

The three novels tell the story of Michael Kent-Hughes. Through the three books, he’s moved from a priest-in-training to Buckingham Palace. He’s now 27, married, with two adopted sons and a young baby. Instead of being a priest, he finds himself the head of the Church of England, in conflict with the church hierarchy.

Michael Kent-Hughes had serious doubts. He occupies a leadership role that he’s not sure he’s at all qualified for. He knows what he’s been called to do, and it’s daunting. He finds himself the object of personal and institutional attacks. And he learns he has to depend upon people, and how much of his success depends upon finding good people to work for him.

He adores his wife Sarah and his family. The importance of his family begins to reshape how he undertakes his royal duties. Not being raised among Britain’s elites means his orientation, values, and priorities are very different.

Although born in southern England, Michael considers Scotland, and the McLarens’ farm, as home. He still rides his bike, even if he’s not competing professionally. In spite of the wealth and royal trappings surrounding them, the Kent-Hughes family will maintain something of a middle- to-upper-middle-class lifestyle.

Michael has been positioned and is being prepared for something much larger than he has yet imagined.

Top photograph by Justin Chenand cyclist photo by Max Libertine, both via Unsplash. Photograph of baby and dad sleeping by Vera Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. All used with permission.

Inspired by a Horror: Because It Matters

June 15, 2018 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

Grant’s Trail, a biking-walking-jogging-rollerblading trail in St. Louis some 10 miles long, begins about a mile-and-a-half from my house in Kirkwood, officially the oldest incorporated suburb of St. Louis. The trail is a converted railroad track bed, and I’ve been biking it for years now. Counting the round trip and an occasional side meander, it’s a good 20-mile ride.

Just before the trail begins, there’s a brick apartment complex of some 40 to 50 units in five or six buildings. Rather nondescript, it’s neither at the luxury end of residential living nor the housing-of-last-resort end. Nondescript, and rather anonymous, sufficiently describes it.

Each time I’d go to Grant’s Trail, I’d bike past the complex, barely giving it a thought except to watch for doors suddenly opening from cars parked on the street (bikers have to watch for these things). But it wasn’t the kind of building or complex that you’d pay much attention to.

Until January of 2007.

One cold, icy day (I remember because we eventually lost power from the ice coating the trees), police made a startling discovery. Inside one of the apartments was a 13-year-old boy, kidnapped a few days before as he rode his bike home from school in rural Franklin County, near St. Louis. And with him was a 15-year old boy, kidnapped when he was 11. The good news was that both boys had been found alive. The bad news was what they had endured, one during a short few days and the other for several years. Police arrested Michael Devlin, 41 at the time. He later pleaded guilty and is now serving 74 life sentences in a Missouri prison.

The story became international news. During the next few weeks, news media from all over the United States and several other countries converged on the complex, the local pizza parlor where Devlin worked, his family’s home in neighboring Webster Groves, the police department and everywhere else in Kirkwood. To see it shook Kirkwood residents’ perceptions, including mine, of our rather self-idealized community is an understatement. A year later, the murders of several council members and police officers by a disgruntled resident shattered whatever images of our community we had left.

The news cycle eventually turned and went on to other things. But I can’t ride or drive by that apartment complex now without thinking about Michael Devlin and those two boys. What happened there horrified all of us who live in Kirkwood and anyone who read or learned about the story.

For me, the horror went deeper. I don’t really understand why it did – there’s nothing repressed or anything that happened to me when I was young that would trigger such a reaction. But I was profoundly affected. For a considerable time, I biked a different route, simply to avoid the association.

Many people asked why or how this had happened. Why didn’t the older boy try to escape when he had so many opportunities? How did neighbors ignore screams coming from the apartment? Why did the police ignore tips? Why didn’t Devlin’s family question some of his odd behaviors?

I didn’t ask how or why. I understood. For some unknown reason, I knew the answers to all the questions. Instead, I focused on the shock, the fear, the horror, the desolation, the pain, the hopelessness, the desire to survive that became part of these boys’ experiences. I said little to anyone about this.

I finally knew what I had to do to deal with it. I wrote it out. More than 44,000 words poured out of me until I knew it was time to stop. I wrote it as fiction, far removed from Kirkwood and the events of February 2007. And then I set it aside. Anyone reading what I wrote today wouldn’t recognize the original inspiration.

In The Right to Write, author Julia Cameron says that “when we commit our thoughts to paper, we send a strong and clear message that what we are writing about and whom we are writing to matters.”

In my head and in my heart, I became a conduit, what Cameron refers to as “becoming a channel.” I don’t understand why this happened, only that it did. No one except me has seen the manuscript, but it’s now becoming the fourth novel in the Dancing Priest series.

Because I finally realized the story needed to be told. It mattered.

Photograph by Aaron Mello via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dancing King Stories: Ian McLaren, Guardian

June 11, 2018 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

Dancing King Ian McLaren

A childless couple, he 40, she 39, feel a drifting apart in their marriage. They always wanted children, but pregnancy hadn’t happened. So, one Saturday night, they go out for dinner and play, in the New Town area of Edinburgh. When they arrive home, the phone is ringing, which, at that hour, usually means an emergency with a horse. The man is a horse veterinarian, and a good one, so good that he finds himself traveling all over Britain to attend to horses.

