Wizards and Minstrels

 

Back in the early 1980’s I was working for Kmart as an assistant manager but I wasn’t happy. I was looking for a way out and my dreams of being a writer came to the fore. I didn’t quit my job, but I signed up for a correspondence course in writing children’s literature. This is one of my first assignments, a short letter to introduce myself to my mentor.

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This, I think, is the hardest part of the assignment. What do I say about myself? I’m a young man of twenty-five who never decided what to do with his life but has lots of dreams. I am an assistant manager for Kmart by default; I had to do something for a living. My job certainly affects my life, but I like to think that it’s not all I am.

The dreams, I feel, are more important. I always wanted to write, and I always wanted to play guitar.

I learned to play guitar in the early seventies. As important as that is, I think I forgot to mention it in the Aptitude test. For a year I worked on my own, mastering basic chords and strumming patterns. Then I joined the folk group at our church. I stayed with them for nine years, until we moved to Columbia.

The music forever changed my life. It opened me up and brought me many new friends. It put me back in a speaking relationship with God and it introduced me to my wife.

The music I enjoy is the simple, folksy tunes by people like John Denver and Gordon Lightfoot.

The writing part of me stayed hidden for a long time. In high school I was introduced to fantasy through the works of J. R. R. Tolkien (who else?) and the Merlin trilogy by Mary Stewart. I knew then that I wanted to tell a story like that, a long story that would touch their imaginations. In secret I began fabricating my own world, my own story. I kept it hidden in a notebook and told no one about it. Until one day on a hike when I told the beginnings of the tale to Diane, who later became my wife. Since then the story outline has grown in length and complexity, and I’ve actually managed to write the first two chapters.

Writing came hard though. But when it came it was like a burst of lightning surging through me. I know that the ability is in there somewhere, I just can’t seem to tap into it consistently.

Then I saw a pamphlet on the Institute’s course. It awakened in me a desire to write for children. A child’s fantasy must be written with standards every bit as strict, if not more so, as adult fantasy. Mostly I hope that writing on a consistent basis will help me forge a link with the stories in my head.

I don’t think I explained that quite right, but I could ramble on all night and still not say exactly what I mean. I’ve tried to explain to Diane this drive to create. It shows in all my hobbies. I try to write songs and stories. I build model trains.

Well, now for just a quick wrap up of stock “who I am” stuff.

I was born in northern Kentucky in June of 1958. My family moved to Annandale, Virginia when I was five and I lived my life there until two months ago. I went to school there, worked there, got married there.

I went to college a couple of times and dropped out because I couldn’t decide what to major in. I never took a typing course. It shows, forgive me please, I’m learning.

This is the first thing I’ve ever written “in the typewriter”. Normally I write it out on paper first, but I thought I’d give this a try. Also, I’ve forgotten most of my high school grammar. Again, forgive me, and help me learn it again.

I hope this helps you get to know me. I’m looking forward to working with you over the next few years. Both Diane and I enjoyed your letters and I think I can learn quite a bit from you.

 

I Was Supposed to Have a Writing Process?

 I recently had my first book launch event, courtesy of the wonderful folks at Shepherd’s Scarborough Library. I read a bit from The Minstrel and the Prophet and then talked a little about how it came to be (much of which was in my last post). After that, I took questions from the people there. One of the students in attendance asked me about my writing process.

No one told me that I was supposed to have a process.

And I really didn’t have some formal process. I had no set time of day that I would dutifully sit down at my computer and write. Sometimes it would be days between writing sessions. Sometime more. Sometimes I’d write more than once a day. The demands of my day job cannot easily be set aside. There are only 15 weeks in a semester, and you simply can’t extend the work past that. Everything has to be done pretty much right now.

What I wrote wasn’t always material to forward the narrative. Sometimes it was a scrap of the history of my world. Sometimes it was (another) revision to the outline of the trilogy. Often, I just went back over previously written material to polish it.

I will, however, offer one tip, but before I do, I’ll say a bit about why I’m offering that tip.

I was lying in bed one night shortly after turning out the lights. I was thinking about book one and the perfect title came to me. It was absolutely brilliant, so amazing that I thought about getting up to write it down. But I was snug and comfortable, and the title felt so right, so perfect that I told myself that I’d surely remember it in the morning, and I let myself drift off to sleep.

