Dancing King

“It’s about who you are, who you are as a person”

November 27, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

“Josh,” Zena said, “there’s something in Michael that speaks to you, and I suspect speaks deeply. He thinks the world of you, but it’s about who you are. He’s grateful for what you’ve done and what you can do, but it’s more about you as a person. He likes you, Josh. You’re not used to having someone who simply likes you as a friend.” She paused. “And you may have to ask yourself what your new faith means in the context of government politics.”

From Dancing King

Photograph by Dominik Vanyi via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Where Do Our (Fictional) Characters Come From?

October 12, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

My wife has said, more than once, that the main character in my Dancing Priest novels is an idealized version of me. The first time she said it, I disagreed. There were some things I shared with that character, but I never planned to write about making an idealized version of me.

After considering it, I thought, well, maybe. I thought about it some more, and I reverted to my original thought. Nope, he’s not me.

Not one of the characters across my four novels are disguised versions of real people. Instead, they are composites of people and experiences.

In Dancing Priest, Sarah Hughes has a conversion experience that is almost exactly taken from my own.

In A Light Shining, the political operative Josh Gittings is based on several people I’ve known from the political world.

The communications man in Dancing King is based on many of my career experiences, especially in crisis communications. His uncanny ability to spot what’s happening and ferret out what’s behind a crisis is based on too many of my own experiences. (I say “too many” because sometimes I was heeded, and sometimes I was not.)

And certainly the speechwriter in Dancing Prophet comes from my own career background, including sitting with an executive for an entire day to write an emergency speech while he did other work.

I can say my characters come from experiences, but where do their personalities come from? Likely our families, our friends, people who’ve influenced us or protected us, mentors, people we’ve have bad experiences with, even casual acquaintances.

For example, the villain in Dancing King, the PR operative Geoffrey Venneman, is a composite of several people I’ve known over the years. He serves his clients, yes, but he is all about serving himself. He looks for the main chance. He has no qualms about hurting others and that, in fact, is part of the game. He can affect a wounded innocence when it’s helpful to do so. His anger becomes uncontrollable when he’s thwarted. Yes, I knew people like this and had to work with them. It was not a pleasant experience, because you always had to be on guard.

In the writing process, however, I don’t consciously create characters. They seem to emerge as the story develops or when this kind of character is needed. Sometimes I know what kind of character is needed at a particular point, but the birth is an agonizing labor, requiring rewrite after rewrite.

I’ve had one exception to my “no real people” guideline. In Dancing Prophet, one character is based on me, less his experiences and more his personality. I admit it. Almost all of his actions and reactions in the book track with mine (that’s almost all, not all). I didn’t realize this until I was in the middle of rewrite #2 or #3, and then I saw it. The character had emerged, unconsciously, from my own life. He’s not an idealized version of me. In many ways, he is me.

It was a shock. For a time, it stopped all progress on writing the book. I had to take stock. What was I trying to say here, or understand? Was I trying to tell myself something? I had to try to answer these questions and others before I could continue.

The answer I came to was this: this character feels broken. It doesn’t stop him from having a successful career and a loving marriage. But it shapes him in obvious and less-than-obvious ways. And sometimes, in the midst of that brokenness, a character has to step forward and do something courageous.

No one ever said that writing would be this hard. No one ever said it would be this revealing.

Photograph by Hudson Hintze via Unsplash. Used with permission.

A Novel about a Crisis

October 3, 2018 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

More than once, my wife has pointed out that my 2017 novel Dancing King and my new novel Dancing Prophet tend to pick on the Anglican Church, and specifically the Church of England.

It’s a fair point; the major tension in Dancing King is between the king, Michael Kent-Hughes, and the Church of England hierarchy at Lambeth Palace. Michael is speaking at churches for the need for reformation, and then makes a blow-out speech at a conference of bishops. Lambeth strikes back, however, employing all sorts of stratagems and accusations.

