Rachel Starr Thomson

If you live a daily walk of faith, as I do, you probably read the Bible often. You may even study it. (If you don’t, why not?) Since this blog centers on reading and writing and faith, I figure it’s fair game to give some Bible reading advice.

Remember Tuesday’s post on entering the moment in your writing?

Have you ever tried that with a Bible story?

I challenge you to try it. Pick a character in a story (any character except God — this won’t work as well from His POV, although I suppose you can try it if you must). Now, put yourself as thoroughly in that character’s shoes as you possibly can. Draw on everything you know (or can learn) about the biblical and cultural setting, the character’s past life experiences or personality, and other factors in the story’s context. Try to get inside that character’s brain. Get as comfortable there as you can. Do your best to forget things you know that this character doesn’t.

(For example, when Peter first goes to meet Jesus, he doesn’t know that he’ll become one of the chief disciples, witness miracles, see Jesus transfigured, betray his lord, be filled with the Holy Spirit, convert 2,000 people at once with his preaching, and lead the Jerusalem church. At the moment you’re entering, he’s just a fisherman who’s heard some rumours about a local carpenter’s son.)

Once you’ve done that, read on — because most often, in Bible stories, characters get their boats upset. God comes in and does something to turn that character’s world upside down. And the great thing is that the more you’ve identified with that character, the more your world can be turned upside down, too.

This method of Bible study is somewhat subjective, and of course it has its limits. But it works surprisingly well for me. It gives me new insights into what was happening in many biblical stories, and into the surprising ways God enters people’s lives and bends their expectations. So today I challenge you to try it.

(If you need a starting place, I recommend trying this with Matthew or Acts. I’ve read both books doing my best to be characters in the story, and I can tell you, it’s an enriching experience!)

For today’s post I’m going to plagiarize my own e-mail again. I received an e-mail from a writer friend who’s trying to start a new novel and facing a few blocks before he even gets going: he’s wondering about whether to kick the story off first or begin by informing readers of a few important facts, and also whether to write in first or third-person. Since you may be facing some of the same questions, I thought I’d share my thoughts with you too!

Don’t start by introducing the important facts. Sneak them in once you’ve already kicked off the story. Otherwise you’ll be writing one of those prologues that publishers dislike and many readers skip. The important principle is “show, don’t tell.” Make us like these people, make us care about them, and draw us into their tale before informing us of any back story. I’d advise writing a first chapter that centers around a situation, around action and relationship, more than it does around explanation or discussion of the past. Once you’ve hooked readers you’ll have plenty of time to explain things.

As to POV, that really depends on where the story will go and how you want to tell it. Would it benefit from the perspective of a single character–an old man’s perspective or a young boy’s? At any point will you want to write scenes you can’t write in first-person (for example, one of those “meanwhile, in the villain’s camp” scenes that are so popular in movies)? Maybe most importantly, does either of your main characters have such a strong voice that it wants to tell the story?

You could try writing an opening (or some other arbitrary scene) in both and see which feels more natural before you keep going.

My friend’s e-mail was timely; in revising The Advent I’m finding that the first chapter does too much explaining and not enough drawing in. So I’m going back to look at the first chapters in Worlds Unseen and Burning Light and why they worked, and I’ll have a look at a few other novels and writers today (probably while I’m hanging out at Starbucks and Chapters, where I hope to get a lot of writing done this afternoon)!

Which brings me to another piece of advice:  if you’re having a hard time starting your own story, you might try reading someone else’s. Inspiration and insight crop up in strange places, or you may just find that reading another person’s words is all the motivation you need to start writing your own.

There’s an old piece of writing advice that goes like this:

If your story is getting boring, bring in a man with a gun.

In other words, make something shocking happen. Mix things up. Send everything in a wild new direction. Shoot someone.

It’s not bad advice — sometimes. But (as per my recent post on making every scene count) you’d better make really sure that man with a gun ends up serving an important purpose in the overall plot. If someone gets shot, getting shot needs to affect that person for the rest of the story, and that person’s changed situation or perspective needs to influence the entire storyline and probably play into the way it ends.

