Author and Novelist Glynn Young
Over this past weekend, I had a discussion with poet, editor, and novelist Mary Harwell Sayler about perspectives when one is writing a novel. Mary writes character-driven novels; I write story-driven novels. The two perspectives aren’t mutually exclusive, but they are different.
Mary has a post today at her blog, summarizing our discussion. Take a look and join the discussion.
It’s the fall of 1985. I’m sitting in a classroom at Washington University in St. Louis, participating in a seminar for my master’s degree. This particular seminar is simply entitled “The Nature of Story.”
Of all the novels on the syllabus, the only one I’ve previously read is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The syllabus includes The Sound of the Fury by William Faulkner, A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean, and about eight other novels. As it so happens, the first novel we’re reading for the course is One Hundred Years of Solitude. I first read it in college when it was relatively new and all the rage, about the same time as The Lord of the Rings. I’ve dutifully read it again, and it’s a completely different experience from my first reading. This time, it almost seems like personal history.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.
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.
I follow quite a few writers on Facebook and Twitter, and I read their blog posts and articles. If a consistent theme exists in all of what writers, and especially Christian writers, say about themselves, it’s that they’re called to write. Christians writers say they’re called by God; others might refer to a muse, an urge, a belief, a feeling.
That theme of calling leaves writers like me in something of a quandary, much like the Christians who accepted faith as a child and can’t remember the exact day, time, and circumstance. I remember the exact time and place of my acceptance of faith – Jan. 26, 1973, about 8:30 p.m. in the basement of a lecture hall building at LSU. But to identify when I became a writer, or why, is not possible for me – it’s buried so far back in the mists of childhood as to be unknowable.
I read early and read often. The first book I remember buying on my own was Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion, spending 59 cents at the local dime store. I was 7. My reading habit was reinforced by the Scholastic Book Club at school and indulged by parents who encouraged reading. One of the earliest memories of my mother was her reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales to me when I as two or three; I still have the book.
But many children and adults enjoy reading without becoming writers. Reading alone can’t explain it.
To continue reading, please see my post at Christian Poets & Writers.
Top photograph by Ben White via Unsplash. Used with permission.
I’ve been writing a fiction series. Two books have been published, and publication of the thid, Dancing King, is imminent. The fourth has been sitting in manuscript form, some 70,000 words, for quite some time. There was too big of a story gap between No. 2 and No. 4, so I couldn’t simply skip the third manuscript and cover it with some narrative filler or explanation in the fourth. The gap demanded a complete novel.
Ideas weren’t the problem; my brain was seething with them. Neither were plot developments, new characters, and new conflicts. Perhaps I had too many possibilities.
The problem was how to tie it all together.
I tried several approaches, and not one worked, or worked well. The more I floundered with manuscript No. 3, the louder the No. 4 manuscript became, like a siren song enticing me into its pages.
I was getting nowhere. It wasn’t writer’s block as much as it was narrative frustration. I’d stare at the computer screen, try writing some words, and sometimes write more than 1,000 words before I’d throw up my hands in disgust. This isn’t working, I thought. Over and over again.
I knew what my frustration was – that fourth manuscript. It would be so easy, with it just sitting there and waiting, for me to turn my back on No. 3. But a voice inside my head told me that would be a mistake, because I would be spending an enormous amount of effort combining No. 3 into No. 4, or fixing No. 4 to account for No. 3. Too much would have to be explained. No. 4 made sense only because there was No. 3.
Then I went for a long walk. It was a cold, sunny day in early spring. I left my house and walked my usual twice-a-week walk of about three miles. Somewhere in that first mile, I heard one of the characters speak, and his heart was almost breaking.
At the very beginning of the story, this character is watching the hero leave his home. He’s leaving with him because he’s working with him. The hero’s family is leaving as well. Life has profoundly changed. And this character begins to tell the story.
I had my way out of my writing morass. An unexpected narrator.
For the next two miles of my walk, the pieces began to click into place. I couldn’t believe how I had been missing what was now so obvious.
When I got home, I began to write, or actually, rewrite, everything I had up to that point. I turned the manuscript on its head. A villain emerged. So did new characters and sub-plots. A couple of other narrators, including the villain, began to speak. New scenes arose, scenes that took the hero into new directions that fit the story arc. While the story still went from the A to the Z I had originally envisioned, just about everything from B to Y changed, and changed dramatically.