In Dancing Prophet, scandal erupts. What looks contained to one church is actually broader and deeper, involving churches and dioceses across the country and well beyond. The introductory sentence reads this way: “The match that ignited the reformation of the Church of England was lit by three teenagers.”

The heart of this story was written more than a decade ago, and then rewritten (many times) over the years. In one sense I did pick on the Church of England – the idea of the scandal in Dancing Prophet is actually inspired by the real institutional crisis the Catholic Church has been struggling with. In the story, Michael will realize that the situation is beyond reformation; the church as he’s known it is gone.

Dancing Prophet is fiction, but like all fiction, it can’t help but reflect the times in which it’s written. When the history of our times comes to be written, it may be title (or subtitled) “The Age of Institutional Crisis.” Our government structures aren’t working; the sorry spectacle of a U.S. Senator questioning a candidate for the Supreme Court about the references to body noises in his high school yearbook isn’t even funny as much as it is tragic.

Our language has become the language of extremes, suggesting a mutual contempt that’s hard for me to fathom. I’ve stopped reading the editorial and op-ed pages of my hometown newspaper; there’s virtually nothing in it that one could call a reasoned argument. Lots of polemics, to be sure; lots of barely disguised contempt for any opinion, belief, or value other than what the editorial and op-ed writers agree with. Snark rules.

The church universal is in crisis as well. Mainline Protestant denominations in the United States are in membership free fall. Evangelical megachurches are afflicted by their leaders abusing women and elder boards refusing to believe it, until significant damage is done. The Catholic Church is being torn apart. This looks like a winnowing of the church to me, a winnowing that will leave a smaller and perhaps stronger church.

This isn’t the time for reasoned arguments. This is the time for rule by the mob. I watch the news coverage, and I see the mob racing through the halls of Congress, screaming at senators and congressman. This is rhetorical violence approaching physical violence.

Some have compared this to the declining days of the Roman Empire; it’s closer, I think, to the declining days of the Roman Republic.

This is the world partially depicted in Dancing Prophet. Michael Kent-Hughes has been thrust into a position he never expected and never sought. He is not only dealing with ecclesiastical failure; he is also dealing with politicians increasingly reluctant to take responsibility and a London governing authority that ceases to work due to political disfunction.

Early in the story, two of the leading characters in Dancing Prophet are discussing how Michael came to occupy his position. Here was Michael, with no military background, no royal upbringing, and in fact nothing to recommend him for the position of king. He was a Church of England priest, and a young one at that, without any hierarchal experience.

And here’s what one of the characters says:

“God picks the man needed for the job at hand. And isn’t it fascinating that Michael had essentially been exiled to the hinterlands as a child, reared completely away from anything even remotely royal, felt called into the priesthood when he was relatively young, and was then sent to the outer edges of the Anglican world, away from the center and all that the center implied. God was preparing Michael, as surely as you and I are sitting here. And He was less interested in military and palace experience and far more interested in raising up a man after His own heart.”

And that’s the hope of Dancing Prophet, that even in the darkest times, God is raising up men and women after His own heart.

Top photograph by Micah Williams via Unsplash, and lower photograph by Oliver Sjostrom, also via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Writing a Fiction Series

August 14, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

My introduction to series fiction happened in college. I was checking the sale table at a B. Dalton’s Bookstore and found God is an Englishman by R.F. Delderfield, a novel about the Swann family set in mid-19^thcentury England. Not long after, I realized there was a second volume, entitled Theirs Was the Kingdom. And a couple of years later, the third and final volume, Give Us This Day, in the series was published.

I loved those stories. Delderfield had created an entire world built around the coming of the railroads and how one man realized that there was opportunity in the routes not connected by the railroads. He builds a business empire upon that realization. It was (and is) good, old-fashioned storytelling at its best. I still have those three books.

Writing a fiction series seems to have become popular in the 19^thcentury. It’s not the same thing as serial publication, which is how Charles Dickens published his novels – a chapter per issue of a periodical. One of the best-known series in the 19^thcentury was the Chronicles of Barsetshire by Anthony Trollope, comprised of six related novels. Trollope also write the six-volume Palliser series.