Excitement that leads nowhere and has no lasting purpose other than to stir things up will ultimately frustrate and annoy readers. It feels like getting pumped full of adrenaline and never being allowed to release it properly.

Last year I wrote a series of lessons on writing. The first lesson on Plot says:

A good plot, like good dialogue, is tight. There are no throwaway moments in a tight plot. Renato Rizzoli wrote, “The plot must be ‘complete’ and ‘whole’ in that it must have a clearly recognizable beginning, middle, and end. That is why good plots should ‘neither begin nor end haphazardly,’ but be linked by causal necessity or probability; one criterion for the ‘completeness’ of a plot is ‘that the whole plot will be disjointed and disturbed if any one of its parts is displaced or removed’” (Wikipedia, “Mythos”).

So in some cases, you may want to put the gun away and give the plot some extra thought instead. Where is this story going? How will the gun help it get there? Will something else serve it better?

Have fun finding answers. And happy writing.

Today my Big Job is revising The Advent, as it needs to be all ready to go to my beta readers by the end of the month and there’s still a lot of work to do. And as always, revision teaches me things about writing (or at least recalls things I already know). Like the biggest question to ask of any scene: what means this here?

What purpose does this scene serve?

In nonfiction you could probably ask the same question of each paragraph/tangent/anecdote, but we’ll stick with fiction for this post.

There are three major purposes a scene should serve. (Ideally, each scene will serve at least two of these at once.)

• Moving the plot forward.
• Developing characters.
• Establishing the setting.

That’s really about it. Scenes that exist just to be funny or exciting or cute or tell a story you’ve always wanted to tell but do NOT move the plot forward, develop characters, or establish the setting should be cut or revised so they DO fulfill one of those purposes. And frankly? Establishing the setting alone is not a good reason for a scene. You can work most setting details in while you’re carrying the story forward or developing characters.

And with that, away I go to apply the rule to my (rather messy) manuscript. See you on the other side .

And yesterday’s discussion continues, this time touching on editing, plot, fantasy as a genre, and influences. Enjoy!

Rachel: You once mentioned on Facebook that copyediting is one of your favourite parts of revision: I think you said you would turn the whole Auralia Thread into a long prose-poem if you could. Can you comment on that?

Jeffrey: Copyediting used to be agony for me. But the more I come to love poetry, the more I see that any sentence in the book is full of revelatory potential, and the more I like playing with the sounds and rhythms of each paragraph. So yeah, I’d prefer to have three years per book instead of eight months.

Rachel: Your work has strong literary sensibilities, yet you’re working in the much-maligned area of genre fiction. What drew you to fantasy rather than more “realistic” fiction?

Jeffrey: Let me give you a few quotes in answer.

Stanley Kubrick said, “I’ve always liked fairy tales and myths, magical stories. I think they are somehow closer to the sense of reality one feels today than the equally stylized ‘realistic’ story in which a great deal of selectivity and omission has to occur in order to preserve its ‘realist’ style.”

I completely agree with that. Fairy tales are, for me, some of the truest stories I know. They distill things down to such a concentrated, poetic truth. Yes, we live under a curse. Yes, we long for redemption. We are the beast, longing to be healed, and hungry for beauty. We are beauty, feeling compassion for the beast and sensing that there is something worth saving there. We are Sleeping Beauty, deceived into error, and suffering the consequences. We cannot save ourselves, so we have to hope for some kind of grace.

Tolkien said, “It was in fairy stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.”

That’s been my experience. And it goes on. In fantasy, we’re allowed to “play” with ideas in a childlike way that helps us apprehend the mysteries beyond the practical, beyond what is immediately available to ur senses. I think the world around us is meant to be read like poetry, and fairy tales help us train our senses for that kind of reading.

Rachel: You’ve pointed out before that there are some amazing writers working in fantasy, some real depth and artistic merit. Why does the genre still get such a bad rap?

