Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

writing

The Major Lesson of Five Decades of Writing

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Looking back at five decades of writing, I can say with certainty the major lesson I’ve learned. I was reminded of it while I was reading Writing Better Fiction by Harvey Stanbrough. This is about as no-nonsense, straightforward, this-is-how-it-is discussion of writing that I’ve ever come across. And most of it applies to non-fiction as well as fiction.

In other words, I recognize what he talks about. Fully recognize it.

The major lesson: Writers write, no matter what.

You may be sick. You may have 67 other priorities and pressing demands. You may stare dully at a blank page or screen without having a single thing to put down. You may hear the chorus of constant critics, including your own internal voices. You may watch others write something seemingly effortlessly and wonder why that never happens to you. Twice a day might be tempted to pack it all in and walk away, forever.

But it still comes down to this: writers write, no matter what.

I’d like to say it gets easier, and it does, in a sense. Like anything else, the more practiced you become, the better you get at it. What’s different about writing is that every article, every story, every poem, every novel, and every book is its own singular act of creation. Which means that, each time you write, you’re doing something altogether new.

I learned this lesson early, without realizing it. I was a reporter for my college newspaper, and I had a fair number of stories already under my belt, the result of a semester and a half of reporting. The story was the University Court deciding whether a candidate for student body president had violated the election rules. The session, held a few days before the election in a room in the student union, went late into the night. The editors were (impatiently) waiting for the story; they wanted to go home. It was a big story; the candidate was the favored winner.

The comment session ended; the court retired into deliberation. It was getting close to midnight. I found a pay phone nearby (no mobile phones in those days) and called the editor who said she hoped I had most of the story already written (this would have been by hand; no laptops in those days). The court returned and announced a non-decision. The candidate was outraged and demanded a yes-or-no answer. Back into deliberation they went. 

LSU’s newspaper some 13 years before my time

I sat in a chair in the meeting room, writing the story by hand. I guessed what they outcome was going to be, because it was clear that the candidate had indeed violated the rules. And then we all waited. For an hour. I kept tinkering and editing the story, knowing my editors were going nuts, because I still had to type the thing. 

Right at 12:30 a.m., the court read its decision. I’d guessed right. I waited just a moment for the explosion from the candidate (now former candidate) and then ran (I did not walk) the roughly three blocks to the Journalism building. I shouted the decision at the editor and sat down to type like a crazy person. I’d type two paragraphs, and she’d grab the page from the typewriter as I typed the next two paragraphs.

Somehow a coherent story emerged. Nobody said thanks, or good job, or good story, or anything else. I watched the editing and the finishing of the front-page layout. I was asked to check the headline for accuracy. And then it was rushed off to the back shop six blocks away for typesetting. I also had to indicate what could be cut if space was too tight. I got back to my fraternity house (where I was living) about 2 a.m., only to discover half a dozen people waiting for me to return, because they wanted to know what the outcome had been.

Under horrendous deadline and pressure conditions, the writer wrote. 

And it wouldn’t be the last time.

Top photograph by Nik Shuliahin via Unsplash. Used with permission.

When Your Characters Take Over the Story

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The title for this post is something of a “Well, duh” kind of title. For a story to work well, it’s the characters who have to take over and knock the author from his perch.

I’ve been reading Writing Better Fiction by Harvey Stanbrough, and he says that he almost called his book Writing Better Character-Driven Fiction, until he realized it was rather redundant. “All good fiction is character-driven,” he writes. He’s not big on outlines, plotting, character sketches, erecting signposts, or anything else that might smack of planning. Instead, he says, “like real life,” he says, “authentic fiction is not planned. Like real life, authentic fiction unfolds naturally.”

Stanbrough has an acronym for this – WITD, or “Writing into the Dark.”

As I’m reading this, I keep asking myself, is this how I write?

The answer is, yes, almost entirely.

I’ve written before about how a minor character became the heart of my fifth novel, Dancing Prince. He was supposed to stay in place. I thought I had a plan for the book in my head. But as I began to write, four-year-old Thomas kept sticking his head in where he was wanted or, I thought, needed. I finally relented and expanded his role a bit. That’s all the encouragement he needed. He took over. 

The book turned into a very different story from the one I’d originally intended. Good thing, too.

I’m currently in the thick of a new story. It’s a rewrite of an earlier manuscript that didn’t work. I’m not rereading the old manuscript as a guide. Instead, I’m letting the characters tell the story, and it’s becoming very different from that old manuscript.

But something similar to Dancing Prince has happened. A new character unexpectedly showed up. The main character is still the main character, but I was typing a scene where he’s leaving an apartment one morning. And for some unknown, crazy reason, this is what I typed next: “As he walked out the door, he saw a young man leaning against a motorcycle parked on the sidewalk.”

Where did that come from? I stared at the line. I read it out loud. I kept staring. And then I knew his name. I knew what he was doing. I knew what would happen next and how the entire story had just shifted. I set the characters free; they let me come along for the ride. Several complicated issues waiting for a solution suddenly were solved, because I let the characters solve them.

