Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

writing

Six Reasons Why Authors Edit Their Manuscripts

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Editing has been much on mind lately, and I’m learning that editing requires more of my time and focus than drafting the original manuscript.

I’m working on the fifth, and final, novel in a five-book series. This one has taken more time to write; I’m aiming for something more ambitious than its four predecessors. I’ve been through the complete draft five separate times and worked on partial segments countless other times. I know I have at least two more complete editing reviews before I turn it over to the official editor and publisher.

Editing is meticulous, time-consuming work. Writing the first draft can be exhausting and certainly more exhilarating, but editing is often where the real work starts – and seems to never end. It’s not perfectionism. Instead, editing is a complete mental, emotional, and spiritual engagement with the text you’ve created. 

As I’ve worked through this manuscript, I realized I’m editing for six reasons.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the American Christian Fiction Writers blog.

Photograph by Andrew Neel via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Interview with Wombwell Rainbow

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I was interviewed by Wombwell Rainbow, a U.K.-based site that features interviews with local, regional, national, and international writers. The discussion ranged from reading and writing poetry to work ethics, writing, and favorite authors.

You can read the entire interview at Wombwell Rainbow.

Writing as Editing, Editing as Writing

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A friend and fellow writer asked me if I edited my writing as I wrote or after I finished a draft. My answer was yes. I do both. I edit as I write, over and over again, and I edit once the draft is “finished,” if that’s possible. 

The question provoked a deeper thought. Is it possible for me to separate editing and writing?

The answer is no, and I suspect computers have something to do with it.

I was trained in journalism. At the time, classroom technology consisted of Royal manual typewriters. Electric machines were available, but my journalism school couldn’t afford them. I taught myself typing on a portable electric typewriter, but in-class assignments and tests were done on the manual Royals. I can still remember the sound of 20 journalism students pounding on typewriter keys. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog.

Photograph by Stanley Dai via Unsplash. Used with permission.

When the Story Emerges from the Words

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I’ve been working on a story, and Michelangelo pops into my head.

He has nothing to do with the story. And I’m not writing about art or sculpture on Italy or the Renaissance or anything related to those subjects.

But something happens in the process of writing that story, and it has to do with something Michelangelo said about sculpture.

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it,” he says, “and it’s the task the sculptor to discover it.”

He follows it up with a slight variation: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved it until I set him free.”

I think the quotes were a bit presumptuous, but it is Michelangelo who says them, so who am I to judge?

And then I have something like a Michelangelo moment.

I don’t see a statue in the rock, or an angel, and I’m writing, not sculpting. But I learn exactly what he means.

It seems like I’ve been working on this story for years, and I suppose I have. Parts of it go back a decade or more. Most of it is new, but it has a history, a past. 

I’m well into the story, working it over and over, editing and adding and deleting, and suddenly something almost jumps out from the page. I’ve typed something that happens in the conflict between a father and a son, and I can’t for the life of me figure out where it comes from, because it isn’t in the outline, in my notes, my mental plan, or in any version previous written. 

I stare at what I’d typed. Why did I write that?

Then it hits me. What I’d written was the whole point of the story. It was what the story was actually about, what it has really been about from the beginning. And it has simply, or finally, emerged from the words.

Completely thrown, I reread the story from the beginning, some 90,000 words worth.

It was almost too obvious, except it isn’t. But it’s there from the very beginning, slightly submerged below the surface, the whole idea that the story has been turning toward, never breaking the surface until it almost couldn’t help itself. 

I did not plan this, I admit to myself. Or did I?

I read through section after section, figuratively smacking myself upside the head. How did I miss this? How am I writing a story with the main point that close to being obvious, yet I still miss it until it starts screaming at me?

That angel in the marble had suddenly broken cover. He was out in the open, shaking his head. What took you so long? I’ve been trapped inside this piece of stone until you finally wised up. A little slow on the uptake, are we?

I go back through the story again, closely reading it, seeing the places where it almost emerges but doesn’t. I start editing, to make a suggestion here, hint a possibility there, make a clear-cut indication in another place.

The story has fundamentally changed, but this is what it has really been about from the beginning.

Michelangelo was right.

Photograph by Akash Patel via Unsplash. Used with permission.

In Praise of Reading Poetry

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Like most of us, I read poetry – a lot of poetry – in high school and college English classes primarily because it was assigned. I was much more interested in fiction (Dickens!) and noir mysteries (Dashiell Hammett!) than I was in Tennyson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Elizabethans. 

My attitude changed with T.S. Eliot and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It was first published in 1915, and Poetry Magazine published it only as a favor to Ezra Pound. The editors were so uncomfortable with it that they placed it at the back of the issue. But it was our first great modernist poem, and it changed poetry forever. A high school senior, I read that poem, and I was mesmerized. I went to the local bookstore and bought a small paperback edition of Four Quartets (I still have it; it’s now more than 50 years old).

To continue reading, please see my post today at the American Christian Fiction Writers blog.

Photograph by Thought Catalog via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Reflecting on Writing a Novel

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Reflecting on Writing a Novel

Dancing Priest

Dancing Priest, my first novel and the first in the Dancing Priest series, is free on Amazon Kindle this week.

It was published seven years ago, and it was almost a decade in the making. From an image inspired by a song, the story spent three years inside my head. In idle moments, or at night after I’d gone to bed, I slowly worked my way through the story of Michael Kent and Sarah Hughes. Over those three years, the story changed, incorporated new ideas and characters, shifted in its narrative arc, and shifted its location from Italy to Scotland. 

When I finally began to transfer the story from head to computer screen, in the early fall of 2005, it came as a torrent. It took about three months, but when I stopped, I had a torrent of 250,000 words, sufficient for three novels. Then began the cutting, splicing, and saving chunks for later. At a writer’s conference or two, I showed excerpts to editors and agents. Editors liked it; agents didn’t. One agent told me that if it didn’t have a vampire or a werewolf, it couldn’t be marketed to publishers (this was at the height of the mania for the Twilight novels). 

Dancing Priest eventually found its way into print. From that first behemoth manuscript in 2005, it was likely rewritten 20 times before it saw the public light of day. Writing is hard work. Editing is hard work. Marketing is hard work. Trying to market one book, write another, and hold down a full-time job is impossible work. 

I’ve reread the book several times, and while there are a few things I’d like to change or edit, I find myself content with it. I’ve always considered it a love story for men, and the reactions of male readers have supported that. While a few (male and female) readers have thought Michael Kent a bit too perfect, male readers have generally seen the character as to what men aspire to. One reader said it should be required reading for teenage boys, because it offered a sense of “the nobility of doing right.” 

The character I still feel the closest to in the story is Sarah Hughes. Her attitude to faith mirrored my own in college, as in, “You’re serious about this stuff?” How she comes to faith is a direct lift from my own experience when I was a senior in college. What happens to her when she begins to talk with the wife of the director of “College Campus Ministry” is an almost verbatim description of what happened to me when I began to talk with the director of Campus Crusade for Christ at my university. 

If there is a single theme in Dancing Priest, it is the same theme that you’ll find in the three novels that have followed it: No matter how dark things look, there is always hope.

This week, you can access the free copy on Amazon Kindle here.

DP Michael Sarah dorm lobby