Brain Surgery and Writing--INKBLOTS

Inkblotters after I read from intensely rough opening chapter

Inkblots on this hint-of-spring evening (It's been raining for something like 24 of the last 25 days, fairly typical for this time of year in our region). But this evening "...When comforts are declining/He grants the soul again/A season of clear shining/To cheer us after rain," from my favorite poet, William Cowper, one of his finest Olney hymns, encouraged by John Newton. A brilliant sunset just fading in the west.

Alisa reads from her 1890 historical fiction set in Roslyn mining. I love the way Alisa celebrates her (our) region and its colorful, rough-and-ready, and rocky history (sorry for the mining allusion). This is narrative beginning exposition, setting up the novel. Rich, narrative description, but I wonder if we're missing something. I feel like I am almost there, can see what the characters see, feel like maybe we need more sounds, smells? Let me think about that. This first chapter is a prologue, then chapter one launches the reader decades forward to the 1930s. We asked Alisa to give us the 40-year transition by reading some paragraphs. Alisa captures the difference in language in 40 years, clearly evidenced, which is not easy to do. The story will explore issues of race, and of how some prospered during the Depression when most lost everything.

Alisa started writing The Emblem seven years ago and the novel is 30,000 words fewer now than originally, upped the pace as a result. F Scott Fitzgerald did a similar chainsaw edit of Great Gatsby. I've found that when anything I have written does not seem quite to work, cut unnecessary words. Be brutal. It will almost always be better. Here is Alisa's synopsis of The Emblem:

We ended up talking for awhile about racial issues and tensions between race.

John read from his novel Violeta. A chapter with conversation about God. Russian novel set in 1917. On the run for their lives with her French Huguenot governess. I like how you used the crow cawing bringing her thoughts back to the present. Can you have Violeta unwilling to tell what she is thinking, and have her governess draw it out of her. Otherwise, the dialogue seemed a bit forced. The butter is a good touch, appeals to readers' taste buds. Praying in fiction is hard to pull off. Have Violeta responding to her words with taunts and criticism.  

I yapped for a bit about the nonfiction project I've tentatively, haltingly, anxiously (I despise adverbs) began, my pen quavering (not quaveringly, I'm improving, maybe). But I decided to read from my latest New Reformation Hymn effort on the blessings of fearing of God, temporal and eternal blessings on the man, the woman, the sons, the daughters, the home, and the church:

How blessed the man who fears the Lord!

Who daily feeds upon his Word,

And falls down at the mercy seat,

And casts his fears at Jesus’s feet. 

How blessed is she who fears the Lord!

Delighting, trusting in his Word:

She fears no danger, threat, or harm

While resting safe in Jesus’ arms. 

How blessed are sons who fear the Lord!

Who hear and heed the Spirit’s Word.

No tyrant’s heel can hurt them here

Since they the Sovereign Lord revere. 

How blessed when daughters fear the Lord!

And love God’s ways, his holy Word.

Disease and dying hold no fear

Since Christ who conquered death is near. 

How blessed the home that fears the Lord!

Adoring the incarnate Word;

Like cherubim and seraphim,

In humble awe, God's praises hymn. 

How blessed the church that fears the Lord!

Her Savior’s work, her sure reward;                        

With wondrous voice, high praise repeats,

And bows in awe at Jesus’ feet.

          Douglas Bond, copyright, January 4, 2017

Rachel's computer died just as she was about to read to us. She'll be up first next week. So I then did go ahead and read from opening chapter of my non fiction book on the Delightful, the Disappointing, and the Despicable Marriages of Church History (working title, but you get the idea). I have never read anything at so rough a stage of the writing process as these opening paragraphs. They stared unblinking at me as if I had lost my marbles, and were very gracious. Now to rewriting. I am so glad that writing is not like brain surgery. With writing you can try getting it right the second time, and the third, and the fourth... Brain surgeons get one shot. I'll stick with writing.

Follow progress on new book at bondbooks.net and follow my new podcast The Scriptorium at blogtalkradio.com/thescriptorium I'm featuring on-going writing tutorial along with author interviews and historical vignettes. I may have a future Inkblots broadcast on The Scriptorium, so follow and share.

