Weekly Writing Report

This week I had the opportunity to lunch with a good friend of mine who read my story "Moving On," offered some suggestions for polishing it off, and said he was "impressed." I ran with his suggestions and feel the story is solid now. I submitted it to Dialogue last Saturday. It's surreal letting go of a story that I've worked so hard on to get right. But it's time to move on to other pieces. Haha. No pun intended.

I worked some on "The Funeral of Sterling W. Booth." It's another Mormon-themed story. I have one more section to complete before I consider the "first draft" done. I tend to build a work a block at a time. I suppose that's unremarkable, but I have a hard time just writing straight through. I am trying to tame my self-editor to overcome this start-and-stop process. Alas, you work with what you got.

Not much progress on NSG. It's evident that I'm going to have to bear down and just wake up early in order to fit significant, uninterrupted writing sessions in. Otherwise, I'm just stealing time here and there.

The graphic artist who is preparing my cover for "Cocked" is almost done, so I hope to self-publish that story in the next few weeks through Smashwords and Amazon.

Well, write on!

Photo by MAE

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Weekly Writing Report

These past two weeks have been consumed by my day-job spilling over into the night, so not much to report in the way of writing.

The first part of the week of the 20^th I was in Chicago on a business trip, but found some time to work on my short story "The Funeral of Sterling W. Booth." (No time to tour, but definitely want to visit again sometime.) Beyond that, I gathered some suggestions from a few readers as to how to improve my story "Moving On." Most seemed to like it overall. Meanwhile, the novel has been on the back burner. I hope to bring it forward starting this next week. I have made some scribbles in my notebook concerning the next part of the current scene I'm working on.

I am progressing in my reading of Roderick Hudson by Henry James. This is the novel that he considers his first. I like the pairing of the two main characters, Rowland and Roderick, in a patron-artist relationship, and I am eager to see how it ends. I am at the part where Christina Light has been introduced and Roderick is sculpting her bust.

One thing I am learning from James is pacing. He presents a scene in detail, and then either summarizes the events of an intervening period or simply says, "Two days later . . . ." He concentrates on character development and how the choices of his characters move the events along. To a modern reader, some of his sentences may seem interminably long, but I enjoy them. Each is a journey in itself.

I am also reading Don Quixote, The Tree House by Douglas Thayer, Lysis by Plato, Fiction Writer's Workshop by Josip Novakovich, and I have just started On Writing by Stephen King. I know, I know. I'm trying to stick to my list of a couple posts ago, but I have A.D.D when it comes to literature sometimes.

Well, I have some time to write, so I'm switching to that now.

Photo by Horia Varlan

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A Lost Argument Review

A Lost Argument by Therese Doucet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked the dramatic, traditional narrative trajectory of Part I. It pits an innocent, college-aged Mormon woman against real arguments to her faith. I was also riveted by the love story. At first, I felt tricked by a particular scene toward the end of Part I, but I have since thought that it had the appropriate effect of emphasizing in the reader's mind just how much Marguerite longed for being loved and wanted. The author handles the characters and scenes in Part I well, maintaining a balance between all the philosophical ideas Marguerite learns about and the pace of the narrative.

Initially, I thought the episodic structure of Part II causes the work as a whole to flag, because the momentum of Part I is lost. The narrative is built up in Part I based on certain cause-and-effect situations that come to a climax (no pun intended). Part II, conversely, seems to wander. There is more analysis-like writing in the form of journal entries than there is mimesis of actual events. But that idea of wandering may be the author's point with Part II. Marguerite’s life back at BYU is a kind of wandering through a literal wilderness. In the end, it was a pleasure to be privy to Marguerite’s journal entries and to follow her in her quest to learn about and ultimately define what faith means to her.

