Rachel Starr Thomson

It’s just past 7 in the morning, and I am once again blogging from an airport. The drive here was gorgeous as the sun came up, all palm trees in the rosy mist. I’ve had a warm, relaxing, productive time in Florida, and now it’s time to go home.

I didn’t fulfill my dream of seeing an alligator, but this morning I saw a shape in a pond that very well could have been one. I’ll take what I can get, I suppose. The funny is that alligators scare me — but if I could have seen a wild one while I was here, it would have made me very happy.

On Monday I embark on a whole new adventure, one which scares me as much or more than alligators: phone calling. Soli Deo Gloria Ballet is hosting a major event in the Niagara area in May, and we need local businesses to sponsor it. So I, who dread and avoid phone calls above all things, have set myself a goal of making 100 phone calls to total strangers in a single week.

Pray for me .

What was printing like before computers, back in the days of Gutenberg, leather-bound books, and handmade characters? Firefly Press is still using old-fashioned techniques, as this fascinating video will show you. If you’ve fallen in love with the look and feel of books, you’ll enjoy this one!

Check it out here.

Thanks to Sheri Harper, who was in love with Shakespeare when I was still discovering the classics, for sending this to me!

P.G. Wodehouse, a British comic writer whose writing career lasted seventy-three years, authored some of the funniest prose in the English language. He was a master of using narrative, description, and dialogue to capture the essence of any character — most famously Bertie Wooster, whose adventures with his manservant Jeeves have proved preeminent among Wodehouse’s work. The following is the opening of a short story entitled “Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest,” originally published in 1919.

I’m not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare — or, if not, it’s some equally brainy lad — who says that it’s always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping. There’s no doubt the man’s right. It’s absolutely that way with me. Take, for instance, the fairly rummy matter of Lady Malvern and her son Wilmot. A moment before they turned up, I was just thinking how thoroughly all right everything was.

It was one of those topping mornings, and I had just climbed out from under the cold shower, feeling like a two-year-old. As a matter of fact, I was especially bucked just then because the day before I had asserted myself with Jeeves — absolutely asserted myself, don’t you know. You see, the way things had been going on I was rapidly becoming a dashed serf. The man had jolly well oppressed me. I didn’t so much mind when he made me give up one of my new suits, because, Jeeves’s judgment about suits is sound. But I as near as a toucher rebelled when he wouldn’t let me wear a pair of cloth-topped boots which I loved like a couple of brothers. And when he tried to tread on me like a worm in the matter of a hat, I jolly well put my foot down and showed him who was who. It’s a long story, and I haven’t time to tell you now, but the point is that he wanted me to wear the Longacre — as worn by John Drew — when I had set my heart on the Country Gentleman– as worn by another famous actor chappie — and the end of the matter was that, after a rather painful scene, I bought the Country Gentleman. So that’s how things stood on this particular morning, and I was feeling kind of manly and independent.

Well, I was in the bathroom, wondering what there was going to be for breakfast while I massaged the good old spine with a rough towel and sang slightly, when there was a tap at the door. I stopped singing and opened the door an inch.

“What ho without there!”

“Lady Malvern wishes to see you, sir,” said Jeeves.

“Eh?”

“Lady Malvern, sir. She is waiting in the sitting-room.”

To read “My Man Jeeves,” the short-story collection in which the above was published, visit this link from Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8jeev10.txt

Paragraph breaks are often underused. That’s unfortunate, because paragraph breaks give important visual cues that affect the way readers process a story.

When my students turn in a paper with too few paragraph breaks, I advise them to add breaks every four to six sentences. When breaks are added, the experience of reading dramatically changes. The second draft will feel like a whole new story. I will notice things I didn’t notice before, and events will hit me emotionally as they couldn’t before the breaks were added.

How does a simple break make such a difference? Regular paragraph breaks will do three things:

1. Preserve your readers’ eyes. Paragraph breaks do the practical job of keeping your readers’ eyes from getting tired, which means they’ll take in more and skim less.

2. Highlight important moments. When you use a paragraph break, the end of the previous paragraph is emphasized. So is the beginning of the next paragraph — and the middle of the paragraph is given significance. When you don’t use paragraph breaks, scenes run together. Nothing is allowed to stand out.

3. Move plot forward. Use a paragraph break each time there’s a shift in direction or action. If a story takes us from a house to a beach to examining a grain of sand, use paragraph breaks to move us from one place to one another — from one focus to another.

A paragraph break is like a silence in music. It’s an important element of the entire composition. Without them, the music suffers.

Last night I watched the Oscars. And as I watched all of those talented, beautiful, skillful people being honoured for their work and sharing their love of this thing called Hollywood, I thought, “Can you imagine the impact Hollywood could have if it was devoted to God?” As you know if you watched the awards, various winners and presenters took the opportunity to share messages they’re passionate about. The movies, most notably Milk, shared the same messages. And while I (fervently) disagree with some of those messages, I was struck by the thought of how much power creative people have to spread them.

Just imagine if all that talent, all that charisma, all that beauty and humour, went into uplifting people and glorifying God. What if.