The currently popular Poldark television program on PBS is based on the 12 novels written by Winston Graham, written in two periods, four from 1945 to 1953 and the rest from 1973 to 2002. And a beloved series still being published are the Mitford novels of Jan Karon.

Fiction series are not limited to adults; in anything, they’re even more popular among children. I grew up on the Hardy Boys. Other popular children’s series at the time were Nancy Drew, The Dana Sisters, the Bobbsey Twins, Trixie Belden, and others. Today, my 8-year-old grandson is deep into the Boxcar Children series.

Having written three novels in a series, with the fourth now in editorial production, I can explain why fiction authors tend to write related books. Dancing Priest began its manuscript life as some 250,000 words, almost enough for three novels. (For a word-count comparison, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy is 587,000 words.) (Tolstoy could get away with that. Few if any novelists could get away with that today.) I ended up splicing it into a novel of 92,000 words, a manuscript of 70,000 words that was eventually expanded to become A Light Shining, a manuscript (a really rough manuscript) of 45,000 that grew to become Dancing King, and some 35,000 words that eventually made their way into the fourth novel in the series, tentatively entitled Dancing Prophet.

What happened was this: as I constructed what became the world of Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes, the construction grew, it expanded over time, it became more elaborate and detailed, and it became too big to be contained in only a single book. What was one rather large manuscript was transformed into four novels.

There are potentially more. I have story ideas and even extended fragments and outlines for additional books. I’m not sure if I will go there, although it’s difficult to resist when you’ve connected with a character who won’t appear for another two or three books. Perhaps what will happen, or what should happen, is that these fragments and outlines will make it into a story collection.

But I know what it is for an author to publish a series. You come to inhabit a fictional world, one of your own creation. It becomes incredibly familiar. You see things in the real world and almost without thinking apply them to your fictional world. You read a newspaper story and translate it to your fictional world. Sometimes you get surprised and discover that something you wrote becomes reality. That’s happened to me at least three times during the writing of the Dancing Priest novels.

Little did I know when I picked up that copy of God is an Englishman.

Top photograph by Jake Hills via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dancing King Stories: Writing as an Act of Faith

August 6, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Southwark Cathedral

We writers would all love to be Stephen King, James Patterson, J.K. Rowlings, and other successful people who turn everything to gold simply by their touch. For most of us, writing is difficult, frustrating, depressing, discouraging, and lacking any kind of return even remotely like the effort we put into our work. We pour ourselves into what we write, often for a very long time, and once it sees the light of day, the world yawns and moves on to books that are badly written, semi- (or totally) pornographic, or so lacking in anything of value that we wonder why we continue to do what we do.

Writing can be a slog. For most of us, writing is a slog.

A scene inDancing King unintentionally speaks to writers, what we write, our platforms (or lack thereof), and the whole question of “why do we write.” I wasn’t thinking of writers when I wrote it, but I believe it applies to what we writers try to do.

It’s two days before Christmas. Michael Kent-Hughes flies from Scotland, where he’s on holiday with his family, to London. He’s giving the first in a series of sermons on the need to reform the church, and he’s at Southwark Cathedral. It’s an old church, dating back to early Anglo-Saxon times, but it’s a church that has managed to flourish. (Southwark is an overlooked gem for tourists, likely overshadowed by its much larger and better-known brethren like Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral.)

Dancing King Michael gives the sermon. He has friends and staffers visiting among the 400 people in the congregation – his chief of staff, his communications leader, and his security people. People are taken aback, first by the fact of the king giving the regular Sunday sermon, and second, by what he says and how he says it. Jay Lanham, Michael’s communications man, is narrating what is happening. And he learns that Michael is speaking with an authority that seems to come from outside him. Lanham’s there in his communications capacity; he’s what might be called a “cultural Christian.” He can recall the order of the worship service from his childhood, but he finds himself overwhelmed by the truth he hears in the sermon.

