A Light Shining

Can Fiction Predict the Future?

February 22, 2018 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

The comment came in a tweet: “Finished my reread of A Light Shining last night. I found the section ‘The Violence’ to be remarkably prescient.”

The section has to do with a relatively short-lived religious upheaval in Britain – short-lived but turning the country upside down. Even when I reread the section, I see the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, in London in 2017, in Brussels, in Orlando, in San Bernardino, and other places.

Except that section of the novel was written in 2005.

My wife says there are some things in my novels that give her the creeps, as if I knew what was coming.

I didn’t. I just wrote the story that was in my head. It’s all fiction.

In 2012, I outlined the main ideas of the rest of the Dancing Priest series to my publisher. The fourth novel (now in process) would be about a specific issue, taken largely from a similar issue in the United States but transported to Britain. Two weeks later, he sent me reports from several British news media. My idea was sudden news in Britain, and it wasn’t fiction.

I didn’t predict what happened. Instead, what I think was happening was picking up an idea here, a suggestion, there, and something related over there, and then the ideas fusing into something that became part of a fictional story.

This is not unlike the situations I found myself in during my professional career. Developments, trends, and emerging issues would often look obvious to me, and they wouldn’t look obvious to anyone else. I wouldn’t “predict the future” but I would say “This is what we’re dealing with, and this is what I think we need to do.” It became even more difficult with the arrival of social media, because the company would need to respond in minutes when the company often didn’t think social media mattered at all. Until it did. Which was almost all of the time.

I can see the same processes working through my novels. I read a lot – magazines, blogs, social media, books. I read people I agree with and people I don’t. I try to break out of my worldview bubble to understand what people are thinking and, more importantly, how they think. If there’s any predictive element to any of this, it’s understanding how people think.

The chief villain in my third novel Dancing King is a PR operative named Geoffrey Venneman. The character is not based on any real individual. But how he thinks comes from a composite of people I’ve known. He’s not a type but a composite of types, and not all of them bad. He’s resourceful, does his research, and verifies things himself. He’s also an astute judge of character, except when he sizes up Michael Kent-Hughes, the story’s hero. While the reader (and author) are appalled at what he does, the fact is that he’s operating in a time when it’s not about right or wrong but about winning.

In 1898, an author named Morgan Robertson published a novella called Futility. He created a ship called the Titan, loaded it with wealthy people, and wrecked it on an iceberg. Fourteen years later, people remembered it, and drew the uncanny parallels (including ship length, top speed, and claims of being unsinkable) to the Titanic. Robertson didn’t predict the sinking of the Titanic; but he more likely considered the culture and how people thought, which shaped the story in his head.

Fiction can’t predict the future. But it can give the future a good run for its money.

Top photograph by Aziz Acharki via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Every Writer Needs a Plan, Right?

February 15, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

The inspiration for my three novels, Dancing Priest , A Light Shining, and Dancing King, was a song. The story was gradually written in my head, and only there, for four years. When I began to pound the keyboard, it poured out – gushed, actually – for almost 250,000 words. Eventually, I shaped the equivalent of two novels from that original manuscript and had enough to write the third. But the story arc for the series was set by 2006.

Along the way, the outlines, drafts, and ideas developed for five more novels using the same characters, ranging from a 4,000-word treatment to a 70,000-word manuscript. Somewhere in there two entirely different novel ideas popped up, one becoming a 60,000-word manuscript and the other a 1,000-word summary. And the ideas for three more novels in the Dancing Priest series have been rattling around my head, following the same process as the original – creation in my mind as I go to sleep at night.

Did I mention the 30,000-word novella?

This is not exactly what I would call a deliberate writing plan. Including the three that are published, this would mean a total of 14 books.

It makes my head hurt just to think about it.

I look at these manuscripts, these words, and the characters waiting in the stage wings, and I’m not sure if there will even be another act. I’m working on the fourth novel in the series, but I’m plagued by all the usual doubts.

My plan will likely be something like “just plow right on ahead.”

For most of my professional career, I worked for a company where this absence of planning would have been anathema. Planning means control, and whether they realize or not, all corporations were created with the idea of reducing uncertainty by creating or extending control. Control your market. Control your environment. Control your raw materials. Everything is a process and has a plan. Measure the results of your plan. Repeat.

Corporations took a function like mine – communicating with the great, messy, unruly, uncontainable, obnoxious, and unwashed public – and expected it to control that environment. (“Tell the reporter not to ask that question.” “Tell Twitter to remove that tweet.”) Result: #totalfail. The communications revolution we’ve been living since the creation of the worldwide web has, if nothing else, proven that no one can control anything. In fact, it’s not about control any more, if it ever really was. (Watch what happens when you tell corporate executives that it’s not about control; it’s about letting go of control. Result: #careerfail.)

The way I’ve written my novel manuscripts likely compensdates for the writing rigidity I experienced at work. Now I let inspiration move me. In one form or another, there are likely some 500,000 words of published and unpublished manuscripts, with at least that many words to go if all of these books ever see the light of day.