The other day a friend and I discussed the Jewish concept of sin as two-sided: sin is the wrong things you have done (“forgive us our trespasses”), but it is also the right things you have not done that you should have (“forgive us our debts”). As creative people, what should we be doing? Where should our talents be focused? What impact should be striving to make in the lives of others?

In a great post on Christian fiction, Rebecca LuElla Miller discusses two kinds of Christian writer:

The first group generally has overt Christian messages and may be accused of being too preachy. Authors in the latter group stress their creation of a story as art and are often accused of being too secular.

But art is about communication, she argues; and Christians ought to be conveying Christian messages — not to the detriment of artistic excellence, but using it.

You can read Becky Miller’s whole post here. And then I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject. For you, where do art and message intersect? As a Christian creative, how do you live out your calling?

This week I did something I haven’t done in quite a while: I plunged into a fantasy world. Obeying my sudden urge to actually read the book I was supposed to review for the CSFF Blog Tour (that’s Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy, if you were wondering), I bought two fantasy novels on a whim and then ploughed through them in three days. If you read as fast as I did as a teenager, that probably sounds like an intolerably long time, but I’ve slowed down since I started editing — and I still have work to do. So reading like that meant staying up really late at night and eating all my meals while buried in pages.

I am, for the most part, glad I did it. I’ll give a disclaimer here: as several other bloggers remarked, these books are for mature teens and adults — they deal with some adult themes and have their very violent moments. But they’re also rich in theme and imagery, with taut, skillfull writing of the kind that lends itself to being quoted in my writing lessons.

The thing about plunging into a fictional world, though, is that eventually you have to come back up. If the book was a good one, it will leave marks. My vocabulary is always a little altered after I’ve been reading, and I’ll be hearing character voices in my head for weeks. Catch me thinking, and I may well be thinking about some place that doesn’t really exist. But ideally, good fiction will do more than leave marks. It will actually influence the ways we live our real lives.

When I read, I want to come away with a more profound understanding of who I am, what this world is, who God is. I want to come away loving my family and friends more, hating evil with a greater passion, longing for beauty with a sharp edge. In general, fiction affects me this way far more than nonfiction does. That’s the power of story.

Judging from the comments on my Cyndere’s Midnight posts, I’m guessing that some of you have come away from fiction in some measure changed. I hope so. And as you write, may God bless your work with the power to change others as well.

See you next week!

I came on board as a freelance editor for VMI Publishers in November last year, in the midst of rehearsing and promoting Emmanuel. Busy as I was, I was thrilled to receive the first novel I’d be editing for them: Wayback by Sam Batterman.

Sam’s book is a Crichton-esque scientific thriller that transports readers back through time with an intrepid team of scientists, businessmen, and soldiers assembled by TRC, a think tank with unusual ties to Christianity. Their destination? Mesopotamia, just before Noah’s Flood. Throw in unexpected discoveries, terrorists, serious spiritual questions, and a Flood that’s coming much faster than anyone expected, and you’ve got a humdinger of an adventure!

I really enjoyed working on Wayback and am pleased to announce that Sam’s Web site is up. Check out www.SamBatterman.com, where you can read more about the book, comment on Sam’s blog, and view some seriously cool artwork by Justin Gerard of Portland Studios. The landing page is especially worth seeing. Have a look!

Much has been said by other CSFF bloggers about the beauty of Jeffrey Overstreet’s writing. They’re right. Even Publishers Weekly, reviewing Auralia’s Colors, called his writing “precise and beautiful.”

But what makes writing truly beautiful? It starts in the roots, in the word choices themselves, in the rhythms as they grow into something more. And it leads to greater things — to characters, to conversations, to story itself. To images that don’t fade.

In my first post of this month’s tour, I said that Overstreet’s writing would leave readers with memories. Now that I’ve finished Auralia’s Colors and am partway through Cyndere’s Midnight, I still think it’s true. And not least among those memories will be certain images — images that stand out starkly, beautiful in their own strange ways, meaning different things to different readers.

In “The Heiress and the Oceandragon,” Cyndere mourns her dead by the fog-enshrouded ocean when she hears panicked cries that an oceandragon has been sighted.

“Cyndere!” they were calling into the mist. “Heiress! Where is she?”

The sound of their panic blew past.

Cyndere splashed out  of the tide.

There it was. A jagged line of darkness ahead, like a mountain range. As it took on detail, she heard its hollow groaning.

The oceandragon’s gargantuan form loomed, its snout resting on sand, head large enough to swallow a herd of wild tidehorses. The fog withdrew, and she could see the spiked tip of its tail curling about and resting on the sand beside her, ten times the size of the harpoons her father had hurled at seawraiths and horned whales.

But then the scene turns and becomes one of those images, one of those clear, strange visions that means something. I’ve read far beyond this chapter, but this image remains.

She stood still, waited for the dragon to writhe and twist and thrash down upon her. “Is this what took you down into the sea?” she whispered to her father. “Is this what you saw as the ship came apart?”

