writing

Why Publish? Why Write?

June 8, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

My head’s swirling. I’m editing, rewriting, drafting, doing other projects, maintaining a rather hectic if not torrid pace when I’m suddenly stopped cold by a question.

Why do I want to publish?

I have three novels and a non-fiction book published. A fourth novel and a collection of stories are in the works.

Why?

It’s not as if the novels have been so wildly successful that I can live off the royalties. So why am I doing this again, when each novel has turned out to be far more of a wrestling match than I expected?

Is it because I feel called by God to do this? Actually, no. I’ve talked before about “being called” to be a writer, and I’ve never heard that call. My call is the call of every Christian – to know God, and to honor and serve God in all I do. That includes my family, my friends, my job, my church, people who don’t particularly like me, and how I deal with rudeness and trials and setbacks and successes. That includes writing, too, and publishing a second or a fourth novel. But I’ve ever felt “called” to publish.

Is it personal pride or vanity? I think the answer to that question is also no. Publishing a book is to travel to the land of disappointments, unmet expectations, surprises, uplifting encouragements and depressing discouragements. The world is not going to beat a path to my door. I’m not going to get oohed and aahed over at writers’ conferences. No, publishing a book isn’t about pride or vanity. If that is even a part of it, you’re going to be brought down to reality pretty quickly.

The fact is, I knew all of this going into it. I had seen enough of others’ experiences to know what to expect. It’s a trial for first-time novelists, but even well-established ones find themselves with a large, well known and respected publisher who overlooks marketing (except for a press release), or editors suddenly changing and the latest manuscript of no interest to the new editor, or the publicity firm dropping the ball, or a million other things.

So, unless your name is Karen Kinsgbury or Max Lucado or Stephen King or John Grisham, you can’t take anything for granted (and I suspect even those authors can’t take anything for granted).

So why do I want to publish?

The reason is simple. I have a story to tell, a story that’s been part of my life for a decade or more, and it was and is time to push it out and let others see it.

In Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity and Writing, L.L. Barkat has some good advice about publishing:

Learn if you’re really ready to tackle the story you want to write. Sometimes you need to calculate the cost, and I’m not speaking of the financial cost but the emotional and even spiritual cost. The story you have to tell may still be too raw, too “unborn.”

Write for small audiences first.

Learn how to connect (or network) and how to hold back or “not network” – there are ways to “not network”).

Understanding the economics of publishing – what a publisher has to risk and what you have to risk if you self-publish.

I followed some of this advice. But for what advice I didn’t follow, I knew I wasn’t following it. And I knew why.

I still went forward.

I had a story to tell.

Photograph by Hannah Olinger via Unsplash. Used with permission.

He Wants to See You. Now.

June 1, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

The phone rang. Focused on the words on my computer screen, I absentmindedly picked up the phone.

“He wants to see you.”

“Now?” I asked.

“Now.”

I grabbed my suit coat (that’s what we wore in those days), made a mad dash down my building’s back stairs to the tunnel connecting all of the buildings on our campus. I surfaced in the executive building next store – a place of granite, art work, and polished wood bathed in toney silence.

In corporate communication circles, I occupied one of the high positions – the CEO’s speechwriter. I had written for CEOs before him, and I would write for CEOs after him. But no one had the reputation this CEO did.

He had run through three speechwriters in four months before I received the dreaded invitation. I had written a speech for another executive that had received outsized attention inside and outside the company. And that call came from the head of communications: The CEO wants you to write his speeches.

In normal circumstances, I would’ve been thrilled. These were not normal circumstances. This CEO could be awful to work for. He seemed to relish being awful to work for. His supervisory style was known as management by intimidation.

I had already set a record for being one of his speechwriters – I had lasted more than a year.

I reached the outer office where his secretary sat. She nodded toward his door, slightly arching a eyebrow.

The eyebrow was code. The CEO was not in a good mood. I didn’t know how I was going to handle going back to square one in our working relationship.

I took a step toward his office and he started yelling at me. Literally yelling. And waving the pages of a speech draft I had written.

You don’t know how to write. This is trash. It’s the worst thing you’ve written. You think you’re a writer but you’re not. I don’t have flacks write for me. This went on for some time.

I sat in the chair in front of his desk and let him finish his rant. I knew it wasn’t the speech draft. I knew I had written a really fine draft. But I knew it must be something, so I listened for clues.

When he finally muttered something about me not knowing how to write for certain audiences, it clicked.

“It’s the audience, isn’t it?” I asked.

