When I write creatively, I usually have a specific goal in mind, like giving my students an example for an upcoming assignment, passing along advice to parents or, when I’m really lucky, working on my latest manuscript.
But this summer I got the chance to take a break from all that and write for the sake of writing. My best friend and I have this tradition of giving artistic gifts for each other’s birthday. This year, since he reached a particular milestone, I decided to write him a short story. What began as a break from composing my latest manuscript turned into a published short-fiction title, complete with an ISBN and original cover art. And since this project started out as a gift, I plan to keep the spirit of giving alive by donating the proceeds to charity. The story of Canada Jones and the Legend of the True Cross is a fun little tale as much about our friendship as it is about searching for lost treasure. Like with any project, I did my research to make it as real as possible. But in the end, this project was about something that often gets lost in endless cycle of writing, editing, pitching and marketing your work over and over. It’s like when I first picked up a pen in junior high to tell the simple story of a noir Private Eye from St. Louis. I was concerned about one thing back then: having a little fun. It was nice to feel that way again.
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A popular trend these days is binge-watching TV shows. Back when the medium was invented, you had to wait a whole week or even an entire summer to see the latest episode of your favorite show. Today, with DVDs and streaming video, you can sit for hours on end and become totally immersed in your favorite fictional universe.
While we don’t use our streaming video to its fullest, my wife and I have 3-4 TV series on DVD and tend to cycle through them when a new season comes out. The most intense experience we ever had was when we watched all of 24 in one summer. It was the definition of obsession. For better or worse, my writing career has been defined by such binges. I greatly admire how NoNoWriMo encourages more people to write the book they've always wanted to, but there are some downsides to this race-to-the-deadline approach. I learned how to write quickly when I was in college and worked as a reporter. These skills have been helpful as I typically have only the summer to write anything longer than a blog post or short story. Over the last 17 years, I have written 4 manuscripts during the few summers when I wasn’t working or teaching. While I have streamlined the process with better outlining, my basic procedure remains the same: I sit down in the morning and write until I hit my word goal, which is usually 2,000 words. Some days I am under, while other days (especially toward the end) I have written up to 5,000 words in a day. This summer I wrote more than 60,000 words in seven weeks, with days off here and there to actually get outside and enjoy other humans. While this was an immensely rewarding experience, I am not planning to repeat the process if I can at all avoid it. I imagine it’s like being on a movie set for weeks on end and you are in every scene. It becomes all-consuming. I’m not going to lie and say I wrote every minute of every day. Sometimes my “research” time was spent discovering what my friends were saying about each other on Facebook. Today, I have a completed manuscript, along with several notes for changes I need to make. I also have gained a few extra pounds and my tailbone really isn’t my best friend these days. We won’t even talk about what may or may not have happened to my vision during this process. I spent most of my waking hours thinking about my story and, while I’m told things happened in the world this summer, the time has passed by in a blur. All in all, although I love writing, there has to be some happy medium between writing for an hour a day and devoting every hour you can to the process. When you figure out what it is, would you please let me know? "He was letting you break your icons one by one. He was letting you reduce him to the status of a human being." — Uncle Jack Finch in Go Set a Watchman As a child, we have our heroes. Whether they are on the TV or movie screen or a bit closer to home, these deities are set apart from mortal men and women. For many, those heroes are our parents or other adults in our lives. We revel in their positive character traits and are blinded to their foibles. They can do little, if any, wrong. As we age, the veneer wears off and the faults that were always there readily appear. Sometimes the flaws are minor and common to the lot of humanity. At other points, they are so significant that learning of them rocks us to our very core. Such is the case with Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman. Many Americans were raised on Lee's first book, To Kill a Mockingbird, which has been taught to teens for decades. I know it a bit better than most because I teach it every year in my freshman English classes. One of the key themes we highlight is the concept of Atticus Finch as ideal father. He always has sage advice, protects his children from harm and defends the rights of the oppressed against their oppressors. Even when he knows he won't win a case that is clearly stacked against his African American defendant, Atticus still fights the good fight because that's what good people do. His daughter, Scout, remains proud of him even when Tom Robinson loses in court and eventually his own life. At times, Atticus Finch seems like a fabled knight on a one-man crusade. Well, that myth in dashed in Watchman. It's 20 years later and Scout is no longer a child, having abandoned more than just her childhood nickname. Jean Louise smokes, has no problem kissing boys or cussing and has lived it up a bit in New York City. On a pilgrimage home to see her arthritic father in still mostly rural Macomb, Alabama, she learns things about him that shatter her perception of Atticus Finch, defender of the defenseless. The storyline aside, there are some technical glitches in the meta-narrative that connects the two stories. Clearly the idea of the Tom Robinson case was firm in Lee's mind when she wrote Watchman, but there are differences between the cases in the two books that will set the teeth of loyal Mockingbird readers on edge. I'm not a big fan of the third person narration, but it's a modified third person, since we really see the world from her point of view. Also, there is some repetition that a good editor would have pruned away. It's like when your favorite TV show has a guest writer and she strays from the accepted canon of the series. These issues aside, there's a reason her publishers told her to put Watchman aside and write a prequel. Mockingbird is a positive story of one man fighting against an unjust system. It has its complexities to be sure, but at its heart it is a fairy tale. Perhaps with the death and injustice it's more like a Grimm's Fairy Tale than a Disney fable, but morally muddled characters like Mayella Ewell and Walter Cunningham Sr. still pale in comparison to the virtuous Atticus Finch. In Watchman, however, Atticus has feet of clay. The moral purity Scout saw in him is peeled away, layer by layer, until we see his view of African Americans is much less enlightened than we previously thought and he has little desire to promote immediate societal change. His approach flies in the face of Dr. King's comments at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — "This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism." What's brilliant in this book, and what it should be remembered for, is the climatic scene between Jean Loiuse and Atticus. This is where his beliefs are laid bare, and the woman who once idolized her father completely loses faith in him. It would be easy for this moment to be orchestrated solely by Jean Louise herself, but the reader is blown away when Uncle Jack reveals Atticus had arranged the firewood and kindling for his own destruction and all she needed to do was strike the match. Jean Loiuse struggles, as do we, when we're forced to see Atticus as anything less than the perfect dad. "As she welcomed him to the human race, the stab of discovery made her tremble a little." Perhaps you were stung when you discovered your own father was just "a man with a man's heart and a man's failings…." Maybe you revered Atticus because the man who fathered you was bereft of the values and integrity imbued in this simple country lawyer. In the end, no matter how much our view of Atticus Finch may have been tarnished, Lee offers us a message of hope. She asserts, in a much less grandiose fashion that we had previously believed, that Atticus is fighting for what sees as good. And, in this era of using technology as a weapon to assail those who hold opposing viewpoints, Lee suggests through the words of Uncle Jack that we should always offer the counsel of a friend rather than the venom of an enemy. "[T]he time your friends need you is when they're wrong, Jean Louise. They don't need you when they're right." That's something Atticus Finch, and the rest of us, should all stand for. Being a child of the 80s, I am, at heart, a space buff. I poured over my kids’ science magazine detailing the Space Shuttle's specifications. I was devastated when Challenger exploded in 1986 and Columbia did as well in 2003. Then when Atlantis landed for the final time in July 2011, I was saddened we had lost something as a country. Our collective drive to discover, I suppose.
