Dancing Priest

Writing to Make Faith Attractive

March 1, 2018 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

It showed up as a comment on a blog post, and it stopped me in my tracks.

“Whatever your plan is…I do hope you continue this series of books. May God direct your thoughts and plans with His plan. I loaned the books to a friend of mine to read, and her comment was after reading the first one (Dancing Priest), ‘If I wasn’t already a Christian, this book would make me want to be one.’ That is a powerful testimony. Keep writing. There is power in the written word when it directed by God.”

A comment like that leaves you surprised, almost shocked, humble, and then almost fearful.

You ask yourself, “What is it I’m doing here?”

I’ve been known to answer that question about the novels I’ve written with “I’m just telling a story.” It’s a story that was on my mind and my heart for years – almost five years – before I typed the first word. By the time I began writing it down, it was almost uncontrollable. I couldn’t type fast enough.

I came to a stop at 250,000 words. I still hadn’t poured it all out.

The Dancing Priest series is now three published books. More may come. One is in process. But I read a comment like that and I tremble.

The books haven’t exactly been blockbuster bestsellers. I’d starve in about four days if I had to live off the royalties (and the royalties would cover only food for four days). But when you hear things like “the best description of lifestyle evangelism I’ve ever read” and “that scene, that scene of Sarah’s speech in the hospital, I cried” – and you hear them from men – you know something else may be going on.

At the end of 2013, I almost stopped writing. Two novels and a non-fiction book in three years, my mother increasingly ill and reaching the end of her life, absolute craziness at work, keeping up a blog, writing two weekly columns – it all nearly did me in physically and emotionally. When Michael Kent-Hughes says in Dancing King that giving a sermon physically exhausts him, in many ways that’s me saying writing physically and emotionally exhausts me.

But after three novels, I know that I’m about more than “telling a story.” It’s that comment: “If I wasn’t already a Christian, this book would make me want to be one.” These may be “Christian novels” but they’re not really written for Christians (although Christians seem to like them). Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes may be attractive and sometimes inspiring heroes, but it is their faith that’s the real hero of the story. It carries them through separation, through tragedy, through mistakes they make, through literal attacks on their lives, and through constant attempts to smear their reputations. If this series continues, their faith will carry them through a lot more. And they don’t emerge from all of this unscathed; Michael bears literal and figurative scars. But it is faith that inspires these characters to carry on.

It took a reader to help me understand that a good part of what I’m about is making faith attractive.

Photograph by Samantha Sophia 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.

What I Learn from Readers (Part 3): Required Reading

January 18, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I was learning a lot from the readers of my novel Dancing Priest. Some had read it as the kind of story they’d like to be part of, being used by God in the ways the novel described Michael Kent, the main character, and even some of the minor characters. A pastor had discovered what he called the best explanation of lifestyle evangelism he’d come across.

And then there was the reader who worked for a big, well-known software firm on the West Coast.

I’d corresponded with this man before. We followed each other’s blogs, and we had corporate career experiences that had much in common (good and bad). I didn’t know he had bought Dancing Priest, but he had. And one day, about three months after it had been published, he sent me a note.

“I’ve read your book,” he said. “And I’m moved beyond words. Do you know what you have here? It’s almost an operating manual for how young men should act and behave. It should be required reading in every high school in the country. It tells young men how important nobility, character, and courage are. There’s nothing in the culture today – movies, books, TV, nothing – that does that. Not a single thing. And it’s desperately needed.”

I didn’t write Dancing Priest to be an operating manual. What I had heard from a few readers (including my wife) was that Michael Kent seemed a mite too perfect; he needed some flaws to make him more real. This particular reader (a man) saw the same thing but saw it as a positive, an example of noble behavior that young men could aspire to.

Yes, like with the other readers, I went and reread my own book, trying to understand what he meant and what he had found. (I think I reread that book so much I could almost recite the dialogue and narrative.) And I found it, in many of the same places I had found other readers’ discoveries and in some new ones as well.

But would young men respond the same way this adult man thought they should and could?

A partial answer came a few weeks later. A family of four – husband, wife, and two teenaged sons – had all read the book within days of each other. The wife had read it first and urged it upon her husband, and then he, in turn, urged his sons to read it. It was the wife who wrote to me with the boys’ response. “They inhaled it,” she said. “They said they had never read anything like this, and they loved it.”

Perhaps my friend in the software business was right.

Writing a novel involves a lot of time, focus, and sometimes pain. You think you know what’s in your own book, and then some readers come along who disabuse you of that notion. You tell the story, and the readers decide if it’s written on their hearts.