He exploded.

After the rant subsided again, I spoke. “You’ve never spoken to a minority audience before, have you?” I asked, surprising myself at how abrupt I was being.

He sat there, glowering at me.

“What if we do this,” I said. “I will send the draft to” – I named two company executives who happened to be minorities – “and have them read it. And see if they think it’s OK for this audience.”

Grumbling, he agreed.

The CEO never allowed anyone to read his speeches beforehand. So, this was a rather unusual move for him, underscoring his high anxiety.

The two executives read the draft. One suggested a single word change (in a 2,000-word text). The other said he wouldn’t change anything, and that he would give the speech if the CEO wouldn’t.

The CEO gave the speech, to a group of 250 minority business students.

A couple of days later, I received another phone call.

“He wants to see you.”

“Now?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“Now.”

When I arrived, the secretary nodded me toward the door and winked.

That was a good sign.

I walked in his office.

“I gave a great speech,” he said. “I knew it would go over well. They gave me a standing ovation.”

I nodded. “I don’t think I would have expected anything less.”

He nodded. “So, let’s talk about the Boston speech next month.”

After 18 months of my career being over once a week, we both had had one of those business epiphanies. He realized that I might know more about something than he did. And I realized that there was a human being sitting behind that executive desk.

(This story is one of many that helped to create the character of Jay Lanham, a communications professional in my novel Dancing King.)

Photograph by Taylor Nicole via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Story of the Second Chance

May 18, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I was raised a Missouri Synod Lutheran, courtesy of my mother. I was raised with a strong Protestant work ethic, courtesy of my father (who was himself raised a Southern Baptist). Both of those influences fused me into something of an overachiever, although only for those things where I felt I had a chance to overachieve. Academics were one area. Sports were not.

Until my senior year in college, my life followed that overachiever pattern. Set goals, achieve them, surpass them, and then set new goals. As a college freshman, I set several goals, and kept adding to them.

By the middle of my senior year, I had achieved or overachieved everything. All the positions, honors, accolades, recognitions – I had captured them all, including being the managing editor of the student newspaper for my final semester – the position that ran everything in the paper except the editorial page. I had the power position on the paper, likely as powerful as any student office on the campus.

Nothing was left. Nothing.

I crashed and burned.

I kept working; the work ethic was too strong for that to stop. But I crashed. Everything I had accomplished seemed meaningless. Everything I had done seemed like wasted effort. Meaningless. Chasing after the wind.

What I didn’t know was that I was careening, wildly careening, right into the arms of God.

Through what seemed a strange series of circumstances, I landed one night in a conversation with the director for my college’s Campus Crusade for Christ chapter. I was angry, believing that I had been taken advantage of by this man’s organization, which seemed to preach one thing and practice another.

We talked, possibly for hours. I don’t remember how long. But by the end of our conversation, I found myself in God’s arms. I had become a story – the story of the second chance.

This wasn’t an opportunity to reinvent my life. This was a transformation of my life. In a matter of minutes, I understood that everything had fundamentally changed.

About 11 p.m., I found myself in the newspaper editor’s office. He was working late. He asked me if I was okay. “Has something happened?” he asked. And I nodded. “Everything happened,” I said. “Everything. And I can’t explain it.”

The story of the second chance didn’t begin and end that night. If I have learned anything about my life, it’s that the second chances keep coming.

Fourteen years after that night, I had a career crash and burn. Same pattern of overachievement; same result. It happened again 10 years after that, and then 11 years after that.

And each time brought an opportunity for a second chance.

I can say this: had not that second crash and burn happened, I would not have written a speech that changed an entire industry.

Had not that third crash and burn happened, I would not have spent nine months as the communications officer for an urban school district in extreme crisis, learning that a lot of people think differently than I do and they all don’t live in nice, comfortable suburbs, and that some of their children attend schools with 110 percent turnover – annually.

Had not that fourth crash and burn happened, I would not have had published three novels and a work of non-fiction. I would not be a weekly columnist on poetry.

Four stories of second chances. And each time, something changed, something was learned, and something was realized.

Something was being grown inside of me.

What was growing, what is growing, is less of me.

Photograph by Lisa Pellegrini via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Gospel According to Stephen King

May 11, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Three or four times a day, I receive email notices of conversations on discussion boards and Facebook groups, usually about Christian fiction. The subjects are all over the place, from a request for help for a software application to a question about Idaho state law governing autopsies.