That, of course, was a mistake.

As a psychologist, someone who studies human memory, I knew that the odds were that I wouldn’t remember something that came to me right before sleep like that.

All I remembered the next morning was that I’d thought of a perfect title, but I had no idea what it was.

So, my tip: if you think of something for your writing, write it down.

I started carrying a small blue notebook with me. It’s full of scraps of dialog, thoughts about things I needed to do, and some complete scenes. It was really handy to have around, and a great deal of good material would have been lost if I hadn’t had it with me.

Chronicles Origins - Part One

So, I recently self-published a fantasy novel.

Most of the people who know me now might reasonably ask, “Where did that come from?”

So, at least as early as high school, I was writing stories. In the fall of 1973 — the start of my sophomore year — I started keeping a journal and one of my first entries mentioned a short story I had written. Throughout my journal I mentioned short stories that I was writing. All the stories I wrote back then have been lost to time. Given what I wrote about them in my journal, that’s probably a good thing.

It was sometime in 1973 that my friend Dean introduced me to Tolkien. I read The Hobbit first, and then The Lord of the Rings. Something Tolkien wrote in the forward of The Fellowship of the Ring resonated deep within me. He wrote, “The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story…” When I read that, I knew that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to write my own story set in my own world.

The exact timing of things is a bit fuzzy now. I seem to remember getting my high school ring while I was reading The Lord of the Rings (maybe I was re-reading it). I am pretty sure that I was sick soon after I got my ring, and it was during that illness and under the influence of Tolkien that I saw in my mind a young man with a ring like mine leading a group of people out of a forest into a battle with a huge army of dark beings. As he stepped out of the tree line, the stone in his ring kindled into red flame…

That was my first glimpse of Lauren. He didn’t have a name then, and I had no idea who the bad guys were, but that was the beginning.

I never wrote about my desire to write a fantasy trilogy in my journal. It was on my mind a lot, though. By the end of the 1970’s, Lauren had a name, and I had conceived of a number of other characters. I also had a number of individual scenes that involved Lauren and one of the other characters interacting, but I had no idea how they all fit together. In the early 1980’s, I started trying to fit the puzzle pieces together. I drew a map of my “world” and developed names for some of the kingdoms. Out that came a draft of what are now chapters one through seven of The Minstrel and the Prophet. Then I stalled out because I was missing a couple of small details: believable characters and an actual plot. The characters I had — including Lauren — were all very one dimensional. I also had no idea who my antagonist was or what that person’s motivations were and without that, there was nothing to drive the story forward. In truth, there was no story, just the desire to tell one.

I never completely let go of my world, though. Lauren, Ryan, Peg, and Ambrose had taken up residence in my head. There were periods of time in which I didn’t think about them or their world, but I always returned to trying to work out a coherent, interesting story. I’d make a few notes and then return to real life…

That all changed in 2005. In one of those moments that I was thinking about my world and the story I wanted to tell, the origin story of the world came to me. With it came the identity and motivation of my antagonist. I also learned some things about the real world that shaped my ideas on evil and refined the character of my “bad guy.” It took a few years to work out an outline of the entire trilogy, but then I scanned in those typewritten pages and began editing the older material to fit the outline. Then I had to continue the story. And that pretty much gets us to here and the release of  The Minstrel and the Prophet.

Five Years

There’s a pair of his shoes in the garage.

They’re black

So you couldn’t see the soot on them when I brought them home

It’s been five years now

Something white has begun to appear on the surface

But I still don’t know what to do with them

There’s a bag of his underwear in my closet

Most of his clothes went to Goodwill

He got a lot of clothes from thrift shops

So I think he’d appreciate that

But Goodwill doesn’t take underwear

And it didn’t feel right to just throw them away

And I still don’t know what to do with them

Soot was everywhere

On everything

It came home with me when I brought his things home

It got on my hands and on my clothes

And it took six washings to get it out of his clothes

Traces of it still linger

In the garage on the shoes and the jacket hanging there

And I can still smell it on warm days

It’s been five years and it is still there

And all it takes is a line in a TV show

Or a phrase in a song

And I can feel it

On my hands

In my heart

In my failure