Symbols, Suffering, and Showing (not telling)--INKBLOTS

Gargoyle straining under the weight of the world

After many weeks away and apart, Inkblots reconvenes, at last. Good to be back together again. Let's make sure we don't have gaps of this size again (my fault really, busy fall speaking schedule largely to blame, though a rich and  beneficial time, at least for me it was). We read from Psalm 131 and discussed some of the things that are too marvelous for us to grasp, and talked about God's providence, his will and way, so often mysterious to us, certainly always high above us. And about calming ourselves before the Lord's marvelous mysteries, sometimes, perhaps often, painful to feeble sinners in a broken world, longing for life in a world of death.

SYMBOLS

I led off reading a paragraph from Rosemary Sutcliff's Shield Ring, which I just finished reading with my daughter Gillian this evening before 'Blots (while she worked on her CC science project spread all over the living room; multiple reads over the years with the bigs). Sutcliff deftly elevated a ring on Bjorn's finger to the level of a symbol, a collector of meaning, a tangible connector to his past, a symbol of his heritage, of his Saxon ethnicity, of his identity and place in the new Viking world that he now lived in, now imminently under the threat of being crushed by Norman invaders (Reformation France/Armistice 100 Tour will be visiting William the Conqueror's birthplace in charming Bayeux and the Medieval tapestry, and where he is buried in Caen at Abby des homes--a few spaces still open, but not for long).

WRITING AND SUFFERING

Sidney will lead off with a portion of a novel she is writing, a passage that is informed in part by the death of her brother Isaiah the day before Thanksgiving. It is emotional and personal. This is clearly white-hot out of suffering and the immediate experience of loss and grief. But very much in control. there's no blubbering here (though there is absolutely nothing wrong with blubbering in our grief), no exploiting, only writing what she needs, as Lewis urges all writers to do, "Write what you need." Sidney is doing so brilliantly. There are so many rich uses of words here: Silent whisper of life; low moan, rattling of the throat, hastened footsteps (this reminds me of Lewis's description in Surprised by Joy of the night his mother died when he was nine); candles, their wax frozen mid drip; kiss of a ghost; silently giving up his soul to the blackness; a tender reed upon which life had trampled, and much more. 

This passage demonstrates the power of fiction. Sidney could write this as a non-fiction blog post (I've been reading her posts, and she has done so, very ably, with maturity beyond her years), but here there is a transcendence as if we the reader are looking from on high at the tragic and dramatic scene, and at the same time we are transported into the hospital room, the sights, sounds, smells (I think you could give us more of the smells), the wailing, the painful intake of breath. It is so painfully real, I am torn. I want to be there, and yet I want to run away (you want to be careful in an opening chapter to not be so weighty that your reader feels they need to run away or be crushed). The word painting is incomparably wonderful. But none of us are perfect. I have a few suggestions. Help readers have a clearer sense of from whose eyes we are seeing the world through. Mostly it is the boy, but then it seems to shift to the woman, the mother, who appears to take her own life, to the anguish of her son. Some of Sydney's description dangles, is not tightly connected to and affecting the protagonist. And there needs to be greater clarity on who, the protagonist actually is. I lost the thread of the boy's point of view. It may be in part your use of Time personified in the feminine and hence the shift to "She" pronouns. Compound that with the She pronoun for the mother. Clarify pronouns. "I hate and mistrust pronouns, every one of them as slippery as a fly-by-night personal-injury lawyer." Stephen King, On Writing

Patrick commented that there is a problem of whose world we are seeing things from, and, I'm interpreting him, maybe it is overly dense for a first chapter. I agree on a certain level. I think Sidney gives us too much in the opening chapter; it is lengthy for a first chapter, probably too lengthy. For a nine year old, the boy has intensely mature perspective and processes the action going on around him like an adult. I'd suggest giving the nine-year-old a legitimately mature vantage point on what is going on by making it clear that he is looking back on it all from an older perspective. Leave some of the backstory for a later chapter. You don't have to cover it all in the opening chapter, in fact, it is best not to do so. Maybe mapping it out would be helpful at this stage. Where are you going, at least in broad strokes. This will give more direction and clarity to how you use your artist brush in each chapter and episode.

I interviewed a young writer on my podcast The Scriptorium the other day and cautioned her that being a writer meant being a sufferer. Suffering is not a smorgasbord. There's no menu with lots of options. We don't get to request the particular flavor of suffering we would like, or how we would like it cooked. God chooses for us. He is sovereign over suffering, over all things; he is all-wise in the exercise of his sovereignty, and he is motivated purely by love for his children. Hence, "What ere my God ordains is right." Sidney, who is passing through some very deep waters, is writing what she needs in her suffering, as so richly illustrated in this passage she shared with us this eveing. Wonderful writing!