One recent discussion stream caught my attention, but only after it had been underway for a few days. The question was about the use of the omniscient narrator, and whether it was something a fiction writer could do and not put off an agent or a publisher. (Like a lot of questions about writing, those who know will always say don’t do it – unless you can get away with it.)

As the discussion went along, one participant appealed to Stephen King, citing his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. That wasn’t so unusual in and of itself. But as soon as that comment was made, several others added their citations to King’s work. It was clear that King was seen as a significant authority on the subject.

A few days later, someone posted a short article on a blog about Christian fiction that asked what books on writing would readers recommend – and while there were the standard references to Strunk & White’s Elements of Style and a couple to Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, there are far, far more to Stephen King’s On Writing. (My own favorite books on writing are John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction and Mario Vargas Llosa’s Letters to a Young Novelist.)

My own knowledge of King is limited mostly to his early works. The first novel of his that read was Salem’s Lot, and then I read Carrie, The Shining and The Stand. Of those I’ve read, I liked The Shining the best, and I still have vivid memories of one of the main characters driving up a mountain (in a big Cadillac, I think) in a fierce Colorado snowstorm.

He’s published a lot of books since then, and On Writing came out in 2000. It’s not exclusively a “how to write” book, but more of a combined personal memoir, writing manual, and how he recovered from serious injuries after being struck by an automobile while walking.

What is it about Stephen King in general and his On Writing in particular that makes him (and it) so appealing to Christian novelists and writers? And this appeal is broader than only to the writers of Christian horror, suspense and supernatural, a genre that’s developed only in recent years and by many writers who were directly influenced by King.

One is obvious. King is a terrific writer and storyteller. He’s a master of suspense, and even if you’re not interested in writing a suspense novel, there’s much to be learned from how he constructs his novels and stories in general and suspense scenes in particular. In other words, we can appreciate his writing for the same reasons anyone can appreciate his writing.

Second, despite the horror aspects of many of his works, his stories are “clean” – you don’t find gratuitous or obligatory sex thrown into the stories like you find is so much contemporary writing. (Not long ago, I read a buy-in-the-supermarket romance novel to see what it was like, not only were the “adult” scenes written really badly, the entire novel was written badly.) (Several weeks later, it showed up on the New York Times’ paperback bestseller list, so what do I know?)

A third aspect to King’s appeal is how accessible his writing is for Christians, even with all the blood, gore, plague, ghosts, stalkers and vampires (or perhaps because of them). His writing, as varied as it is, hews to the basic story format – setting, conflict, climax and resolution. This is a format, a structure, that is familiar to us from the story of the Bible overall and the story of Christ. One can’t call King a “Christian author” is the sense that the Christian Booksellers Association would use that term, but his stories are structured like “the story” we know and his themes – good vs. evil, redemption, and the darkness within each of us – are the themes we’re intimately familiar with.

They’re the story and the themes of The Book.

Photograph by Carl Cerstrand via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Making the Time for Writing – and Honoring It

May 4, 2018 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Ann Kroeker and Charity Craig ask this question: To what extant have you arranged your space and time to honor your writing?

I joke with my wife that only three poets in the United States make a living from writing poetry, and two of them are Billy Collins.

Expanding from poetry to writing in general, how many novelists actually support themselves by strictly writing? Likely more than you find in poetry, but it’s equally likely that the number can be counted – it’s not huge. James Patterson. Stephen King. Some romance writers.

The number is finite and knowable.

For the rest of us, we likely write whenever we can cram in a minute or 30 minutes or an hour. I write whenever I find a moment to write.

My first novel, Dancing Priest, spent the first four years of its existence as a story idea inside my head. Initially, I never intended to write it down. It started with a song I heard, and the image of a priest dancing on a beach. I developed the story as a mental narrative and delved deeper into it once I started biking. A number of scenes in the novel were created and elaborated while I rode the 10 miles (20-miles round trip) of Grant’s Trail in St. Louis.

I was also doing a lot of traveling, including a regular monthly trip (sometimes more frequently) to Alabama. Airline flights and nights in hotel rooms afforded the time for writing. Two hotels in Oxford, Alabama, provided the physical space for the writing of Dancing Priest from 2004 to 2007, the mental and physical narratives overlapping during this time.

I started writing the story down in the fall of 2005. Hurricane Katrina and getting my mother and aunt out of New Orleans had something to do with it. Perhaps it was seeing the destruction of the place I was born and grew up. Whatever it was, it was Katrina that spurred me to start writing the story down.