Yes, I need a plan. And I need to take to heart some words I’ve read about planning your writing.

“Some stories can’t be written now,” says Charity Craig in On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts (co-authored with Ann Kroeker). “They don’t fit together, or they compete…Or maybe the stories refused to be written. Either the story is not ready, or I’m not ready to write it…having a plan doesn’t mean having all the answers.”

Having a plan doesn’t mean having all the answers. That may be one of the most encouraging things I’ve read about writing. Ever.

Top photograph by Matt Artz via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Curious Responses to Faith-Based Writing (Including My Own)

January 25, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I’ve published three novels, all faith-based, and I’ve had an unusual experience with all three – readers are roughly divided 50-50 between Christians and non-Christians. Equally interesting is the gender divide. I expected more women than men to read the novels simply because women tend to read more faith-based fiction than men do. And yet my readers seem split 50-50 here, too.

The element of the novels that all readers seem to respond and react to is the role that faith plays. It’s a significant role, especially in the first and third novels (the three form a trilogy). In Dancing Priest, the first novel, faith forms the central tension between the hero and the heroine – he has it, and she doesn’t. They’re in love with each other, but faith is the stumbling block – and it eventually drives them apart.

How the heroine comes to faith is a key element of the story. It’s also pretty much how I came to faith – I fully used my own experience to create hers, including an initial rejection of faith. But come to faith she does, and she finds it leaves her more open and vulnerable than ever before.

Most readers (including non-Christians) appeared to like the tension that faith creates in these stories and understand it. Some do not. One sent me a long email in which he objected to the heroine, Sarah Hughes, finding faith; he didn’t think it was necessary and he was pretty adamant about not liking it in the story. I had to point out that without her finding faith, the story would have stopped, or she would have been written out of it. The central character – Michael Kent – is a young Anglican priest, and a conservative Anglican priest, and he would have no choice but to marry a believer.

Faith plays a subtler role in the second novel, A Light Shining. Michael and his wife Sarah are caught up in religious violence, part of the larger global religious conflict we see happening today. How they respond to what happens is infused with their Christian faith, and their responses include stepping off into the unknown. They’re able to do that because of their faith.The third novel, Dancing King, continues the story of Michael and Sarah, but it’s set within the growing conflict between Michael’s faith and the institutional church.

When I wrote the first two novels, I didn’t think of myself as writing “faith-driven” stories. I was simply writing the stories I had to tell. Looking back, I can see that’s exactly what I was writing. And yet I can’t say these stories are what we associate with “Christian fiction.” They’re not. They don’t tightly fit any one genre, and that’s a problem, especially for marketing. And they’re not “crossover” stories, because the faith element is simply too strong, even if it’s not obvious. Perhaps another way of saying this is that I don’t hit people over the head with the faith element in the stories, but it’s clearly there.

While my characters talk about faith, what’s more important is what they do because of their faith. They give villains a second chance; they reach out to abandoned children; they give people (and themselves) room to doubt; they’re kind, even to people who don’t deserve kindness. Faith is more about what they do, and less about what they say. And that may be a clue to my 50-50 split between Christian and non-Christian readers.

I didn’t begin writing with these themes and ideas in mind. I never consciously decided that these are things the characters would do because faith is more about what you do rather than what you say. Instead, they came from the story I had to tell.

Photograph by Karl Frederickson via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“A Light Shining:” Tears and the Heroic

December 4, 2017 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Not long after A Light Shining was published, a colleague at work knocked on my door and asked if I had a minute. He sat down, and told me he had downloaded A Light Shining for his Kindle. And he had read it.

“I stayed awake until 4 a.m. to finish it,” he said. “I couldn’t put it down. I’m here to make a plea for a third novel in the series.”

I laughed. “We have to see what happens with the second one first.”

He smiled. “When I reached the part with Sarah’s speech, I lost it. I’m sitting there blubbering, and everyone else in the house is asleep, and I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. It was terrible.” And then he proceeded to outline what Sarah had said, quoting the key phrase of the speech exactly, and the reaction of one of the characters to her speech.

This was the same colleague who liked Dancing Priest so much that he bought 20 copies and gave them to 20 senior executives at our company, people from around the world. One of those executives – from India – stopped me and said he had read it and that he had enjoyed it so much that he had become completely absorbed in the cycling events in the 2012 Olympics in London this summer. “I didn’t know anything about cycling until I read your book,” he said.

Shortly after that, I picked my oldest son up at the airport. Right out of the blue he said, “That part with the warehouse kids – I totally lost it on the plane.”

“You’re reading the book,” I said.

“I bought it for my Kindle,” he replied, “and started reading it on the plane. Good thing I had a row to myself, because it would have been embarrassing.”

And then he said, “You better not kill him off.” Suffice it to say that I know which character he’s talking about, and why. But I wouldn’t respond to his question.

I’ve read both of those scenes – Sarah’s speech and the warehouse kids – scores of times. And I still get choked up when I do. It’s almost as if I forget I wrote them. There are one or two other scenes that affect me the same way. In Dancing Priest, the scene that never fails to bring me to tears is the British Olympic team arriving in the stadium in Athens for the closing ceremonies.