Although the Apollo 13 failed lunar mission took place before I was born, I watched with fascination many years later the Ron Howard film of the same name. I knew from history that the crew lived, but I was riveted to the screen as astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise scrambled to cannibalize their supplies in order to limp back safely to earth. They realized they had to give up on their dream so they could live to fly another day. As a writer, I have discovered that the writing, pitching, publication and sales of each book seem almost as complex as a space mission. There are so many items on the checklist and if any of them go wrong, the entire project can crash and burn. For full-time writers, such failure might mean less food on the dinner table. Thankfully, that’s not the case with me. On a recent book project, I realized I had to jettison my plans and disassemble the component parts. The manuscript, which was written as much from my heart as my imagination, was good but not good enough. I was passionate about the tale, but those I trust broke the news to me it wasn’t as well crafted as I thought. After the first person told me this, I dug in my heels and refused to listen to the sage advice for months on end. It took some deep reflection, insight received at a recent writers conference and the counsel of another close adviser before I knew for sure the project needed to be shelved. Now, all is not lost. Parts of the book may find their way into future projects. They will need to be re-tooled to be sure, but like Lovell, Swigert and Haise, I am not willing to lose sight of the greater mission. Being a writer has never been just a passing fancy for me, so I won't end my career because of one shipwreck. I’m taking what I can from the experience and moving on. One of the space-related groups I was part of as a teen had the following motto: ad astra per ardua (to the stars, with effort). With a little effort, I am hoping to soar to reach my own stars. When I was a reporter, I came into the office every day knowing I had a hole in the paper to fill with a story that was fresh and engaging. While I often planned out what I was working on days in advance and, of course, followed up on stories deserving additional attention, much of what I wrote was expected to be new.
As an author, I find myself falling into the same mindset. After writing Chasing Deception, I moved on to the next project. I may have done so in part because after 15 years from first draft to published book, I knew the story so well I didn’t think there was any more tale to tell. Jim Mitchell, Melissa Jenkins and Jeremiah Harmon had become so familiar to me that when they left it was like they were children who had grown up and were going away to college (well, not Jeremiah so much, but you have to read the book to understand why). But as children often tend to boomerang back home after a few years, so did these characters. People wanted more of Jim and Melissa and I began to wonder what I could give new and returning readers that would draw in and capture their attention. Ideas began to percolate and Undue Pressure, which is the working title for the sequel to Chasing Deception, started to take shape. As I sat down to launch the new manuscript, old fears began to nibble at my brain: What if I don’t have enough story to tell? What if I have misjudged my audience and they don’t want more of these characters? How much of the old story do I include in the new one? Despite these concerns, I dove into the narrative a couple weeks sooner than expected and things are going well so far. It’s weird to be back in the head of Jim Mitchell, almost like running into your best friend from high school a few years after graduation. While I worked on other projects, and taught enough to support my penchant for writing, I hadn’t spent time with the former reporter turned college professor. As I began writing, I saw that Jim Mitchell may be a little older and a touch wiser, but is driven by some of the same passions that have always moved him. I have returned to the scene of the action and, while some of the landscape is different, the players are the same. So, what will happen to our beloved characters this time around? Like me, you’ll have to wait and see. I was recently reading a novel that takes place partly in Southern California and was put off a bit by a couple of what I, as a native of the region, would consider mistakes. Well, through the magic of the Internet, I was able to contact the author, who shared with me his research of the area and that any issues I might have considered mistakes might be chalked up to artistic license. The reply was quite unexpected considering the fact we met once for a few moments more than a decade ago when he signed one of his books for me.
The more I have thought about this response, the more I can see the validity of his argument. I make a big deal about the geography in my work, but I most often write about fictional places based on real-life locations, so I can bend all kinds of rules. For those who write about real places, we are taking their word for it that they have done the requisite research. The challenge is that it becomes very easy to expect writers to tell great stories and get all the details right according to our exacting standards. I remember watching episodes of 24 when the series was based in Los Angeles and complaining the characters were getting from one part of the city to another way too quickly. Perhaps considering the fact that the fast-paced nature of the series required a little suspension of reality, I probably should give Jack Bauer a bit of a break, because at least one day a year, he did not eat, sleep or, as far as I could tell, ever use the bathroom. And, while authors often churn out 1-2 books a year, it is rather unfair for someone who is writing his fourth manuscript in 17 years this summer to judge a person who has to make a living by meeting tight deadlines. I know that some of my reporting as a journalist was at the surface level because I was up against a 5 p.m. deadline every day, so I suppose I should extend a bit of grace to others who do what they need to in order to meet the needs of their agents, editors, publishers and adoring readers. I suppose it all goes back to the first rule of writing: never let anything get in the way of telling a good story. The recent release of the mainstream, yet violent porn film Fifty Shades of Grey (let’s refrain from using the term erotic romance, shall we, because while it has the former in excess, film and cultural critics agree it does not contain the latter) has prompted a firestorm of controversy. One such entrant in this conversation is a Vox.com article that protests the poor quality of Christian films attempting to provide a counter-narrative to this societal trend.