I immediately discovered that thinking a story in my head was infinitely easier than writing it down. The mental narrative included images – what the characters looked like, the settings, even the weather. The written narrative had to account for these things in words. The time required multiplied exponentially.

So, I crammed it in whenever and wherever I could – early mornings, late nights, and trips. There was no set time, because I was also a husband, a father (and soon a grandfather), a church deacon, an editor, an occasional freelancer – and I had a full-time job that, like most jobs, is something more than full-time.

To answer Ann’s and Charity’s question, I have no regular time to write. I have only what becomes available, or what time I can make available. Through 2015, that “schedule” allowed the creation of two published novels (Dancing Priest and its sequel, A Light Shining), the non-fiction book Poetry at Work, this blog, a weekly column at Tweetspeak Poetry, and occasional articles for other online sites.

In the late spring of 2015, the time available changed radically – I retired from the day job. With all the supposed free time, it took three years to write the third novel, Dancing King. Perhaps I did better with a demanding schedule.

But there’s a second consideration to that question asked by Ann and Charity – the idea of honoring your writing.

I could come up with a longwinded answer, but I believe it’s tied to the time devoted to writing – I honor my writing by making the time for it.

I’ll ask you the same question – how do you find the time to write, and how do you honor your writing?

Photograph by Jordan McQueen via Unsplash. Used with permission.

I Know My Platform Holds at Least 2 or 3 People

April 27, 2018 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

The year 2013 was not the easiest for me or my family.

My mother had to be moved from her home of 58 years to a retirement home, which meant the “breaking up” of her house and the breaking up of where her three sons had spent most of their formative years.

Work, normally a state a barely controlled chaos, dropped the “barely controlled” and went through severe regime change and was rather suddenly “under new management.” Work demands on my time escalated, and sharply.

I was trying to get a book manuscript completed (what was eventually published as Poetry at Work) and I know I was driving the editor frantic (on a good day) and off the cliff (on a bad day) as we struggled, or I struggled, to get it done. I was also trying to promote my second novel, A Light Shining, published right at the end of 2012. That was three books published in two years.

I wasn’t thinking a lot about marketing and promotion.

I don’t have a household name. I don’t have three million people following me on Twitter, or hundreds of thousands of likes on Facebook or Google+. I’m not on the public speaking circuit.

To use the word that is the Holy Grail of agents and publishers everywhere, I don’t have a platform. Or if I do, my platform is barely big enough to hold me and two or three friends.

Publishers like authors with a pre-existing platform – it helps guarantee sales, and publishers like to make money. That’s how they stay in business. It makes perfectly good business sense for a publisher to contract with, say, Justin Bieber, rather than a more literary author. (It also provides an interesting commentary on the state of American culture, but that’s another story.)

For an author, it’s only marginally easier if you write non-fiction rather than fiction. Self-help has been a major publishing category for much of the last 100 years. If you have a method or a formula that will seemingly help lots of people do something they want to do – get hired, lose weight, deal with difficult relatives, conquer depression – then you have a pre-existing platform and audience. And the publisher may help you find it.

But you, the author, have to work at it. I know the writer’s mantra – “I’m a writer not a marketer” and “I’m an introvert not a gifted public speaker” (been there, done that) – but the fact is that self-promotion of what you write isn’t a luxury. Even the best and biggest publishers won’t do that for you, unless your name is Jan Karon, Max Lucado or Karen Kingsbury in Christian publishing or Stephen King and James Patterson in general publishing.

So, what about the rest of us?

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Ann Kroeker (co-author with Charity Craig) has something simple yet profound to say about this, and based on her own experience: “Promotion and marketing – whether speaking, radio interviews, social media interaction – are best positioned as an extension of the original book (or story or poem) a writer felt compelled to write down and submit for broader distribution.”

In other words, the promotion and marketing you do for your writing is simply an extension of the story you’ve already written.

I stumbled partially (and rather marginally) into this with A Light Shining. To help promote the book, I interviewed the two lead characters as if they were real people (and for me, they had indeed become real people). While this didn’t result in a massive increase in sales (in fact, I’m not sure if it increased sales at all), it’s this kind of approach – understanding that your story doesn’t stop at the end of the book – that will lead you in the direction of creating and building a “platform.”

And this, too: your reading audience isn’t going to magically find you. You have to find the audience.

Unfortunately, that takes work, work that isn’t strictly writing. Seeing is as an extension of your writing, part of the same creative process, will help.

Photograph by Paola Chaaya via Unsplash. Used with permission.

writing

Footer

Meet the Man