The fog thinned.

The oceandragon’s eyes were hollow, the head but a skull. Its sides did not heave; they were no more than rows of towering ribs. Its tail, a chain with links of bone. Perhaps it had been dead an age. The sea had carried it into the inlet by night and cast it onto the shore, having taken every scrap of its flesh, offering up its unbreakable skeleton.

That reverberating moan — it was only the wind moving through the skull’s cavities.

“Beautiful,” she said.

As writers, as readers, what do images mean to you? I’m not simply talking about description, but about those moments in description that suddenly stand in sharp relief, that linger, that turn into memory, that mean things. Imagery is as old as words, and a single image can tell more than pages and pages of them — the cracked Stone Table in Aslan’s How; the “shadow of his wings” in David’s Psalms; a barren mountainside I vividly remember from George MacDonald’s Heather and Snow, where a boy went out to walk with the Bonny Man and the angels.

Images may be beautiful or strange or frightening, or all three at once, as I think the image of the oceandragon’s skeleton is. You who have long been readers: what images still linger in you?

The latest Carnival of Homeschooling is up, hosted by Topsy-Techie, whose banner proclaims she is “Raising homegrown geeks, one laptop at a time.” Gotta love it . Check out the carnival for great posts and people in the homeschooling world!

Yesterday I bought a copy of Cyndere’s Midnight, happy and excited because I rarely get to buy novels — especially ones I’m really excited about. I actually bought two books, because Cyndere’s Midnight is the sequel to Auralia’s Colors, and you can’t read a sequel first. At least I can’t.

Consequently, I’m halfway through Auralia’s Colors and really wishing I had more time to read. Jeffrey Overstreet is a good writer. I had read only two chapters when I realized that Auralia’s Colors was one of those books that leaves you with memories, with a feeling that you’ve been somewhere else for a while.

I’m currently critiquing a fantasy novel, and I’ve written several of my own, so after I’d put the book down I got to thinking about how authors do that. How do you create a world so real that readers end up immersed in it? Worlds are revealed through so many things — through their creatures, their cultures, their vocabularies, their landscapes. Fantasy writers know that if you’re going to transport your readers to another world, you have to know all about that world first. But even then, it’s not that simple. You also need to skillfully SHOW that world without revealing yourself as the man behind the curtain.

There are basically two kinds of fantasy story in the world, which I’ll call “portal fantasies” and “complete fantasies.” Portal fantasies involve people from one world (usually ours) being transported into another world (Narnia, famously), and when you write one of these, it’s not too hard to immerse your readers in the fantasy world. This is because Narnia is just as new to the Pevensies as it is to us, so naturally characters will explain things, and the unfamiliar bits will be commented on, and history can be retold and common knowledge reiterated without anybody crying “Foul!”

Complete fantasies, exemplified by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, are different. They’re harder to write, because the characters must seem perfectly comfortable and at home in their world, but at the same time, your readers who are NOT comfortable and at home there must be able to follow along.

In this first chapter of Auralia’s Colors, two thieves discover a baby dripping with riverwater. The conversation that follows is slightly bewildering, but it’s as drenched in this fantasy world as the baby is drenched in the river, and it stays just anchored enough in things and concepts familiar to us to help us follow along. It also masterfully reveals much about the geography, history, and superstitions of this world. Before the book is through, we’ll have come to understand what this place is and who these  people are, and their voices will echo in our heads always.

“Now don’t you get it in your head to leave me here with this orphan,” Krawg called, “or I’ll rip that patch off your dead eye!”

“Have ya thought  . . .” Warney paused, turned, and clasped his head with both hands, as if trying to stretch his mind to accommodate a significant thought. “Has it occurred to ya that . . . Do ya think . . .”

“Speak, you rangy crook!”

“Oh ballyworms, Krawg! What if she’s a Northchild?”

Krawg stumbled back a step and narrowed his eyes at the infant.

The tailtwitcher, the crowd, and even the river seemed to quiet at Warney’s question.

But Krawg at last shook off worry. “Don’t shovel that vawn pile my way, Warney. You been eatin’ too much of Yawny’s stew, and your dreams are gettin’ to you. Only crazies think Northchildren are actual. There’s no such thing.”

They watched the baby’s hands sculpt shapes in the air.

“And anyway,” Krawg continued, glancing northward at the sky purpling over the jagged mountains of the Forbidding Wall, “everybody knows Northchildren are taller, and they drape blankets over themselves.”

In my own Worlds Unseen, you might say I cheated a bit. The Seventh World is first of all very much like ours, right down to its geography, which is loosely based on Europe. And even though Maggie has grown up in her world, its true history and entire spiritual dimension are foreign to her. When they come crashing into her reality, she has to learn right along with the readers.

How about you, writers? What tricks and tips have you learned to help immerse readers in your worlds? When have you felt most successful at it? What authors do you feel have done this best? For that matter, what fantasy worlds are you carrying around memories of?

Tomorrow, the last day of the February CSFF tour, I will actually blog about Cyndere’s Midnight. Stay tuned .