Writing

Writing: The Right Reason

April 13, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I was at a writer’s conference, carrying with me my selection of a work in progress like hundreds of others, scheduled for a meeting with both an editor and an agent. Like most of the people there, when not in a general session or a seminar, I spent a lot of time milling about, looking at the writers’ books for sale, talking to a few people, trying to understand what I was even doing there.

At one of the luncheons, a woman sat next to me, her arms full of books, papers, notebooks, purse, briefcase, and water bottle. She smiled expansively at the rest of us at the table and announced, “I am a writer.” Loudly. Loud enough so that the people at the next table turned their heads.

She went on to tell us, knowing we were all phenomenally interested, that she was in her positive affirmation mode. Declaring herself to be a writer meant, as night followed day, that she was one. And she went on to explain what that meant.

“One day,” she said, “I will be on that dais, getting ready to make the luncheon address. I will be signing books during the meet-the-authors sessions. My books will be on the best-seller lists. I will be mobbed by people asking for advice and the name of my agent, and manuscripts thrust in my face to read.” She smiled. “I will not just be a writer; I will be an author” (emphasis in the original). She looked around, a smug smile on her face. “And each of you knows that’s what you want, too.”

The rest of us at the table suddenly discovered reasons why we had to be somewhere else. And if we had to choose between two good seminars scheduled at the same time, the decision would be easy once we saw which one she had chosen.

What struck me about her words wasn’t her brazenness. It was that she didn’t want to become a writer, not really. What she instead wanted was the experience of becoming a writer. The difference was, and is, huge. One implies work; the other implies adulation. One implies a love for others; the other implies a love for self.

In Forgotten God: The Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit, Francis Chan asks a rather pointed question about Christians’ desire to be “filled with the Spirit.” And that question is, “Do I want to lead or be led by the Spirit?”

It’s not unlike “do I want to write or have the experience of being a writer?”

Chan asks the question rather bluntly because there’s no dancing around it; this isn’t the time to be polite. Your faith is either all about you, or it’s not. How you live your faith is either all about you, or it’s not. How you pray is either all about you, or it’s not.

Do I want to lead or be led by the Spirit?

That question requires a deep pondering, a prayerful searching of the soul. The answer isn’t as automatic as we like to think it is, or hope it is.

Because if there’s one thing that’s true about the Christian faith, it’s that it’s not about the person holding that faith. It never was and it never will be. To be a Christian is to be other-directed, in the same way Jesus was other-directed. For him, and for many of us over the centuries, it meant being other-directed to the death.

Jesus didn’t die to save himself.

That’s why Francis Chan asks that question about the Spirit.

Do I want to lead or be led by the Spirit?

Photograph by Aaron Burden via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Writing and Publishing

April 6, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I started reading a novel recently where what mattered to the writer most was being published. I stopped after four chapters. The writing was bad. What got the book published was lust dripping from every page. I suppose some authors would be thrilled to write like that if it meant being published.

I wasn’t. You might call me the reluctant novelist.

I worked on my first novel, Dancing Priest, for years before I showed the manuscript, or even a piece of the manuscript, to anyone. I wasn’t uninterested in publishing it. I did join online groups, followed what everyone was saying about publishing, followed the blogs of agents and publishers, sent our query letters to agents, and talked to editors and others writers. And I was reading a lot of fiction, both in the general and Christian genres.

I attended a writer’s conference, and even had a session with an editor who had read a portion of my manuscript and then a group reading session with an agent and other writers. Both sessions were personally encouraging. I kept at the writing. I even kept writing after an awful experience with a review and an editor that taught me that some Christian publishers were no different than general publishers. It’s a business, like any other business, and it is business considerations that rule over everything else, including what kind of quality is published.

So, when a small publisher approached me and said they had heard I had a manuscript, I said no. It took almost a year of prodding before I finally agreed to let the publisher see it. When they came back with the offer to publish, it took six months for me to agree. I was still reacting to that negative experience with the Christian publisher, and I also understood what kind of effort would be required to market and promote the book. I already had a full-time job that was about 50 percent more than a full-time job.

We went ahead and published. And I was right to have been worried – the amount of time required was huge, in reverse proportion to the result achieved. The same thing happened with the sequel, A Light Shining.

But I learned a lot. And that made the entire experience worth it.

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Charity Craig (co-author with Ann Kroeker) quotes author Anne Lamott, who frequently sees people at writing workshops who are less interested in writing and more in being published. “The problem that comes up over and over again,” she says, “is that these people want to be published. They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published. You’ll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them.”

Charity and Ann both describe their own experiences with trying to be published. Both eventually got there, but not because they wanted to be published. They wanted to be writers first; they wanted to tell the story they had in them to tell. They both eventually realized that sometimes, and perhaps most of the time, it’s better to concentrate on the writing and making your story the best it can be before rushing out to try to get published. And sometimes life intervenes, and your writing dreams get put to the side.

The writing is what matters.

Photograph by Helloquence via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Writer at Rest

March 30, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I’ve invented a word: “misculturalized.” It describes being born, raised and living in one culture when you’re probably better adapted to another culture. And the culture I should have been raised in? The one that celebrates naps. Spain. Mexico. Argentina.