Jeffrey: Well, trashy book covers don’t help. And in a consumer-driven society, people will exploit their audiences by fashioning their work to appeal to our baser appetites. Thus, most fantasy takes from Tolkien the violence, the epic battles, the grotesque monsters, but they don’t carry on the grand and glorious ideals that stand in such stark contrast to the darkness.

Our imaginations are more easily dazzled by perversion, by what is lurid and twisted and shocking, than by what is true and beautiful. Beauty requires us to do some work to comprehend it. In our busy culture, where so much is competing for our attention, whatever is loud and shocking will win out. So a lot of fantasy writers and illustrators, as in any genre, exaggerate whatever will grab people’s attention.

But I also think that as people get older, they feel threatened by the mystery of fairy tales. They grow to prefer portrayals of a world that they can understand and control. So they write off fairy tales as childish, because their ego has a desire to feel very grown up, sophisticated, and in control. Not me. I like Madeleine L’Engle’s perspective: I’m 39, but I’m also 5, and 7, and 14, and 21.

Rachel: The power and purpose of art is a major theme—if not the major theme—of the Auralia Thread. I have to ask: What works of art, be they fantasy novels, music recordings, movies, paintings, etc, have influenced you most? What have delighted you most?

Jeffrey: Bible stories, like the Joseph narrative and the Exodus, have sunk right into my marrow, I think—just as much as The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Dune, and especially Watership Down. The music of the language in those books, as well as in works I discovered later like Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, and Patricia McKillip’s books from the last fifteen years—those have inspired me too.

But readers familiar with the music of contemporary bands and artists like U2, Over the Rhine, and Sam Phillips will find echoes of song lyrics here and there. And I’ve named some characters and musical instruments after some of them.

Rachel: I re-read both Auralia’s Colors and Cyndere’s Midnight before reading Raven’s Ladder, and in all three books I’m struck by how masterfully you handle plot. We never feel cheated, yet things rarely if ever turn out the way we expect them to. You are a master of surprises. Does that come naturally, or do you have to work hard to keep from falling into more predictable plots? To what extent do your plots surprise you?

Jeffrey: I suspect that I liked to play “peek-a-boo” when I was an infant. I love the kind of surprise that is both startling and yet the best possible outcome.

But I find that it won’t work if I decide those surprises ahead of time. It works best just to spend a lot of time writing about characters and their surroundings, and the surprises just suggest themselves.

I was writing a scene about the two thieves Krawg and Warney very, very quickly one afternoon, and I found myself writing about how they met, and what made them into thieves. I’d tried to imagine that story for years, and nothing felt right. But one day, following them into a certain predicament, the whole back-story just unfolded right in front of me like somebody putting on a slide show. I was totally surprised and delighted to learn about Warney’s childhood, his sisters, and how he was accused of being a thief from the moment he was born. I hope readers enjoy that scene as much as I enjoyed writing it.

But you throw away a dozen dissatisfying scenes just to get to one that feels like that one.

Rachel: I’m listening to Nathan Partain as I write these questions, thanks to a link from your Web site. Any connection between Nathan and the Bel Amican musician Partayn?

Jeffrey: I feel like you should win some kind of prize. Nathan and Sarah Partain used to lead music at my church, along with a guy named Rick Jensen. They would sing and play with such joy, such rapture, that it took my attention away from them and turned it toward the mysterious interplay of the ancient texts they were singing and the music they were discovering. It was one of the most profound artistic experiences of my life.

They’re making music elsewhere now, and there’s a big Partain-shaped hole in my heart. So I had to name the great musician of The Auralia Thread for them—although he also represents the spirit of Rick Jensen. Sometimes I’m tempted to give my characters long, complicated names in tribute to large groups of people!

Rachel: Jeffrey, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts on so many subjects. This has been a great interview!

—–

This officially marks the end of our three-day tour, but I’m not done with Raven’s Ladder yet. Check back tomorrow for a more personal look at the story AND a chance to win a brand-new copy of the book for yourself.