SHOW DON'T TELL

Patrick read next, his sci-fi futuristic yarn. Welcome to Mars. I love it. familiar hiss, I think that needs more work; maybe a simile or metaphor for the hiss, one that relates to and further intensifies the Mars context. Patrick does a fine job of keeping the action and pace moving forward. It's clearly his strength. But there's some work to do on showing rather than telling, creating depth and breadth to the narrative as it moves forward. For example, he writes, "The idea thrilled him." Could you show his thrill, his reaction, hastening of his pulse, sharp intake of breath, or better. Let the reader read what you have shown and say "he is thrilled." Another example, "Cloudless sky." Could you describe the color of the sky over Mars, with a comparison to a vintage car color, or?

"But first he had to introduce himself." You don't need to announce things like this. It's far more effective to do it, than to tell us you're going to do it, then do it. You could nuance this by showing body language that shows he forgets basic human relational interactions; silly me. Or the woman he needs to introduce could say something that jolts him into introducing her. I would also like to hear more dialogue. Patrick has lots of narrative sequential description, but it feels static. I feel like I am seeing a series of still photographs, with changes between shots, but not smoothly connected like the minute and fluid movements of a movie camera. As to introductions, when you do have them near the end of your reading with Joanna, it feels stilted, unnecessary to maintaining the pace. "Defiantly," avoid adding adverbs to attributions (Stephen King says that the road to hell is paved with adverbs). Show defiance in the words themselves, his posture, or tone, or a gesture.

We talked about the length of speculative fiction short stories, "short" is fairly long in this genre (9,000 words). How to create episodes and natural pauses without chapter breaks?

Where did the two hours go? Great to be back together with Inkblots. See you in a couple of weeks. Check out my new and improved (improving) web page bondbooks.net. Thanks to the amazing work of my summer marketing intern Sionna Spears.

Douglas Bond, author of more than twenty-five books, is husband of Cheryl, father of six, and grandfather of four. He is Director for the Oxford Creative Writing Master Class, two-time Grace Award book finalist, adjunct instructor in Church history, advisory member to the national committee for Reformed University Fellowship,  award-winning teacher, hymn writer, speaker at conferences, and leader of Church history tours in Europe. He broadcasts weekly at The Scriptorium. Follow him here and at bondbooks.net

Losing Your Mind--The Insanity of the Gospel

The Vicarage, Newton's home in Olney, Cowper's behind

"He's bonkers," they used to say of someone with insanity. In WW I, "He's blighty," they would refer to a soldier with shell shock. We call it mental illness, PTSD, dementia, early-onset dementia, or Alzheimer's. Whatever society calls it, we feel that something is not right about someone's words and behavior. "Have you lost your mind?" we say when something is not connecting the way the rest of us feel like it ought to connect. Or the way it used to connect.

BECOMING A CHILD AGAIN

My eighty-two-year-old father-in-law has lost his mind. Once a can-do-anything man, an ironworker, certified to weld every ore on the planet, now has stage-six Alzheimer's. The man of laughter and endless stories of bygone days with which he held his grandchildren spellbound and belly laughing for hours, not only doesn't remember any of those stories; he doesn't know his own wife, children, or grandchildren.

For him, the earlier stages of the disease were more difficult, when he knew he didn't know things he ought to know, and was frequently frustrated by that knowledge. But now there is a mercy in his mental oblivion. Mercy for him, though not for his dear wife and children who know he doesn't know them and are in anguish at the knowledge. "The more knowledge, the more grief," wrote the author of Ecclesiastes (1:18). Whatever else this means, surely it applies to a family watching a dear loved one steadily lose his mind. At the last, they become like a child in an old body, an infant again, who must have everything done for them.

Let's be honest. There's a nagging question that inevitably creeps into our minds, or onto our children's lips: "If Grandpa doesn't know anything or anyone anymore, does he still know Jesus?" Is he safe? When he has lost his mind, is his soul lost too? Is he still saved? God our Heavenly Father wants to hear all our lisping, all our stammering, all our quavering questions. And his Son answers this one. "Unless you become like little children," said Jesus to his disciples, "you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matthew 18:3).