Previous:

What I Learn from Readers of My Books – Part 1

What I Learn from My Readers (Part 2): A Pastor Buys a Bunch of Books

Top photograph by Christopher Jolly via Unsplash. Used with permission.

What I Learn from Readers (Part 2): A Pastor Buys a Bunch of Books

January 11, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

To say I was surprised when I opened the email is something of an understatement.

The message was from a pastor, a well-known pastor of a very large church in the upper South. Somehow, he had gotten a copy of my novel Dancing Priest and read it. And then ordered quite a few copies for his church staff. And then he sent in a second order, for quite a few more copies, for his elder board.

Authors like to hear about orders of their books for multiple copies. Take my word for it.

He was writing to ask me to draft a guest post for his blog. Specifically, he wanted me to write about lifestyle evangelism as described in Dancing Priest. “Your book contains the best description and example of lifestyle evangelism that I’ve ever come across,” he wrote.

My book? My novel? Dancing Priest?

I was so taken aback that I almost forgot to be excited about all the copies being ordered. I had to think for a moment. What was he talking about?

I started looking through the book, and then reread it a second time (I’d be interested to know if other authors have had this experience – being driven back to read their own books because they’re surprised by what readers have found).

I began to find examples of what the pastor was talking about. How Michael Kent treats the cycling competitor who treats him so shabbily. How Michael is not ashamed of hosting a prayer group at the Olympics. How Michael’s faith is translated into his actions. How Michael responds to the half-brother who had treated him horribly years before.

And then there was the rather obvious example of Sarah Hughes. It’s one whole section of the book. Sarah is not a believing Christian. That is one layer of the conflict in her relationship with Michael, because he’s not only a believing Christian but preparing to enter the Anglican priesthood and planning to enter the mission field. They break apart, because his faith and her lack of it is too great an obstacle.

Sarah will come to faith, but it will be by a very different route than what was Michael’s experience. In fact, this was the specific section the pastor had in mind when he wrote to me (I finally asked). And Sarah’s story of finding faith in the book is modeled very closely on my own experience. It’s the one part of the book that I can say was drawn largely from real life.

But it wasn’t deliberately written that way. I wasn’t trying to explain lifestyle evangelism. I don’t think I was even conscious of what that part of the story was based on until after I went looking for what the pastor was talking about.

As gratifying as it was, the pastor’s letter wasn’t the most surprising thing I learned from readers. That story is next.

Previous:

What I Learn from Readers of My Books – Part 1

Next: Required Reading

Top photograph by Annie Spratt via Unsplash. Used with permission.

What I Learn from Readers of My Books – Part 1

January 4, 2018 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

I can’t speak for other authors, but I’m always surprised – nicely surprised – at what readers have found in my books. I’ve learned that sometimes it takes a reader to show you what you done.

The writing of Dancing Priest happened over a period of years, but it followed a fairly standard trajectory. The idea for the story incubated for quite some time, and then the story line was envisioned in my head long before the first word was actually typed. I knew the story I wanted to tell; I knew who the characters were; and I knew all of the side stories that would be pulled along with the main story.

During the editing and publishing process, the draft actually changed very little from what I’d submitted, at least in terms of the story line. There was a considerable amount of editing, but the story line remained unchanged.

Once the book was published, my expectation was that readers would find that story line – they would find the story I wrote. And they did. But they also found more. In fact, they found more than what I had thought I’d written.

About three weeks after publication, I received a note from a reader. This is what it said: “Just finished Dancing Priest – one of the most compelling stories I’ve read. I kept thinking I want God to use me like this.”

I did a double take.

Wait, I wanted to say, I was just telling a story. I wasn’t trying to tell people how they should live, or what they should want for their lives. Where could that have come from?

And so, I went back and reread Dancing Priest, with the specific thought in mind of what the reader had written to me. I looked for examples or themes of how God uses people.

I found the examples. I found a lot of examples. The examples were so obvious it was almost embarrassing that I had missed them.

The story of Ian and Iris McLaren accepting guardianship of a child at less than an hour’s notice. The story of how Sarah Hughes comes to paint again. The stories of Michael holding his hand to the side of an injured young cyclist’s head, or treating a prostitute no differently than he treated anyone else, or accepting responsibilities far beyond what he thought he was capable of. Or repeating what he had learned first-hand from his guardians and accepting a child.

It was all rather unsettling. How had I missed this in my own book?

It took me some time to find the answer, and it was another email that helped explain it.

Next: Part 2 – A Pastor Buys a Bunch of Books

Top photograph by Ben White via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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