A slight change to the planned schedule: as I revisited this interview, I realized that it is long and rich and worthy of being posted over more than one day. So this week my touring days are going to extend to Thursday, methinks .

Today we discuss allegory, art, religion, and shockwyrms. The interview begins:

Rachel: The “one true religion” concept is common in Christian fantasy, although it’s more likely to be couched in political terms (the “one true king” idea) than presented as an actual religion. But Raven’s Ladder delves more deeply into false religions and their origins and powers than it does into the “true faith,” even showing how truth can be twisted into something deviant (I’m still thinking about the scene with Auralia’s Defenders). What inspired you to explore this territory?

Jeffrey: That’s a big question. So forgive me if I ramble on for a moment.

For me, the central questions in The Auralia Thread are about art. Writing these three books, I’ve found the characters stirring up a lot of those questions: Where does inspiration come from? Should an artist seek to please an audience, or focus solely on their work? What is going on when a work of art takes on a life of its own? Religion was never the primary subject.

But conversations about art and religion are intertwined. They both ask us to venture into mysterious territory. I’m not surprised that the characters around Auralia and her extravagant artwork have been struggling with questions about what they believe.

King Cal-raven realizes that Auralia’s colors suggest there is a better world somewhere within reach. That shakes up his assumptions about the world. He’s determined to follow those implications and lead his people to a better place. I can’t tell you how many times a good book or a good song has done that very thing for me.

Beauty restores my faith because it reminds me what is possible, and it trains me to read the world around me in such a way that I sense the design, the love, and things that—as Hamlet tells Horatio—“are not dreamt of in our philosophy.”

Beauty inspires us to awe, and makes us feel like we’re a part of something tremendous. But it also humbles us and makes us feel smaller. That can threaten a person’s ego, or their sense of control. Or it can be an exciting invitation to discovery. That’s what happens when Auralia’s colors are revealed to House Bel Amica.

So it makes sense to me that people in a consumer-driven society like House Bel Amica would react to Auralia’s colors by exploiting them for their own advantage. They try to control them, instead of responding to the possibilities they suggest. People do this with art and religion all the time. In the name of American “freedom,” we justify destructive behavior. In the name of Jesus or Mohammed, we justify all kinds of violence and prejudice. But if we take the claims of faith seriously, we’ll realize that it requires humility and sacrifice, and that is disturbing to us. We want to avoid that. So we pervert the original idea to suit ourselves.

Fore example, look at the flourishing industry of “Christian art.” It’s a huge industry. People love the name of Jesus, and so they’ll accept any shoddy, derivative art that has his name stamped on it. A lot of that art is designed to make them happy, to make them feel good, and to tell them things they agree with. “Christian art” is, in most cases, processed comfort food. It pleases them without requiring any change. But if they were really paying attention to the effect of Jesus on people around him, they’d realize that his presence did not make people comfortable. His ideas challenged them. He discomforted them. He made them wrestle with hard questions so that they would grow. The hope and love he revealed to them called them to sacrifice and commitment.

That’s what great art does.

But those artists who are really wrestling with Christ’s scandalous ideas—they produce something different that shakes up culture all around them. Look at Marilynne Robinson’s novels. Bach’s compositions. The politics of Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln, Films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Carl Dreyer, or Robert Bresson. The films of Andrei Tarkovsky. The poetry of John Donne, John Milton, or W.H. Auden. Annie Dillard’s nonfiction. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Art that is true and beautiful will not let us sit still. It will break us and humble us even as it gives us hope.

But we don’t want to be shaken up. So we excuse ourselves from dealing with big ideas by blaming the idiots who pervert those ideas. Conservatives mock John Edwards and his infidelity so they can put down liberals. Liberals mock George W. Bush’s lousy vocabulary just so they can bash conservatives. This shuts down progress and the hope of reconciliation. It’s a cop out. Fools do not falsify the truth they’re misrepresenting.