How could I have been born in United States, the country that hates – hates – naps? Think of everything we miss when we succumb to temptation and take a nap: getting work done; staying busy, looking like we’re staying busy; and rest.

Rest.

While I love naps, I have a hard time with the word rest. And rest from writing? Can’t happen. It’s too much of who I am. At least that’s the excuse I make. To myself.

And yet.

We’ve had several beach vacations – Gulf Shores and nearby Orange Beach, once at Virginia Beach. And Honolulu. Some with kids, some without, and once empty nest. On the empty nest beach vacation, I’d wake early each morning, walk down to the beach, rent my umbrella and chair, and sit, reading. To be honest, it was a project – the second time I had read the unabridged version of Don Quixote. And I was doing it because my high school English teacher who taught our class the novel said you should read it three times in your life – when you’re young, when you’re middle-aged, and when you’re old.

Sitting there on the beach each morning, listening to the sounds of the waves and birds, feeling the heart, smelling the salt of the gulf, I read the Cervantes classic. And it seemed like a very different book than the one I read when I was 17.

Even though I was technically doing something, it was still rest. Sitting for long stretches of time and reading, finding myself transported to Spain in the late 1500s, and tilting at windmills, was restful.

It was the kind of experience Ann Kroeker describes in On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts (co-authored with Charity Craig). She finally convinces herself to go with her kids to a family camp in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and she finds herself reading and resting.

“At camp,” she writes, “I sat a lot, often with a book but just as often with nothing. I sat at a picnic table. I sat in an Adirondack chair. I sat on a beach towel on the sand, on a couch in the lodge, and in a folding chair by the calm, cold water of Lake Huron.” She did go jogging one morning.

What she was doing was engaging in mental rest. We have to take time to let our minds rest and regenerate.

Our minds, like our bodies, need a Sabbath.

Photograph by Aaron Burden via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Writing: Is It Themes or Is It Story?

March 23, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

In 2013, a study by three researchers at the University of Toronto suggested that people who read literary fiction are more comfortable with ambiguity, tend to avoid snap judgments and can deal better with disorder and uncertainty. Publishing in the Creativity Research Journal, the researchers found that reading fiction may help people open their minds. (You don’t have to read the entire study; a short and succinct article in Salon translates the study from the original Academic-ese.)

Business executives don’t read novels to help them make decisions. But perhaps they should read novels to help them understand the culture around them. They might make better decisions as a result.

I spent a career writing non-fiction – speeches, articles, reports, studies, and essays. And I read the business stuff I had to read – The Wall Street Journal and a multitude of business and trade publications. But I also read a considerable amount of fiction and poetry, and the understanding followed was reflected in my career work. I don’t think I could have written a lot of what I did without having read Charles Dickens, for example, or The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (as bad a novel as it was, it changed the laws governing food production).

Reading fiction and poetry also leads me to ask myself questions, like “What are you trying to say in your own fiction?”

I have three published novels and a fourth is in the works. I would be kidding myself and everyone else if I claimed to have had specific themes in mind when I started writing. What I had was the story at hand, a story that kept insisting it be told. I wasn’t thinking of grand ideas or themes; I was completely focused on telling a story, a story that often seemed to have a life of its own and characters who did things I didn’t plan on them doing.

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Charity Craig (co-author with Ann Kroeker) says this: “We have something to say that can come only from us. Though we often find ourselves, our lives, in the pages of others, what’s missing? Where is the story, the perspective, the hope that only I can express? I can look and look for it, but I’ll never find it until I sit down and write.”

I can reread those three novels now, and I can see the themes and ideas. But they were not, and are not, intentional. But they’re there, and I didn’t really know what they were until I sat down to write:

There is nobility in the world. There are people who know, and who live, what it means to serve.

It is possible to act honorably, no matter what trials or disasters one faces.

There is evil in the world, but it will not overcome the good.

The best way to teach people about God is to live as God would have you live.

Forgiveness is a gift, a gift to give and a gift to receive.

If I had been determined to write a novel with any of themes as my purpose, I likely would have written a very bad novel.

Photograph by Luke Stackpoole via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dancing King Stories: The Green Drawing Room

March 12, 2018 By Glynn Young 4 Comments

Before there was a Buckingham Palace, there was a Buckingham House, built by the Duke of Buckingham in the early 18^th century. George III bought it in 1761 as a residence for his wife, Queen Charlotte, and it became known as the Queen’s House. The royal family spent considerable and increasing time there, and it came to be known as the family’s London residence. The Green Drawing Room, known by that name today (or simply the “Green Room”), was originally the Duchess of Buckingham’s saloon, and was the largest room on the first floor (what Americans call the second floor) of the house.

Over the centuries, the room has been remade a number of times. For Queen Charlotte, large wall drawings were brought from Hampton Court Palace and the ceiling was painted. Later, the drawings were replaced, and the ceiling plastered. Doorways have been added and chimney mantles replaced. In the 1830s, green silk was used to decorate the walls.