In some areas, the author makes valid points about the challenges inherent in Christian films. In Old Fashioned, for example, the storytelling is stilted at times, as is the acting of the lead actor, who probably should have remained behind the camera. We both appreciate the efforts of his on-screen romantic partner and I gave a bit more grace to the side characters, who I thought helped overcome the weaknesses of the storyline. But let’s look a bit deeper at this movie that the author so easily dismisses. Here is where I offer the requisite spoiler alert. I agree that the rules Clay lives by are antiquated in our sleep-together, ask-questions-later culture, but his past as a producer of exploitative sex videos who has rejected the cheap “love” that society trumpets provides a powerful motivation for such extreme measures. In particular, I was drawn to the scene where Amber is walking down a hallway to go sleep with a man who lies to her in order to get her into bed. I found it refreshing that the hollowness of the scene mirrors what many people say they feel after hooking up with someone to temporarily assuage their aching hearts. I don’t know that Old Fashioned really is preaching to non-Christians in the way the article suggests. There is a clear message of conviction and redemption, but it is for Clay, the Christian, not Amber, the free spirit. His holier-than-thou attitude brings on the ridicule of his friends and family. He is the one who is flawed just as much as she is. It is clearly evocative of the maxim: “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.” I agree the marketing of the film clearly makes it look like Old Fashioned was made just to complete with Fifty Shades, which is unfortunate. To be fair, however, the nonreligious market often makes films that compete with each other, but take radically different approaches. Armageddon vs. Deep Impact is a key example of such. Fifty Shades is a big-budget Hollywood film, while Old Fashioned is a small-budget indie film, with the quirks and oddities that come with indie films. When we went to see Old Fashioned, it was showing right next door to Fifty Shades and, while the Vox article might call it a knock-off, I would say it is an alternative that presents a different view on the topic of love. Thankfully for both audiences, the theater walls were well insulated. But all of this is prelude to the larger argument, which is this: if Christians were more willing to use the medium well, Hollywood would be more receptive to their movies. Oh, please. The author of the Vox article is right that the storyline of the Bible is rife with tales waiting to be told well with modern special effects, but he is seriously delusional if he thinks such projects are going to be greenlit any time soon. Sure, you can look to Noah and Exodus, but those films were so concerned with visuals over story that they lost money, at least domestically. The Passion of the Christ was one of the boldest ventures into this arena and critics complained it was too violent. Too violent. In Hollywood. Yeah, OK… You can have children’s films like the Narnia series or Prince of Egypt that are allegorical or historically religious, respectively, and African Americans are allowed to celebrate their faith with genuine passion, but if these are the only two groups who are permitted to express a vibrant faith, then Hollywood is no better than Rudyard Kipling in his ode to ethnic paternalism: “White Man’s Burden”. And while the author suggests Hollywood would accept films about chastity, the only examples that come to mind are ones that mock purity rather than embrace it (i.e. The 40-Year-Old Virgin). Now there are exceptions to these rules, but they are few and far between. You had 7th Heaven in the ’90s and The Blind Side in 2009, but finding other shows or movies with positive Christian characters is rather hard. Stephen King seems to enjoy using religious leaders as villains and others employ them for comic relief. In contrast, Aaron Sorkin for the most part has been willing to write Christians as people trying to live out their lives in a complex world. And like in real life, some are good, while others are not. Some would argue there are no good Christian movies because, apart from the Bible, there is no source material. This claim is just ludicrous. While novels with Christian themes do not enjoy the same level of success as ones without, these authors do sell millions of books and are not strangers to the New York Times Best Sellers List. Two storylines that were able to make it to the screen are the Left Behind novels and the 2014 reboot inspired by the LaHaye and Jenkins series and Janette Oke’s Love Comes Softly series that was made into a string of TV movies. But the following seven faith-focused authors: Davis Bunn, Ted Dekker, Alton Gansky, Dee Henderson, Angela Hunt, Jan Karon and Lauraine Snelling, most of whom have multiple kudos and have sold in