In the world of art, we need to be discerning, so that attractive art doesn’t seduce us into believing lies. At the same time, we need to be careful not to reject great ideas merely because they’ve been distorted into terrible art.

So, it made sense to me that in a free, consumer-driven society like House Bel Amica, people would take advantage of Auralia’s beautiful work in order to promote themselves and to deceive people. That’s so much easier than doing what Cal-raven does—respond to the art by changing his plan and taking terrible risks.

Rachel: In our age of The Secret and Disneyfied spirituality, the Bel Amican moon spirit religion is a bold statement. Thanks for making it.

Jeffrey: Thanks! Growing up, I learned right away that Disney movies—well, actually, American movies—wanted me to follow my heart. But my heart is “deceitful above all things.” Every mistake I’ve made, I could blame on the impulses of my heart. I need a compass that’s made out of something greater than my own skewed perspective.

I like the character of Ryllion a lot. He’s a monster, but he’s been taught to be a monster. He has a sense that he should respond to something greater than himself, so he falls for the lie of the moon-spirit religion. But the Seers tell him that the moon has given him all of his desires, so he should indulge them. That’s a road to self-destruction.

Rachel: In earlier interviews, you’ve said that you don’t like it when readers pigeonhole the characters into an obvious allegory—The Keeper as God the Father, Auralia as Jesus (Raven’s Ladder will certainly explode the notions of those who’ve done the pigeonholing despite your warnings). But I’m wondering if readers have just chosen the wrong allegory, or if you’re avoiding allegory altogether.

Jeffrey: I’m not really thinking about allegory while I write. I’m trying to think about what the characters would do in any given situation. When I stand back and look at the story, sometimes I see various possible interpretations. Some see it as a story about religion. That’s fine. Others see it as a story about art, and the prophetic role of the artist in culture, that’s fine too. I think that if I’ve done my job right, it will inspire different interpretations. Time will tell.

But if I feel that the story is just illustrating a lesson, then I’m doing a terrible job. The story, the characters, the particulars… they need to come first. A good parable will leave the listener or the reader in some measure of doubt about its precise application. That’s what wakes up the gray matter and gets us wrestling with a text. It’s what makes a story personal. It’s what makes a work of art stick.

You’re right, though. Anybody who took Auralia’s Colors as a simple religious allegory is in a position to be very surprised by Raven’s Ladder, I think. And the fourth book should do away with any notion that Auralia is Jesus. Perhaps her artistic endeavors have a redemptive influence in the world around her, but she’s a much more complicated character than just some cardboard messiah.

Rachel: The Expanse is full of strange creatures, even plants, and while you use their names you don’t always describe them—making the Expanse at once familiar and foreign. As a reader I’m sometimes frustrated that I can’t clearly picture the things you mention offhandedly. And I’m curious: can you? Do you know exactly what a gorrel looks like? A shockwyrm? A coil tree?

Jeffrey: Some people seem to like that, some don’t. I try to leave just enough hints to get the reader working with me at painting pictures. I love the idea that readers might come up with strikingly different illustrations of some of these critters. But there was one critic who went on a rant that I didn’t ever describe what vawns are like. I don’t think he read very closely. There are several passages about their raptor-like bodies, their colors, their scales, how they eat, what they sound like. You just have stay alert.

Gorrels—I see them as kind of a cross between a possum and a squirrel, with the occasional nasty effect of a skunk. A shockwyrm is kind of a cross between a rattlesnake and an electric eel. A coil tree—I could swear I’ve seen coil trees—broad, black trees that twist as they sprout branches, until they’re a swirl of rising, spiraling branches.

I know that I would write these books differently if I started over. What author wouldn’t? You learn as you go. So I’m still finding my way to a good balance of details and mystery.

——-

Readers, come back tomorrow for the rest of the interview, in which we’ll talk about the joys of copyediting, fantasy as an under-appreciated genre, art, and influences.  My thanks to Jeffrey Overstreet for his generous gift of time and thoughtfulness in answering my questions at length!