SUFFERING--THE SCHOOL OF POETRY

My travels take me frequently back to Olney in the United Kingdom, John Newton and William Cowper's village, the geographical origin of my literary endeavors over the last nearly twenty years. As I prepare for another visit, I am reminded again of the expansive reach of the gospel of grace. We can so easily slip into thinking that Christianity is for the morally upright, for people who have it together, for normal people, functional people, smart people, witty people, people who have not lost their minds. You know, people like we want others to think we are.

We scowl and attempt to explain what Paul really meant when it begins to dawn on us how the gospel actually works (or we clutch at our perceived good works and grind our teeth like the religious leaders of Jesus' day). It doesn't seem to connect. Jesus came for the sick, not for the well, for those sick in mind as well as in body. For smelly fisherman, not well-perfumed religious leaders; for lepers, not people with all their fingers and toes; for prostitutes, for victims of sexual abuse, for sexual abusers, not self-righteous moral purists; for swindlers, not for well-suited accountant types; for the illiterate, not for the strutting sophisticated academic; for the demon possessed, for those with dementia, with mental illness, for those who have lost their minds. For those who have lost their lives. For the dead.

William Cowper, born in 1731, one hundred years after the death of his ancestor and fellow poet John Donne, was one of those with great needs, special needs. He was one of the blighty. He was crushed under repeated bouts of insanity, even attempted suicides, odd behavior, dark depression, at times feeling himself a castaway, "whelmed in deeper gulfs" than any other. And yet God raised him up by the grace of the gospel, ministered to him through the love and kindness of his neighbor and pastor, John Newton, to be one of the Church's greatest hymn writers. 

FROWNING PROVIDENCE

Perhaps it was not in spite of, but because of Cowper's lifelong struggle with mental illness that he became one of the most tender of our hymn writers. He knew that God truly does "move in mysterious ways his wonders to perform." He knew that behind a "frowning providence" God truly does "hide a smiling face." Cowper gently, experientially teaches us that, "Blind unbelief is sure to err and scan his work in vain." God truly does work "deep in unfathomable mines of never failing skill." He truly does "treasure up his bright designs and works his sovereign will." God in his gospel truly "is his own interpreter and he will make it plain," in his time, in his way. 

With all of his mental challenges, Cowper knew that there really is a sort of insanity about the gospel. It is completely counter-intuitive. It defies economic sense, quid pro quo, this for that, balance the scale of bad deeds with good deeds. No. The gospel of Jesus Christ is a tertium quid, something altogether outside of and above all other religions. I want to get this, down deep in my soul. "O for a closer walk with God!" as Cowper cried. O to see more clearly the Light that "rises with healing in his wings." O to be washed in the precious "blood drawn from Immanuel's veins," there to "lose all [my] guilty stains." 

GOSPEL HEALING

We will always get the gospel distorted when we think it is only for the functional, the repectable, for people like we want to believe we are, and not for the insane, the ones who have lost their minds, for the dead, who must be raised to life by the gracious, sovereign mercy of God. Cowper reminds me of that.

When I am most honest about my own heart, my desperate need for grace--justifying grace, sanctifying grace, daily enabling grace--then I know that I am in some real sense much more like William Cowper with all of his mental disorders, or more like my father-in-law who has lost his mind, but not his soul. When I see myself as a little child, a nursing infant (Luke 18:15), one who needs to have everything done for me, one who must be carried into the Kingdom of Heaven, then God has made the gospel plain. He has been his own interpreter. Behind his "frowning providence," I see his "smiling face." And am healed of all my diseases (Psalm 103:3).

Douglas Bond, author of more than twenty-five books, is husband of Cheryl, father of six, and grandfather of four. He is Director for the Oxford Creative Writing Master Class, two-time Grace Award book finalist, adjunct instructor in Church history, advisory member to the national committee for Reformed University Fellowship,  award-winning teacher, hymn writer, speaker at conferences, and leader of Church history tours in Europe. He broadcasts weekly at The Scriptorium. Follow him here and at bondbooks.net

FEAR: Let's Be Honest

"We're going on a bear hunt. We're not scared," reads the charming, safe-scary children's board book. Forget bear hunting; the fact is, most of us are scared--afraid--a good deal of the time.  I'd like to pound my chest and tell you that I am never afraid. O, I used to be when I was a little 'fraidy-cat kid and didn't know any better, but now that I'm a grown man, I've conquered my childish fears and march unafraid into the fray. But it would be a lie. A pretty big one. I turned fifty-nine in 2017, and I've been calling my hair "premature" gray (now very much, white) for a number of years. My wife informs me it's well past time to drop the adjective. Birthdays are supposed to be happy occasions, but they have aging lurking menacingly in the shadows. Human beings are afraid of aging. The more honest ones admit it. 