I said above that “writing into the dark” is almost entirely how I write. That qualifying phrase has to do with how a story forms in my head, long before (years in the case of Dancing Priest) before the first word lands on the computer screen. The stories I write essentially begin as short scenes in movies. I visualize them happening, slowly connecting the scenes until I can say a “whole story” has been visualized. 

But each scene in my head is character driven. And I mentally repeat each scene to watch what the characters do, and to see how the characters themselves change the scene. 

What’s clear is that I’m not the movie director. I may not even be the script writer. I think I’m more a technician standing in the shadows, assisting if needed, moving props around, painting a backdrop. 

But the characters are in charge.

Top photograph by Steven Houston via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Literary and Other Kinds of Fiction

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Wiseblood Books, which leans in the direction of being a Catholic publisher, has been issuing a series of novels and poetry collections that that interesting, thought-provoking, and broader than the idea of “Catholic publisher” might imply. Its novelists and poets include Dana Gioia, Marly Youmans, James Matthew Wilson, Samuel Hazo, Charles Hughes, Katy Carl, Sally Thomas, Glenn Arbery, R.R. Reno, and others.

What these writers have in common is that they write perceptively and unapologetically about faith, although it’s usually not that obvious. The fiction is serious, literary fiction; the poetry is just as serious, and just as literary. Both compare favorably to anything produced by mainstream, “secular” publishers. Wiseblood’s books aren’t out to score political points and tick the boxes of the latest social and cultural mania to seize the imaginations of what passes for America’s literary elites. 

Instead, they tell stories. They wrestle with what people wrestle with, including holding on to faith in a world growing more indifferent and more hostile.

I was reminded of this when I read a Wiseblood monograph, Christopher Beha: Novelist in a Postsecular World by Katy Carl. I’ve heard of Beha, a writer and novelist who served as editor of Harper’s Magazine from 2019 to 2023. He stepped down from the position for the best of reasons; he couldn’t balance his editorial duties with his writing.

Carl’s 32-page monograph explores Beha’s novels – The Whole Five Feet (2010), What Happened to Sophie Wilder(2012), Arts & Entertainments (2014), and The Index of Self-Destructive Acts (2020). And what she finds is that, in what describes as a “postsecular” world, raising the possibility of faith and belief is, well, okay. You can do it in serious fiction, and Beha does it very well, indeed. 

Carl is the editor in chief of Dappled Things Magazine. Her stories and articles have appeared in numerous literary publications, and she previously published the novel As Earth Without Water (2021) and a short story collection, Fragile Objects (2023). She was chosen as Wiseblood Books first writer in residence in 2020, and she is pursuing an MFA degree in creative writing at the University of St. Thomas in Houston., whose founding faculty were James Matthew Wilson and Joshua Hren.  

Katy Carl

Her essay on Beha’s novels repeatedly made me think about my own writing, and how I would describe it. I don’t write literary fiction. I can’t say I write “popular” fiction, or mass market fiction, either. When asked, I’ve said “contemporary fiction.” A few people have suggested “alternative history” or even “alternative future history.” More recently, it’s been historical fiction – no doubts about what to call a novel set during the Civil War and 1915. And now a new one is underway, and it’s definitely contemporary fiction. 

It may be a copout of sorts, but, setting labels aside, all authors have to write the story that’s asking to be written, because it’s a story that the author has to tell. 

I’ve gradually learned the importance of trusting my characters and writing like the writer Harvey Stanbrough describes – WITD, or “writing into the dark.” That means writing with no set outline but trusting your characters enough because they know what they’re doing. I learned that lesson with my last novel, Dancing Prince. One character refused to stay in the minor role I planned for him. I finally surrendered and gave him his head, and he took over. 

And it worked.

Related:

Fragile Objects: Short Stories by Katy Carl.

Wiseblood Books monographs.

Top photograph by Aman Upadhyay via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Why I Write” by George Orwell

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Why I Write is a small volume of four essays by George Orwell (1903-1950), the author of 1984, Animal Farm, and many other works. The essays include the title one, “Why I Write;” “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” “A Hanging;” and “Politics and the English Language.”

Orwell’s writing, and his understanding of it, reflected his political beliefs. He had a five-year stint with the Burma Division of the Indian Imperial Police, but eft with a medical certificate because his health was ruined, he dabbled in writing and a somewhat itinerant life and married, but then joined the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. That experience shaped the rest of his life, his politics, and the books and essays he wrote. He became a democratic socialist, but he was opposed to totalitarianism in all its form, both right and eft.

He identified four motives for writing, all of which are present in a writer but to varying degrees, depending upon the immediate context. The four are sheer egotism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. “Writing a book,” he wrote, “is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon who one can neither resist nor understand.”

George Orwell

“The Lion and the Unicorn,” the longest essay in the volume, is a meditation upon writing England, socialism, and how they all have mixed together. In its own way, it’s Orwell’s manifesto for a very specific kind of socialism.

“A Hanging” is one of Orwell’s best-known essays, a short account of the hanging of a prisoner in Burma. Orwell formed part of the police escort for the execution. “It is curious,” he says, “but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.” When the prisoner steps to avoid a puddle, he sees “the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.” The essay is not a direct discussion of writing, but it is an example of writing very well done.