excess of a million copies of their books, have only four film credits to their name despite having written at least 100 novels collectively. If Hollywood depended on such a small handful of authors to make their mainstream films, theaters would be empty most weekends. And when Hollywood does get a hold of a great story with strong Christian themes, such as The Vow, it performs literary liposuction, sucking out the faith that fueled the endurance of the real-life couple. The resulting product is a less-than-satisfying, date-night movie that does little to please the built-in audience from which it was borrowed. While they are not perfect, indie films with Christian themes like Do You Believe, God’s Not Dead, Grace Unplugged, Old Fashioned and Turnaround Jake, are trying to express the ideas of faith and grace, redemption and forgiveness outside the Hollywood structure that claims to enjoy diversity, but its attempts at such inclusiveness are, to borrow a line from the Vox author, “so painfully bad”. And what motivation is there for actors, writers and directors to want to make big-budget, faith-friendly films when they know Hollywood’s track record for supporting such ventures is woefully lacking? If Hollywood executives were smart, they would seriously court the faithful they way they market to groups like young adults, by buying well-told stories, paying for good actors, directors and film crews and promoting said films with at least a healthy portion of the energy they do these other releases. There are good faith-driven stories out there waiting to be shared with a larger audience that would happily pay to see them, if only Hollywood would wise up and produce them. As a storyteller, I’m always looking for a good tale. When I’m on vacation, for example, I tend to sacrifice a few hours on TV shows not normally programmed to record on my DVR. Recently, I tuned in to Revelation: The End of Days on the History Channel.
While the cinema verité nature of the pseudo-documentary makes it feel like a cross between The Blair Witch Project and Left Behind, I like the boldness of the film. The movie may take some liberties with the narrative, but when you're dealing with prophesy, you quickly learns it’s all about interpretation. Having read and watched a great deal of apocalyptic literature, particularity from a religious perspective, I am used to a certain quality and unfortunately, it’s not always very good. More concerned with giving a sermon than telling a story, these pieces typically have characters spout Bible verses with a purity and näiveté that seems unrealistic to the average reader or viewer. Although I am thankful the storytelling in this genre is improving, it has taken some time for the Christian community to accept tales that haven’t been sanitized for its protection. Which brings me back to Revelation, a film I thought was quite well done in one regard: the characters seemed authentic. They often were filled with doubt about the reason behind their circumstances and used language you probably won’t hear from a pulpit anytime soon. They were, in a word, real. They were like normal people living through extraordinary events. Whether or not you believe in the claims of the Bible, you have to respect Revelation from a storytelling point of view. The Bible tells a good, and often dirty, tale. For a movement that frowns on sex and violence, there sure is a lot of it in the pages of Scripture. While the Christians don’t have to like the bad behavior described in the Bible, the reason people connect with this story is because they can relate to it. They may not have committed murder, theft or adultery, but they probably have thought about it once or twice. Having the courage to telling stories like this, warts and all, is what will take the telling of Christian tales from the wings to center stage. You can leave the job to those who don’t respect the source material, but when that happens, you get films like Noah and Exodus, which look good but have been lambasted because they took turns from the original narrative. Wouldn’t it be better if Christians told these stories rather than leave them to others? In the Lewis classic, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Mr. Beaver says Aslan, who is a classic messianic figure, “is not a tame lion”. If you consider that story as an allegory of the Passion of Jesus Christ, as many do, and that the rest of the stories in The Good Book aren’t very tame either, then to clean them up is not being honest to the original material. When you mess with one part of a story, then people are less likely to believe the rest of it. And that defeats the entire purpose of telling this particular tale, doesn’t it? One thing I have learned as an author is that once you have drawn readers into your type of storytelling, they are hungry for more. There is a reason John Grisham uses the same structure in most of his novels: it sells really, really well.