Since my untimely (humanly speaking) termination from decades of teaching (I was replaced by two people, neither with gray hair), I've found that in my flesh I am a very timorous person, fleeing when no one is pursuing, yet fleeing, nevertheless--running scared. It doesn't reveal itself in trembling lip, and constant glancing over my shoulder, not literally. But there are plenty of the internal tremblings, anxieties, uncertainties, worries, hand wringing, the tossing-and-turnings of raw fear on sleepless nights. And sometimes it begets impatience, frustration, even anger, which, like Spenser's Dragon Error, feeds on its own offspring and produces more of the same--Fear. 

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear," wrote CS Lewis in the opening lines of A Grief Observed, penned after the death of his wife in 1960, just three years before his own death. Lewis got so many things right, especially when we take into account that he had no formal theological training, and he didn't even have Ligonier and the ministry of the late RC Sproul "to bridge the gap between Sunday School and seminary." But someone did tell him about fear. God did. "Fear not," is the most ubiquitous imperative in the Word of God. Why? Because fear is the universal result of sin and the curse. It clutches at the innards of everybody. "The day you eat thereof, you shall surely die." And death, philosophy's great problem, terrifies all of us. "But timorous mortals start and shrink.../And fear to launch away," as Isaac Watts put it. 

What a happy thought for the New Year! Well, in an important sense it is a happy one. Owning our sin and its just consequence, death and fear of death, is the first principle of abandoning all hope in solving the problem on our own hook. There is no solving it apart from God.  "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble," wrote the Psalmist (46:1). Because God chose to make his habitation with us, in the incarnation, to be tempted in every way, like we are--including tempted to raw fear of suffering and death--because God in Christ is our ever-present help.,"Therefore we will not fear..." (46:2).   

Just as there is the Grand Exchange of my sin and guilt imputed to Christ on the cross, and His perfect obedience imputed to my account, making me forensically righteous before His holy Father, there is in the Good News an exchange of fear. "Fear not, O little flock the foe/ That madly seeks your overthrow./Dread not his rage and power," wrote German hymn writer Johann Altenburg. In Christ, my Mighty Fortress, fear of man in all its pernicious forms fades away. And in its place comes right fear of God. 

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding" (Proverbs 9:10). Right knowledge of ourselves as sinners before a Holy God who is justly angry with us for our sins produces the leading edge of right fear of God. God is good and we are not, so we fall down in terror and repent, crying to him for mercy. And then he purges us with the burning coal of true forgiveness. Then filled with grateful awe, we worship, we adore, we trust, we feed on, we live for, and, by grace alone, obey the glorious God who has stooped to rescue us from sin and death--and fear. 

I've never attempted to write a hymn on the theme of the fear of God before, but while reading through Proverbs and Table Talk for January 2018, I managed to write a hymn on the gracious blessing of fearing God, progressing, stanza-by-stanza, from the man, the woman, the sons, the daughters, the home, and the church that fears the Lord. My hope is that you will be blessed meditating on this important biblical theme with me. "How blessed is the man who fears the Lord... His heart is steady; he will not be afraid" (Psalm 112:1,8).

How blessed the man who fears the Lord!

Who daily feeds upon his Word,

And falls down at the mercy seat,

And casts his fears at Jesus’s feet.

How blessed is she who fears the Lord! 

Delighting, trusting in his Word:

She fears no danger, threat, or harm

While resting safe in Jesus’ arms.

How blessed are sons who fear the Lord!

Who hear and heed the Spirit’s Word.

No tyrant’s heel can hurt them here

Since they the Sovereign Lord revere.

How blessed when daughters fear the Lord!

And love God’s ways, his holy Word.

Disease and dying hold no fear

Since Christ who conquered death is near.

How blessed the home that fears the Lord!

Adoring the incarnate Word;

Like cherubim and seraphim,

In humble awe, God's praises hymn.

How blessed the church that fears the Lord!

Her Savior's work, her sure reward;

With wondrous voice, high praise repeats,

And bows in awe at Jesus' feet.

           Douglas Bond © January 2, 2018

Read and listen to more New Reformation Hymns at bondbooks.net where you can purchase Rise & Worship, Bond's recently released album with Greg Wilbur and Nathan Clark George. Follow Bond's podcast at blogtalkradio.com/thescriptorium