The phone call is not about a horse. It’s about a boy, a 6-year-old suddenly orphaned by the deaths of his parents in a car crash outside of London. The man learns that the boy is being driven to their home outside Edinburgh; he and his wife are the designated guardians. He’ll arrive within the hour.

Dancing King The boy is the son of Henry and Anna Kent, who live a quiet life in southern England. Henry races horses, and his veterinarian is Ian McLaren. He had watched Ian work a near miracle when a valuable racehorse was injured. He had also come to know Ian McLaren the man, and it was to Ian and his wife Iris that Henry Kent entrusted his son Michael.

In Dancing King, the third novel in the Dancy Priest series, Ian McLaren has a small role, but it’s a critical one. Michael and his family come home to Edinburgh from London for Christmas, and it’s to Ian whom Michael turns for counsel and companionship. This is the man Michael thinks of as his “Da,” his memories of his real father being buried in time.

Michael seeks Ian out in the barn, where Ian is attending to horses. Conscious of his healing arm and shoulder injury, Michael does what he’s been doing since he was six – “mucking out the stable,” as Ian describes it. It’s something rather below the station of a king. But Michael, beset by doubts about his abilities and beginning to see enemies unexpectedly rising up, seeks refuge in the familiar – the mucking of hay and the rock that Ian represents.

Ian is a big man physically, tall, broad-shouldered, and barrel-chested. His red hair has gone to gray. He’s now in his late 60s, and he continues to work at his profession. His only concession to age was the hiring of an assistant – Roger Pitts, Michael’s cycling nemesis in Dancing Priest, the cyclist who disgraced himself at the Olympics. Michael had prevailed upon Ian to hire him, Roger also began veterinary studies, and he’s done so well that Ian is beginning to see his successor in his veterinary practice.

Dancing Priest Ian and Iris are Presbyterians, “good Calvinists,” as Iris says. They raised Michael in their church, until he reached about 14 or 15, when he calmly informed them that he was being called to the ministry – in the Anglican Church. Ian didn’t know all of what was happening, but he sensed there was something larger at work. He knew Michael, and he knew Michael’s seriousness, and he and Iris had acquiesced in Michael’s decision. Ian may be a “good Calvinist,” but he doesn’t let sectarianism get in the way of what he can see is God’s plan.

It’s a private, tender moment in the barn, the young man feeling the burden of extraordinary responsibilities leaning upon the older man he considers his father. Ian offers insight, counsel, and laughter.

That moment is a picture of what we all want with our earthly fathers, and what we yearn for with our heavenly Father.

Top photograph by Eberhard Grossgasteiger via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Why Publish? Why Write?

June 8, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

My head’s swirling. I’m editing, rewriting, drafting, doing other projects, maintaining a rather hectic if not torrid pace when I’m suddenly stopped cold by a question.

Why do I want to publish?

I have three novels and a non-fiction book published. A fourth novel and a collection of stories are in the works.

Why?

It’s not as if the novels have been so wildly successful that I can live off the royalties. So why am I doing this again, when each novel has turned out to be far more of a wrestling match than I expected?

Is it because I feel called by God to do this? Actually, no. I’ve talked before about “being called” to be a writer, and I’ve never heard that call. My call is the call of every Christian – to know God, and to honor and serve God in all I do. That includes my family, my friends, my job, my church, people who don’t particularly like me, and how I deal with rudeness and trials and setbacks and successes. That includes writing, too, and publishing a second or a fourth novel. But I’ve ever felt “called” to publish.

Is it personal pride or vanity? I think the answer to that question is also no. Publishing a book is to travel to the land of disappointments, unmet expectations, surprises, uplifting encouragements and depressing discouragements. The world is not going to beat a path to my door. I’m not going to get oohed and aahed over at writers’ conferences. No, publishing a book isn’t about pride or vanity. If that is even a part of it, you’re going to be brought down to reality pretty quickly.

The fact is, I knew all of this going into it. I had seen enough of others’ experiences to know what to expect. It’s a trial for first-time novelists, but even well-established ones find themselves with a large, well known and respected publisher who overlooks marketing (except for a press release), or editors suddenly changing and the latest manuscript of no interest to the new editor, or the publicity firm dropping the ball, or a million other things.

So, unless your name is Karen Kinsgbury or Max Lucado or Stephen King or John Grisham, you can’t take anything for granted (and I suspect even those authors can’t take anything for granted).

So why do I want to publish?

The reason is simple. I have a story to tell, a story that’s been part of my life for a decade or more, and it was and is time to push it out and let others see it.

In Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity and Writing, L.L. Barkat has some good advice about publishing:

Learn if you’re really ready to tackle the story you want to write. Sometimes you need to calculate the cost, and I’m not speaking of the financial cost but the emotional and even spiritual cost. The story you have to tell may still be too raw, too “unborn.”

Write for small audiences first.

Learn how to connect (or network) and how to hold back or “not network” – there are ways to “not network”).

Understanding the economics of publishing – what a publisher has to risk and what you have to risk if you self-publish.

I followed some of this advice. But for what advice I didn’t follow, I knew I wasn’t following it. And I knew why.

I still went forward.

I had a story to tell.

Photograph by Hannah Olinger via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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