Green Drawing Room Dancing King — The Green Drawing Room in Buckingham Palace.

When he was completely redesigning Buckingham House to turn it into the royal palace, John Nash kept the house structure and then added two wings. Eventually, a fourth wing was added, making the familiar “square around the central courtyard” design that’s known today.

The last time the Green Drawing was redecorated was 1949. It is one of the official state rooms that’s included on the public tour of the palace. Its walls are decorated with green and gold silk wallpaper (replaced every 30 years) and highlighted by white and gold plasterwork. The doorway at one end leads directly to the Throne Room; the Green Drawing Room, in fact, serves as an anteroom for the Throne Room.

In Dancing King, Michael Kent-Hughes agrees to meet with protestors, and the place selected for the meeting is the Green Drawing Room. To reach the room, the four representing the protestors would enter the building on the lower level, walk up the palace stairs, and then arrive at the Green Room. A table and chairs have been placed in the room for the meeting. Michael is waiting and introduces himself as he shakes their hands.

Once all are seated, what the protestors would have seen would be Michael with the doors open to the Throne Room behind him – a reminder of his position. He meets them as petitioners, and he firmly rejects their demands. One demand he finds particularly problematic and objectionable – and that is that he change the coronation oath to style himself “defender of the faiths.”

Palace Floor Plan Dancing King — The Green Drawing Room is marked by the letter G and the Throne Room by the letter F.

I had an original source for that demand – Charles, the Prince of Wales and heir to the British throne. Almost 20 years ago, Charles made a public comment about seeing himself as a “defender of the faiths,” to acknowledge all of the religions in Britain. The comment caused something of an uproar, and we can only imagine what the Queen herself, a devout Christian, thought (and said, privately). He’s tempered that sentiment somewhat in the intervening years, and now leans toward “defender of faith” or the traditional “defender of the faith.”

Michael explains to the protestors what acceding to this demand would mean – that they would be acknowledging him as the head of all religions in Britain, including Islam, and their clergy would serve at his pleasure. They’re horrified – that isn’t what they thought their demand was about.

This scene, like the one that immediately follows outside the palace, begins a theme that actually surprised me when I realized what was happening. Both scenes were written toward the end of the manuscript process and were not part of the older manuscripts written more than a decade ago.

The theme is the limits of constitutional and representative government, and what happens when that kind of government begins to falter. That theme was never part of the “original intent” of these stories, but the seeds of it can be found in A Light Shining and the sprouts in Dancing King.

Top photograph: Looking through the Green Drawing Room to the Throne Room.

Writing Who You Are

March 9, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

The spoken word has much to do with how I write fiction.

My professional career in corporate communications spanned some 40 years. For most of that time, I was either a corporate speechwriter or not very far away from speechwriting. Even when I was serving as a spokesman for a crisis (a plant explosion, a train derailment, government actions upending a product and its market, to mention a few), I would usually have an executive speech assignment waiting on my desk.

It’s perhaps the toughest job in corporate communications (or any other kind of communications). You’re writing for another person. To do your job well, you have to write like that person speaks. That means you have to listen more than you talk. You must understand what’s on the audience’s mind. And you’re constantly moving across communication media – from the words you’re writing to the words an executive is speaking to the words the audience is hearing.

Speechwriting is also rather anonymous. Someone else takes credit for your work. That is, unless the speech doesn’t go well. Then you get the full credit (blame).

Most people in communications hate speechwriting.

I didn’t mind the anonymity. I did mind being at the CEO’s beck-and-call on nights and weekends. I liked the largely solitary work. I didn’t like the politics surrounding the CEO’s speeches. One CEO I worked for was so sensitive that he had one hard and fast rule: no one in the company could see his speech drafts unless they came and asked him face-to-face for permission.

Speechwriting taught me to write with a voice, and that the best speeches were the ones that expressed emotion in the right way and in the right places. It taught me that the most critical part of the job was not the writing but the listening. I learned to listen, and listen hard.

I had also been around the speechwriting life long enough to know that it is very rare for a speechwriter to write effectively for both the CEO and his or her successor. You have to know when it’s time to do something else.

The stakes can be high. I wrote hundreds if not thousands of speeches, but I wrote three speeches that changed a company and changed an industry.

Speeches and speechwriting play a critical role in my third novel, Dancing King. It’s no coincidence that the communications guy writing the speeches for the main character also handles his crisis communications. The speechwriter moves back and forth between the roles. The defining conflict between the hero and his antagonists is a speech, one that sums up what the hero is about and the change he’s calling for.

That’s what they call “writing what you know.” It’s also “writing who you know.”

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Ann Kroeker (co-author with Charity Craig) says that “writing is more than what I do or coach. I discover who I am.” It teaches you about how you think, how you react, what you believe is important, what cannot be compromised, and what is superfluous. Writing is about the word; for Christian writers, it’s about the word and the Word, the logos.

That word – logos – means “word,” but it also means “spoken word,” what we call speech. It’s the oldest form of creativity we know, there from the creation.

Photograph by Bogomil Mihaylov via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Writing

Footer

Meet the Man