Novel No. 3 was no longer a transition book, almost my narrative orphan. It had become its own story, and could stand on its own if it had to.
And it had become my personal favorite book in the series.
Top photograph: Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace by Thomas Kelley via Unsplash.
So where did A Light Shining, the sequel to Dancing Priest, come from?
It was part of the original manuscript. The 82,000-word novel was originally joined to the 93,000-word novel that became Dancing Priest. Yes, that’s a total of 175,000 words, not including the original 5,000-word introduction and the 11,000-word “wedding scene’ (it was more than the wedding) that were both dropped, and the 50,000-word section that followed the conclusion of what is now A Light Shining.
Doing the math: 241,000 words, give or take a few hundred.
Long before a publisher ever showed up, even I knew that was way too long for a novel.
I looked at the one I was to read, and realized from the first sentence that it was not just bad, but spectacularly bad. It had ghosts and other creatures (but no vampires), and the writing was just bad. Including the misspellings and grammar mistakes. A dilemma: I was holding someone’s hopes and dreams and hard work, and I could read it like it was written or I could do something else. I did something else. I put my speechwriting skills to work and essentially performed it like a speech, correctly the grammar mistakes as I went along (no one else but the writer and the agent would ever know). After the session, the writer told me that “you spoke it better than I wrote it.”
After the writer next to me read my manuscript, there was a kind of pause, and then the agent said, “I don’t handle your genre. If I did, I’d sign you right now.”
That was sufficient inspiration for the next two years.
I came back from the conference and divided the manuscript. “Dancing Priest 1” eventually became the published novel, Dancing Priest. “Dancing Priest 2” became the core of what is now A Light Shining. The last 50,000 words became what is now entitled “Dancing Priest 3” – a rather raw and unfocused manuscript with a directional outline of what it is about.
Dancing Priest was rewritten and edited at least a dozen times. The interesting thing was that I didn’t think it would ever be published, but I kept editing and rewriting.
In 2010, a guy I knew in St. Louis who had set up a small publishing firm said he had heard I have a fiction manuscript, and could he read it?
I said no. By this time, I think I’d convinced myself it wouldn’t be published.
But he kept after me, and one day in 2011 I surprised us both and said yes, let’s do it. So we did.
I edited the second manuscript, and gave it to him. He sent me a contract.
But that’s when things got complicated.
So I had a contract, The manuscript was in the hands of both a reader and the editor. Early reactions seemed positive.
Then the reports came back.
Suggestions for wholesale cuts.
Too much focus in the first section on “the warehouse kids.”
Too much focus in the second section on, well, just about everything in the second section.
The suspense ended too far from the end of the manuscript.
The whole last section could be cut.
I set the whole thing aside. That I hadn’t signed the contract I saw as a good thing, because if I accepted the suggestions, what would be left was a longish novella.
For the next two months, I came to accept the fact that A Light Shining wasn’t going to be published. I was discouraged, tense, irritable, and upset.
The one thing that stayed in my head was the suggestion by the editor for a new character, to help carry the suspense through to the end of the story. In August, I wrote a new first chapter, and posted it at Faith, Fiction, Friends, essentially to test the reaction. The responses suggested I was on to something, although a few people said they were rather “creeped out.” Which I took as a good thing – that was the whole intent.
It was at that point that I signed the publisher’s contract.
So, the new character was born. I started thinking about how to integrate him into the story. We went to London on vacation, and my laptop (and the manuscript) came with me. Getting away proved to be the best thing I could have done. I did spend some time working on the story in London, but not a lot. I spent more time reading the existing manuscript, deciding what to cut and what to add, and where to place my new character. I didn’t give him a name, because I wanted to come up with exactly the right one.
We returned from London, and the rewriting began in earnest. It was intense, and it happened within the space of a month. I slashed whole sections of the existing manuscript. I rewrote. I integrated. I rewrote what I had rewritten.
And then it was done. The new character still had no name. I fretted over it for a few days, and then realized he didn’t need one. In fact, the story worked better with my character remaining nameless. He had emerged as the major antagonist in the story – an antagonist that Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes don’t even know exists until it’s too late.
The manuscript was finished. I sent it to the publisher, who accepted it, making only minor changes.
It was a different book from the first manuscript. But it was a better book.
Top photograph: A sunset view of Florence, Italy, a setting for part of the narrative of A Light Shining.
An award-winning speechwriter and communications professional, Glynn Young is the author of six novels and the non-fiction book Poetry at Work.