I ask myself what it is about these scenes, scenes I know intimately and have lived with for close to a decade that prompts this reaction, from me as well as readers.

I believe it has to do with our sense of the heroic, that something within us that reaches beyond what we’re capable of doing because something must be done, something must be said, some good and fine purpose must be achieved. One of the readers of Dancing Priest last year sent me an email, saying that the book should be required reading for teenage boys because it was about a young man’s nobility of purpose – something they get from nothing in our culture today.

I’m not going to be able to live off the royalties from these two books – longer than a day, anyway. But the reactions I hear from people reading them are royalties enough.

The story of “A Light Shining”

December 4, 2017 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

So where did A Light Shining, the sequel to Dancing Priest, come from?

It was part of the original manuscript. The 82,000-word novel was originally joined to the 93,000-word novel that became Dancing Priest. Yes, that’s a total of 175,000 words, not including the original 5,000-word introduction and the 11,000-word “wedding scene’ (it was more than the wedding) that were both dropped, and the 50,000-word section that followed the conclusion of what is now A Light Shining.

Doing the math: 241,000 words, give or take a few hundred.

Long before a publisher ever showed up, even I knew that was way too long for a novel.

Cycling in Umbria A Light Shining — Cycling in Umbria

I looked at the one I was to read, and realized from the first sentence that it was not just bad, but spectacularly bad. It had ghosts and other creatures (but no vampires), and the writing was just bad. Including the misspellings and grammar mistakes. A dilemma: I was holding someone’s hopes and dreams and hard work, and I could read it like it was written or I could do something else. I did something else. I put my speechwriting skills to work and essentially performed it like a speech, correctly the grammar mistakes as I went along (no one else but the writer and the agent would ever know). After the session, the writer told me that “you spoke it better than I wrote it.”

After the writer next to me read my manuscript, there was a kind of pause, and then the agent said, “I don’t handle your genre. If I did, I’d sign you right now.”

That was sufficient inspiration for the next two years.

I came back from the conference and divided the manuscript. “Dancing Priest 1” eventually became the published novel, Dancing Priest. “Dancing Priest 2” became the core of what is now A Light Shining. The last 50,000 words became what is now entitled “Dancing Priest 3” – a rather raw and unfocused manuscript with a directional outline of what it is about.

Dancing Priest was rewritten and edited at least a dozen times. The interesting thing was that I didn’t think it would ever be published, but I kept editing and rewriting.

Loft A Light Shining — A loft building in San Francisco, similar to the one in “A Light Shining”

In 2010, a guy I knew in St. Louis who had set up a small publishing firm said he had heard I have a fiction manuscript, and could he read it?

I said no. By this time, I think I’d convinced myself it wouldn’t be published.

But he kept after me, and one day in 2011 I surprised us both and said yes, let’s do it. So we did.

I edited the second manuscript, and gave it to him. He sent me a contract.

But that’s when things got complicated.

So I had a contract, The manuscript was in the hands of both a reader and the editor. Early reactions seemed positive.

Then the reports came back.

Suggestions for wholesale cuts.

Too much focus in the first section on “the warehouse kids.”

Too much focus in the second section on, well, just about everything in the second section.

The suspense ended too far from the end of the manuscript.

The whole last section could be cut.

I set the whole thing aside. That I hadn’t signed the contract I saw as a good thing, because if I accepted the suggestions, what would be left was a longish novella.

For the next two months, I came to accept the fact that A Light Shining wasn’t going to be published. I was discouraged, tense, irritable, and upset.

The one thing that stayed in my head was the suggestion by the editor for a new character, to help carry the suspense through to the end of the story. In August, I wrote a new first chapter, and posted it at Faith, Fiction, Friends, essentially to test the reaction. The responses suggested I was on to something, although a few people said they were rather “creeped out.” Which I took as a good thing – that was the whole intent.

It was at that point that I signed the publisher’s contract.

So, the new character was born. I started thinking about how to integrate him into the story. We went to London on vacation, and my laptop (and the manuscript) came with me. Getting away proved to be the best thing I could have done. I did spend some time working on the story in London, but not a lot. I spent more time reading the existing manuscript, deciding what to cut and what to add, and where to place my new character. I didn’t give him a name, because I wanted to come up with exactly the right one.

We returned from London, and the rewriting began in earnest. It was intense, and it happened within the space of a month. I slashed whole sections of the existing manuscript. I rewrote. I integrated. I rewrote what I had rewritten.

And then it was done. The new character still had no name. I fretted over it for a few days, and then realized he didn’t need one. In fact, the story worked better with my character remaining nameless. He had emerged as the major antagonist in the story – an antagonist that Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes don’t even know exists until it’s too late.

The manuscript was finished. I sent it to the publisher, who accepted it, making only minor changes.

It was a different book from the first manuscript. But it was a better book.

Top photograph: A sunset view of Florence, Italy, a setting for part of the narrative of A Light Shining.

A Light Shining

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