Afterward, Michael treats the staff people in attendance to lunch at a nearby pub. His chief of staff, Josh Gittings, asks him if he has any expectations as to how many people might attend the Bible study the next evening being organized by the church, which Michael had just encouraged the congregation to attend.

“I don’t know, Joshua,” Michael says. “And the number doesn’t matter. God can do wonders with one or two just as easily as 400.”

The response will actually be something a bit more than one or two; Michael’s sermon will spark something of a revival in the diocese. But Michael knows that this is less about what he says and how many may or may not respond, and more about what God puts in people’s hearts. Michael is a vessel; he’s not what pours into and out of the vessel.

That is the “how” and the “why” of what I write. Do I want thousands and tens of thousands to buy my books? Sure. But if that was the goal, I would not be writing the kinds of books I write.

And while the number may matter to a publisher, the number of readers doesn’t, in the end, matter. Wonders can be worked with one or two as with 400, or 10,000. We write to tell a story; what happens to that story is someone else’s business.

Top photograph: Southwark Cathedral, with the office building known as “The Shard” in the background.

The Novel That Wasn’t Meant to be Written

July 30, 2018 By Glynn Young 4 Comments

For roughly 14 months, from September 2005 to November 2006, a story idea that had been in my head for four years began to pour out on the computer screen. Once it came, it gushed, some 250,000 words of the roughest sort of rough draft. It would be spliced, diced, rewritten, divided into three parts, added to, and subtracted from, eventually published as Dancing Priest (2011), A Light Shining (2012), and Dancing King (2017), the three novels in the Dancing Priest series.

In November 2006, I stopped, and rested. Two months later, a story from my small suburban town of Kirkwood in metropolitan St. Louis became international headlines. A boy kidnapped in nearby Franklin County had been found by police in Kirkwood. With him was found a boy kidnapped in 2002.

The kidnapper was a man named Michael Devlin, a manager at a local pizza parlor. He had kept both boys at his apartment, on the far east side of Kirkwood and across the street from the town of Oakland. The apartment complex was just north of the trailhead for Grant’s Trail, which I had ridden hundreds of times. Which meant I had ridden past that apartment hundreds of times. I likely had seen the older boy, who after a couple of years had been allowed outside to ride his bike.

This was, and is, every parent’s nightmare. Your child is taken, and you don’t know if the child is dead, abused, or raised as someone else’s child.

I didn’t feel personal responsibility. I felt something else: a deep sense of horror at a great evil happening a few yards away from where I regularly rode my bicycle.

I did the only thing I knew to do. My writing rest came to an end.

I didn’t write the story of Michael Devlin. Instead, I poured the horror of that story into fiction. Some 40,000 words later, I felt I could stop. I had dropped any reference to Devlin or even a character like him. I had moved the story to England. I moved the crime within the Church of England, most likely being influenced by all of the revelations from the Catholic Church in the United States. I added seminary connections.

And then I set the story aside. It had done what it needed to do. It was a kind of exorcism of the horror represented by Michael Devlin and what he had done.

In 2012, in a conversation with my publisher about writing life after A Light Shining, I mentioned this story. A few days later, he sent me a press story from England. A small pedophile ring had been uncovered within the Church of England. He wanted to know if I had “pre-written history.”

In late 2017, I returned to the story and began to work it over. It grew; new elements and characters were added. The abuse story remained at the center; two additional story lines were added – one about a city government collapse and the other about a mother showing up after eight years. Only when the draft was done in early July did I realize that this had become a story about the collapse of institutional authority – family, church, government. It was exactly the institutions that Michael Kent-Hughes, the hero of Dancing King, had committed himself to during his coronation ceremony.

I’m not sure why I chose to develop the original manuscript into a full-blown novel. But I did. It was a story that was never intended or imagined to be written, but it was, because of the shock of a hometown horror.

The manuscript is now in the hands of the publisher for consideration.

Top photograph by Warren Wong via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dancing King

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