In Praise of Art Museums as Sources of Inspiration

I’d heard that, as you age, you often become more interested in art. What I didn’t expect was to discover how that growing interest in art would affect my fiction writing.

I wasn’t a stranger to art, but I can’t say it was a major preoccupation, either. I had two semesters of art history in college; I took two, because the same textbook was used for both, and it was more expensive than the tuition. I’m also not an artist.

I know when my connection of art to writing fiction started. It was some 50 years ago. We were young twenty-somethings living in Houston, and we saw two exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts. One was the works of Paul Cezanne, and it was stunning. But the one that captured me was “Master Paintings from the Hermitage and the State Russian Museum, Leningrad.” Houston was one of five cities hosting it. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog.

Painting: Lumpeguin, Cigwe, Animiki, by Anselm Kiefer, from collection of the artist on display at the St. Louis Art Museum.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

The genre that came in from the cold: Why we love spy fiction – Andy Owen at The Critic Magazine.

 

Fierce, wild, intractability: Emily Bronte’s untameable spirit – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader. 

Surf’s Up in Slop City – Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft.

How My Novel Originated in the Family Bible

When I was young child, I asked my father what the package was that sat on a shelf in his closet. It was wrapped in brown grocery bag paper and tied with twine. “That,” he said, “is the family Bible, and one day it will be yours.” 

That day came during a visit home to New Orleans about 25 years later. Apologizing for the sorry state it was in, my father thought I might find someone in St. Louis to restore it. Instead, I did the time-honored thing and put in on a closet shelf. I did find a conservation box to store it in, and I did handwrite a copy of the four pages of family records. But it sat on the shelf, just as it had sat before.

 

But as I studied the family records, I noticed that the entries for births, deaths, and marriages were all in the same hand, presumably that of my great-grandfather Samuel. He’d even signed his name on an inside cover page. Samuel was something of a family legend, a legend which my later research showed was almost entirely untrue. But he’d certainly written all of the entries.

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

Some Wednesday Readings

 

What Socrates Teaches Us About Love, Politics, and Death – Agnes Callard at The Free Press.

 

5 a.m. – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

 

The Terrorist Who Murdered My Cousin Now Walks Free – Gideon Black at The Free Press.

 

Matter Matters – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.

 

Blood, squalor, and a taste of things to come: 4 literary adventurers on Japan’s invasion of China – Jeffrey Meyers at The Critic Magazine.

 

AI Can Replace Work, But Not Worth – Cameron Fathauer at Digital Liberties.

 

Hugh A. Garland Jr. and the Old South – Joseph Ricci at Emerging Civil War. 

 

Our National Precipice – poem by Kenneth Horne at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Virgil and the Christian Imagination – Paul Krause at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The Lord’s Corner – poem by Tyree Daye at South Writ Large.

Songwriting and Writing: “Adorning the Dark” by Andrew Peterson

"Songs require patience,” writes Andrew Peterson in Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making. “Books require endurance. Songs are 100-meter dashes. Books are marathons. You have a lot more opportunity to question your sanity when you're battling your way through the jungle of a novel for a year." Peterson writes both songs and books, and he knows the challenges of both.

I’ve read a multitude of books about writing, fiction writing, publishing, book marketing, writing style, writing challenges, writer’s block, and several other categories. Never have I read a book about writing that spoke directly into my soul. Until Adorning the Dark. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

When the Story Emerges from the Words

I’ve been working on a story, and Michelangelo pops into my head.

He has nothing to do with the story. And I’m not writing about art or sculpture on Italy or the Renaissance or anything related to those subjects.

But something happens in the process of writing that story, and it has to do with something Michelangelo said about sculpture.

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it,” he says, “and it it’s the task the sculptor to discover it.”

He follows it up with a slight variation: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved it until I set him free.”

I think the quotes were a bit presumptuous, but it is Michelangelo who says them, so who am I to judge?

And then I have something like a Michelangelo moment.

To continue reading, please see my post at Dancing Priest.

Photograph by Akash Patel via Unsplash. Used with permission.

My Interview with Megan Willome on “Dancing Prophet”

Where does a story come from?

The idea for my novel Dancing Prophet came from the my regular route for riding my bike, and the nondescript apartment complex I passed. I recently talked with writer and author Megan Willome about where the story came from, the major issue that affected it, and how it began to seem that my fictional story was writing the news. She captured exactly what I was trying to do in telling the story.

You can read the interview here. 

Inspired by a Horror: Because It Matters

Grant’s Trail, a biking-walking-jogging-rollerblading trail in St. Louis some 10 miles long, begins about a mile-and-a-half from my house in Kirkwood, officially the oldest incorporated suburb of St. Louis. The trail is a converted railroad track bed, and I’ve been biking it for years now. Counting the round trip and an occasional side meander, it’s a good 20-mile ride.

Just before the trail begins, there’s a brick apartment complex of some 40 to 50 units in five or six buildings. Rather nondescript, it’s neither at the luxury end of residential living nor the housing-of-last-resort end. Nondescript, and rather anonymous, sufficiently describes it.

Each time I’d go to Grant’s Trail, I’d bike past the complex, barely giving it a thought except to watch for doors suddenly opening from cars parked on the street (bikers have to watch for these things). But it wasn’t the kind of building or complex that you’d pay much attention to.

Until January of 2007.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Christian Poets & Writers.

Writing: The Right Reason

I was at a writer’s conference, carrying with me my selection of a work in progress like hundreds of others, scheduled for a meeting with both an editor and an agent. Like most of the people there, when not in a general session or a seminar, I spent a lot of time milling about, looking at the writers’ books for sale, talking to a few people, trying to understand what I was even doing there.

At one of the luncheons, a woman sat next to me, her arms full of books, papers, notebooks, purse, briefcase, and water bottle. She smiled expansively at the rest of us at the table and announced, “I am a writer.” Loudly. Loud enough so that the people at the next table turned their heads. 

She went on to tell us, knowing we were all phenomenally interested, that she was in her positive affirmation mode. Declaring herself to be a writer meant, as night followed day, that she was one. And she went on to explain what that meant.

To continue reading, please see my post at Christian Poets & Writers. 

How a narrative orphan became a favorite child

I’d been writing a fiction series. Two books had been published, Dancing Priest and A Light Shining, and the sequel had 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 and the sequel, so I couldn’t simply skip over the gap and cover it with some narrative filler or explanation in the sequel. 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. And there were fragments and chunks of manuscript set aside or removed entirely.

Could all of this be tied 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 didn't want to fiddle with the "gap novel;" I wanted to get on with the one just sitting there, waiting to be finished.

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 story almost demanding to be written. It would be so easy, with it just sitting there and waiting, for me to turn my back on the gap. 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. And this is what he says: "I wrote this down because that first year, those first six months, explained everything that came after."

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.

The gap novel was no longer filled a gap. It had been my narrative orphan. And it had become its own story, and could stand on its own if it had to.

And iit's become my personal favorite book in the series: Dancing King.