Author and Novelist Glynn Young
Where does a story come from?
The idea for my novel Dancing Prophetcame from the my regular route for riding my bike, and the nondescript apartment complex I passed. I recently talked with writer and author Megan Willome about where the story came from, the major issue that affected it, and how it began to seem that my fictional story was writing the news. She captured exactly what I was trying to do in telling the story.
You can read the interview here.
It was the strangest interview I’ve ever participated in – on either side of the table.
A friend had talked me, or conned me, into interviewing for a job with St. Louis Public Schools – the director of communications.
The school district was in chaos – an outside management firm had been brought in to run the district, schools were being consolidated and closed, services were being outsourced, central office layoffs had emptied more than half of the headquarters building, and protests by parents, students, employees, former employees, teachers and the teachers’ union were daily. School board factions were fighting each other through the news media. The news media was already showing up early each morning at the district’s administration building – knowing there would always be a new crisis to report.
And I wanted to insert myself into that?
To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.
KSDK-TV, Channel 5 NBC affiliate in ST. Louis, posted an interview today with me about my Dancing Priest novels and the upcoming royal wedding. You can watch the report here.
Writer Megan Willome and I had a long conversation about Dancing King, writing, fiction, characters, the use of emotion, crowd scenes, and even bicycles in London. She had read all three books in the Dancing Priest series.
“The stories haunt you, and not in a scary way. They serve as almost an alternate history: What if the Athens Olympics unfolded like that? What if England had a king on the throne instead of a queen? Like any good alternate history, it has enough true details to make it seem real. So real that I find myself thinking The Violence from book 2, A Light Shining, was as real as The Troubles.”
You can read her discussion and our conversation at Megan’s blog.
An award-winning speechwriter and communications professional, Glynn Young is the author of three novels and the non-fiction book Poetry at Work.