The last essay, “Politics and the English Language,” is one with which I was familiar. Some 30 years ago, a new CEO at the company where I worked said that everyone in communications, and everyone in the company, in fact, should read this essay by Orwell. To my knowledge, I believe I was the only communications who did so. The previous CEO had had an inclination toward the writings of Winston Churchill and the novels of Charles Dickens. I was his speechwriter, and so I didn’t have much choice in the matter.

I read the Orwell essay. It’s about the decline of the practice of the English language in writing; Orwell saw it descending into a staleness of imagery and a lack of precision. He also identified the problems of dying metaphors; what he called “verbal false limbs,” or sentence padding; pretentious diction; and meaningless words. 

The former CEO, whether he wrote for himself or used what I’d written for him, was never guilty of any of that; he had run through half a dozen speechwriters and freelancers before me and booted them all until he was satisfied. The new CEO, however, the one who urged everyone to read the Orwell essay, spoke from notes and memory. 

It might have helped if he’d read it himself. 

Writing a Bibliography – for a Novel

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It’s been two weeks since I read a book about the Civil War, and it feels strange. My draft novel is done, at least for now. It’s not so much a novel about the Civil War as it is a novel of the Civil War.

If you grew up in the South, or even if you didn’t, what happened in the years 1861-1865 affected you, even when you didn’t know it. Both my maternal and paternal grandparents were children of Civil War veterans. They experienced the war in very different ways, both in the fighting and in civilian life. 

My mother’s grandparents were Franco-German immigrants who settled in New Orleans and descendants of the Acadians expelled from Canada after the French and Indian War who settled in what we called “the river parishes” – the stretch of territory along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The men generally fought for the Confederacy; after 1862, the women, children, and elderly men discovered life under Union occupation. 

My father’s grandparents experienced much the same. The men fought for the Confederacy; after the fall of Vicksburg in 1863, their families in southern Mississippi lived under sometimes loose, sometimes tight federal occupation. My great-grandfather Samuel Young was the only son in the family to survive the war.

Much like World War II affected the Baby Boom generation, the Civil War affected my grandparents’ generation. A terrible and collective experience of one generation would inevitably affect their children. Louisiana had the highest per capita income in the country in 1860; it had the lowest in 1865. Family members had died in the fighting; the social order was in chaos and upheaval. What happened to my ancestors was repeated millions of times in both the South and, in a different way, the North.

My history classes in middle school, high school, and college focused on broad themes about the war – like slavery, state rights, battles, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow Era, and the rise of the “Lost Cause.” When you write a novel rooted in the war, you discover that, while all of that is important, the broad themes don’t tell you much about how people lived, died, fought, and coped with the war. 

Vicksburg during the 1863 siege

I turned to reading and research – not only histories but also memoirs, newspaper accounts, sociological studies, photographic essays, fiction, and even poetry. I had to be selective, and so I focused on 1863 and post-war Mississippi, including Grierson’s Raid of April 1863; the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia in 1864; and the battles in April 1865 around Petersburg and Appomattox. But general histories were needed, too, and Bruce Catton’s The Army of the Potomac Trilogy and James MacPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom were among the readings as well.

Three books were particularly helpful: Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era by Frances Clark and Rebecca Jo Plant; Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina by Ernest Dollar; and Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox by Caroline Janney. Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches and Irene Hunt’s Across Five Aprils were two works of fiction backed by extensive historical research, and they were both an inspiration. But everything I read helped in at least a small way.

The bibliography includes 84 books and two web sites. They represent an infinitesimally tiny portion of what’s available to read about the Civil War.

It’s awe-inspiring to read what soldiers and civilians alike experienced, including some pretty horrible things. Tragedies abounded. The devastation, especially in the South, was extensive. Soldiers on both sides committed crimes against civilians.

And yet, people coped and went on. They found strength in community and faith. What they had known was gone forever, except in memory. 

Even if the novel never sees the light of day, this has been a humbling and rewarding experience.

Top photograph by Thomas Kelley via Unsplash. Used with permission.

What Happens When You Finally Type “The End”?

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It’s been more than two years since the writing began. It’s been more than four since the research started. A little over a month ago, on Jan. 16, I wrote this in my writing journal: “Reached 87,758 words. First draft completed.” Five days later, I wrote “First reread / editing completed.”

It was there I stopped, almost mentally and emotionally spent. I need to do the second edit, which for me is the most serious one. But I stopped, to catch my breath, reflect and take stock, and consider how the past two years of my life have been devoted to a story that is about 25 percent true and 75 percent fiction. Nd what I thought was mostly true mostly wasn’t.

I’ve published five novels and a non-fiction book. I’ve completed two novel manuscripts that have potential but need considerable reworking. I have at least five different novel ideas, and a dozen short stories, buzzing around my head. 

This story I just finished, this manuscript I’ve labored over, isn’t exactly a labor of love. It’s more a labor of sweat, the story I had to get done. 

To continue reading, please see me post today at the ACFW Blog.

Top photograph by Rui Silva sj via Unsplash. Used with permission.