In the meantime, check out the other CSFF bloggers covering Raven’s Ladder this week. The links are in yesterday’s post.

I love technology, in particular the Internet and personal computers. I used to fancy myself something of a Luddite, moaning about how I wished we could go back to the pre-Industrial Revolution days or at least move to Amish country, but no longer!

As a writer/editor/publisher, I am flat-down excited about the speed and efficiency and possibilities of our modern age. And as a Christian, I think it’s pretty cool that we can interact so freely online with people from all over the world. (Which inspires a short rant: the Net is NOT a place to use less care with your words;  it is a place to be more courteous, more reasonable, and more ready to give an answer — this here Internet is a mission field, people, so behave yourselves!)

My favorite piece of gadgetry is my new keyboard, which I bought yesterday at Staples because the spacebar on my laptop stopped working. I had to go back and fix the spacing in every other word. Do you know how horrendously that can slow a girl down? Anyway, I bought this new keyboard and it’s really comfortable and fast and I love it.

So now I want to hear from you: as writers and readers and just people, how do you feel about technology? What are your favourite gadgets or widgets or iThings? Weigh in!

P.S. Ironically, I couldn’t blog yesterday because of technical problems — first my cantankerous laptop keyboard, and then my site was down for a while. But I will keep posting on Tuesdays and Thursdays as a general rule! Except next week, when it’s time for the CSFF Tour for Raven’s Ladder. Yes!

In a comment on my recent “How I Revise a Novel” post, Rael asked,

I have a question.  Do you print each version as you change it?  My stories are quite a bit shorter than your SW Trilogy novels, and I can’t imagine the amount of paper and ink you could potentially go through!   I’d love to know at which stages you think hard copy is beneficial to be worth the trouble printing, and if there’s several stages at which it is, how in the world you keep everything organized!

~from an oft-unorganized lass~

I thought that was a great question and probably of interest to other readers, so allow me to answer it publicly. I usually print out the first draft to save my eyes because I already spend so much time on the computer doing other things . This gives me a reward and sense of accomplishment (that huge pile of neatly printed paper is gratifying), which is important to personal motivation. I can read it in bed or wherever I’m comfortable, and it feels more like reading an actual book! But I don’t actually revise in that draft — I just read it and take notes on it. All the actual revision (the second draft) gets done on the computer.

The third draft (the nitpicky line edit) likewise gets done on the computer, reading out loud most of the way. If I’m being good I’ll print that out once I’m finished and proofread in hard copy, as I’m more likely to catch mistakes that way (it’s just something about seeing the words in a different format).

Often I only print a manuscript once; sometimes it will be printed twice. I title each one with the draft number and date (if you really want to keep track of things, put that info in a header at the top of each page). My foolproof way to keep from confusing various drafts is to get rid of each one once I’m done with it — I have many little sisters who are always hungry for scrap paper, so they get all my old material.

I advise against keeping hard copies of every single draft. It’s hard to let go of them, but really, it’s just paper — the real work is represented by that final draft.

My graphic skills leave much to be desired, but thankfully my sister Deborah’s artwork is so gorgeous that even I can’t ruin it! This ad will be placed in a book of encouragement from homeschool graduates put together by Amy Puetz. I’m also contributing a chapter to the book.

So having finished the first draft of The Advent back in December and subsequently touring a lot, I’m finally in the heavy revision stage of the second draft. So far I have done two things:

1. Rearranged everything. I didn’t like how tension and pacing were working out, so I basically cut the book into pieces and put it back together with the scenes in different places.

2. Discovered a whole new plot thread. I read a sentence about a character and suddenly realized that character needed a whole new plot thread. I probably wouldn’t have realized this if I hadn’t rearranged everything — the sentence’s new position in the story cast new light on it.

THAT is a lot like living. Routines are wonderful. They really are. They make us productive and useful and make sure we get enough sleep. But now and then things need shaking up, because you know what? When we rearrange a few things, we can see our lives in a different light and realize what we might be neglecting, what needs more attention, what beautiful stories are waiting for us to write them.