• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

  • HOME
  • BLOG
  • BOOKS
    • Dancing Prince
    • Dancing Prophet
    • Dancing Priest
    • A Light Shining
    • Dancing King
    • Poetry at Work
  • ABOUT
  • CONTACT

novels

The Character of Michael in the Dancing Priest Novels

November 17, 2020 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

After Dancing Priest was published in late 2011, I received an email from a reader in Seattle. He liked the book. He liked the book so much that he said it should be required reading for young men under the age of 20. 

He said this, he said, because the character of Michael was all about standing firm and true in the face of adversity. “There’s a nobility in the character of Michael Kent that we should all aspire to.” That character is demonstrated in large things, like an Olympic tragedy, and in smaller things, like taking in a motherless eight-year-old boy.

By the second Novel, A Light Shining, Michael Kent has become Michael Kent-Hughes, husband of Sarah. He wears his wealth lightly. Finding his family in Italy, instead of doing the legal thing, he does the right thing. And he faces the great personal adversity of any in the five novels, when he nearly dies. In fact, for a significant section of the book, Michael is unconscious, and the focus shifts to Sarah. 

In Dancing King, with Britain in physical shambles, Michael could have walked away from family responsibilities and the royal invitation that’s fallen to him. But he doesn’t take the easy way out. Months before the coronation, he learns that he’s facing serious opposition and a pile of dirty tricks. He and the staff he’s selected to work with him meet each one head one, turning potential adversity into advantage. 

Michael, as head of the Church of England, finds himself engulfed in a church mega-scandal in Dancing Prophet. The church scandal begins to erupt at the same time the Greater London Council reaches a political impasse, budgets expire, and the transport and sanitation workers go one strike. Michael is all of 30 years old in the story, but his sense of responsibility carries him forward. 

As the last of the series, Dancing Prince, begins, Michael is 35. He’s effectively the nation’s czar, parliamentary government having collapsed some years earlier. His sense of responsibility is still carrying him forward, but there are cracks, especially in his family life. He and Sarah have grown apart; trouble is brewing in their marriage. The flashpoint becomes their youngest child, Thomas, and one incident will haunt the family for the next 20 years. 

This is a somewhat different Michael than the theology student and cycling enthusiast in the first story. He knows that the pressures of his position are allowing his family to slip through his fingers. He’s physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. People are talking about Sarah avoiding evening activities at the palace. And one person, their youngest child, will bear the brunt of the estrangement.

Much of the younger man remains, but this is a man who’s been shaped, and sometimes mauled, by the job. In the previous stories, he was something of an idealized character. In the last one, he becomes more real. 

Top photograph by Benjamin Rascoe via Unsplash. Used with permission.

4-Book Package on Amazon Kindle

December 22, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

The story of Michael Kent, cyclist and priest, and Sarah Hughes, artist. All four books in the Dancing Priest series are available as a package on Amazon Kindle (or individually).

Dancing King Stories: Researching a Novel

July 16, 2018 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

I’m looking at a web site called English Historical Fiction Authors. Its audience is authors who write period historical novels. The various posts are written by the authors themselves. So, you can learn about how ice cream was made in the 18thcentury, what pieces of furniture would have been found in an upper-class hoe in the 16thcentury, who the Lord Proprietors of Carolina were in the 17thcentury, the friendship between the British Saxon Osulf and one of Charlemagne’s sons; and similar kinds of really detailed information. If you want your period novel to show authenticity, you need authentic historical details.

I don’t write historical novels. Mine fall into the more contemporary genre; actually, they’re set a few years ahead of our own times. So, I don’t have to be concerned with a lot of historical detail, like what Osulf really thought of his friend Charles a thousand years ago.

But it doesn’t mean I’ve escaped the research yoke. Far from it.

I do two kinds of research for my novels. The first is the reading kind – books, articles, web sites, blogs, even social media. The second is the foot-power kind – research by walking around.

A section of A Light Shining is set in Tuscany and Umbria; I’ve never been but I almost went in 2007, and had read so much and studied so much that I had the map of Florence memorized. For Dancing Priest, I had so many books and travel guides on Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh that I could have opened a travel library. That’s the reading and study kind of research.

bookshelf Dancing King
The bookshelf above my computer

And then a crucial scene in Dancing King happens in Southwark Cathedral; I’ve been there three times, walked around, bought and read the guidebook, took pictures, and talked with the nice lady in the gift shop. I stood in the pulpit and looked at where people would be sitting in the nave. And that hill in downtown San Francisco where Michael Kent rides his bike in Dancing Priest? I’ve walked up that hill.

Walking-around research is extremely valuable. You see and feel what the streets look like, you peer into windows, you see a barrister’s gown and wig on sale for 550 pounds, you notice how Essex Street slopes toward the Thames River. A pub in London may superficially resemble a pub in St. Louis, but if you sit long enough, you begin to notice the differences.

Both kinds of research are critical, even for a contemporary novel.

On the bookshelf above my computer sit the guidebook to Buckingham Palace; four volumes of Peter Ackroyd’s history of England (the fifth is to be published later this year), a guidebook to London, a book entitled Crown, Orb & Sceptre which will tell you everything you want to know about every coronation in English history, a history of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, a booklet on the royal line of succession, a guide to Southwark Cathedral, a brochure about the guards associated with Buckingham Palace, and related books. I turn to them often.

I been to England five times in the last six years, and every trip has been both vacation and research. Whatever place we visit – the British Museum, Canterbury Cathedral, the Museum of London, All Hallow’s by the Tower Church, the Imperial War Museum – I buy the official guidebook, which is always packed with information. I see art exhibitions to enjoy the exhibitions and to imagine what they would be like in a novel. I take photos of favorite paintings.

And I take walks. I’ve walked London’s South Bank countless times, along with Piccadilly, the City, Westminster, Hampstead, Pimlico, Belgravia, Mayfair, the Temple, Lambeth, Covent Garden, Charing Cross Road, the West End, and Spitalfields. I’ve walked Oxford, Cambridge, Salisbury, and Windsor. Every walk is research.

I pay attention to contemporary British artists and writers. I read novelists like Paul Kingsnorth (Beast) and Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time). I read contemporary British plays. Contemporary literary culture provides a take on the pulse of the country and insights you can’t get from non-fiction.

It’s not just the historical or period novels that demand research. Contemporary ones do, too. And I think I’d rather eat ice cream in 21stcentury England than what the Georgians considered ice cream in the 18thcentury.

Top photograph by Gaelle Marcel viaUnsplash. Used with permission.

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

January 25, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Man in church writing about faith

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.

Dancing PriestHow 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.

A Light ShiningWhen 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.

Footer

GY



Meet the Man

An award-winning speechwriter and communications professional, Glynn Young is the author of three novels and the non-fiction book Poetry at Work.

 

 01_facebook 02_twitter 26_googleplus 07_GG Talk

Copyright © 2023 Glynn Young · Site by The Willingham Enterprise · Log in | Managed by Fistbump Media LLC