But sometimes as a writer you want to explore a new type of story or different genre altogether. The fear, of course, is that people won’t join you on this journey. I have a manuscript in the works that is a significant departure from my first book and I am pondering how to market the project. I even briefly thought of using a nom de plume to separate it from the sequel I also am planning to Chasing Deception. Speaking of assumed identities, one of my favorite authors who I had a chance to meet at a writers conference a decade ago, has written a new mythic fiction book under a pen name. Revell recently sent me a complimentary, advance copy of this book, Emissary by Thomas Locke, in exchange for an honest evaluation of its merits. While I normally don’t write book reviews on my blog, I thought I would make an exception here because I admire how this award-winning author bravely is striking out in a new direction with this work, thus encouraging me to do the same. Locke was wise to publish this title under a different name, as it is a departure from what people expect from him. His other works are distinctly Christian in nature and Emissary, while not anti-Christian, stays true to the mythic fiction genre in a way that might make his regular readers uncomfortable. In particular, there are mages who use spells to battle evil forces. While this might upset some in his traditional audience, he would not be true to the body of literature he is joining if he ignored such elements. Having said that, I must note Emissary is quite well structured, blending character development and conflict to engage the reader throughout the tale. The work is reminiscent of Stephen Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle in that it embraces the mythic fiction genre but avoids some of its darker elements. You may have the use of magic, but the force is more of a weapon against evil than a blueprint for the reader channeling such powers for his or her own use. There are battle sequences and a romantic subplot, but Locke refrains from the graphic narrative techniques so popular today. Game of Thrones, it is not. In Emissary, Locke reinvents himself, writing in a grand style evocative of his earlier work. He takes us to a new land resplendent in rich detail and introduces us to flawed heroes driven to impact the world around them in a powerful and dynamic fashion. Locke dives deep into the world of mythic storytelling, creating compelling characters readers would follow on a grand quest to fight the forces of evil. Sign me up for the next adventure! If you’re like me, you probably have a favorite author or collection of authors you like to read. Right now I am in the middle of a series about time travel written in a style that reminds me a bit of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. This author is well known for his mythic fiction, so this series is something different. As an established author, I imagine it was easy to sell this concept to his agent and publisher, since they both know people will pick up his work based on name recognition alone.
For those of us who are not “internationally acclaimed” authors, we have a harder time when we switch gears in our writing. This summer I was planning to write the sequel to my first novel. I had done some research and even worked out a secondary plot line with a book editor. But then I was inspired to write a practical non-fiction title that has received some early positive feedback but has put me on the hunt for a new agent because this work isn’t in his area of expertise. I am having to rebrand myself a bit and counting on the same people to buy my second book is much less of a sure thing. The real problem comes when you start talking about my third book. Several years ago I wrote a short story that scared me so much I shoved it in a drawer for a year. It was creative, but it touched on themes that were surprising to say the least. After a writers’ conference where the keynote speaker talked about “going to the dark places” and being willing to pull our inspiration from such journeys, I retrieved the story and made it the foundation for another novel. The initial response for the piece was not as positive as was my first book, so I put it away again. I am taking it out a third time and passing it around to a couple of friends to see if these initial impressions were right or if I need to try harder to revise and sell this project. The biggest worry I have is one of creating a consistent reader base. People who liked my first book want a sequel, which I plan to write next summer. But will these same people buy a book that is a bit experimental in both form and content? Will an agent who knows what I have written before want to take a chance on something different? Since my first work was self-published, will a traditional house be willing to make the same “gamble”, especially considering how risk-adverse the industry has become? I don’t think publishing is a charitable pursuit, nor do I think authors should blithely ignore the conventions of branding and marketing, but if writing comes from the soul, then sometimes we need to open rooms others would leave closed and compel readers to take a look inside. For what is hidden in the secret places often reveals who we are or who we may become. Wanna peak? I’m hoping you do. |
AuthorI've been writing stories and taking photos since I was old enough to hold a pencil and stand behind a tripod. Archives
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