The diction of the work is straightfoward; sometimes poetic, sometimes breezy. The latter is appropriately characteristic of Marguerite. Her mind races with thoughts. Perhaps what I appreciate the most about Marguerite as a character is her unbridled honesty. The poetic descriptions of the various settings in the work are fresh and reinforce the mood of the scene. I’m partial to works with a lyrical style and intertextual depth. This work had lyrical moments, certainly, moreso in Part II than in Part I, but is rather matter-of-fact as a whole, the very thing that Marguerite complains about of her poems. The title tends to give away what direction the story will go, but that may be all right, because discriminating Mormon readers often want to know what they’re getting into.

As I neared the end, I fully expected Marguerite to sustain her faith in Mormonism with the faith quest she had begun, with Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, or his idea of infinite resignation. Indeed, I was surprised while reading Part II that she has so much faith in the idea that she can find her own faith through researching its history in human communities. It was, in itself, a fascinating trajectory. Marguerite’s decision to leave Mormonism comes somewhat sudden to me, but considering that before that point in the story, her feelings of alienation in Mormon communities are based on thinking from lived experience rather than knowledge of the religion's history, it's no wonder that once she discovers the latter, all arguments against leaving are soon overthrown. She can choose to stay only if she, Kierkegaardian-like, resigns herself to the Mormon way of life. Some hands find the glove of Mormonism a comfortable fit, others rather tight. I wish Marguerite and her creator the best.

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Weekly Writing Report

I completed my "final" draft (there's always hope) of "Moving On," a short story about a return missionary who comes home to find that he must deal with some choices his father has made that he doesn't agree with. It's a story about marriage, tolerance, and dealing with change.

I also wrote some more for the first draft of my novel, NSG. I found that I need to add the philosophers Kierkegaard and Sarte to my reading list, because a thread running through this work is the idea of "authenticity," and what that means to the characters.

Finally, I made some more notes on a short story I'm titling, "Inversion." I've started it, and I'm excited to see how it turns out.

Well, that's it.

Read, write, execute!

Photo by Denise Krebs

Noticeable Themes In My Scribbles

When you write long enough, you begin to notice themes or patterns surfacing in your writing. My scribbles over the years have taken the Hmong and the Mormon cultures as their subject, respectively, and with that, I can't help but be aware that there are certain things that I obsess about.

Hmong

An ethnic group from Southeast Asia, the Hmong emigrated to America, as well as to other countries, after Laos fell to the communists in 1975. Between 1953 and 1975, thousands of Hmong helped the United States fight a secret war in Laos against the North Vietnamese Army and the Pathet Lao.

I learned the Hmong culture and language by working with them for two years in the Sacramento area as an LDS missionary ("the Mormons"). Since that time, I have kept up on the language and culture. My Hmong fiction has tended to explore aspects of the culture that I find worthy of change (e.g., women's rights, youth gangs, commercialization of New Year's, Christians v. Animists, etc.), as well as to emphasize the cultural loss and connectivity the Hmong have experienced as they have become assimilated into their host Western society, despite their best efforts not to be.

Some may think that as a "white skin" I should not point out flaws in the Hmong culture. I would answer that until the Hmong have a literary voice of their own that produces serious fiction about their experience, it may be a benefit to have someone who understands both cultures serve as a bridge between them. (Some of the Hmong youth and young adults have made and are making artistic efforts to present their own story, like in the literary magazine, Paj Ntaub Voice. I applaud that and hope that it continues.)

I have drafts of several Hmong-themed stories, but most are not quite ready. In the past, there haven't been many outlets to publish fiction about the Hmong, but with the coming of the e-publication age, this has changed. Look for my story "Cocked" as an e-publication soon.

Mormon

The other domain of my fictional creations has been that of Mormon culture. While at BYU, I studied creative writing under Douglas H. Thayer and, if I learned anything from him, he taught me that serious Mormon fiction is possible, and that writing about Mormon culture and Mormonism doesn't have to perpetuate the Pollyanna worldview of much of mainstream Mormon fiction (i.e., Deseret Books). In Doug's words, serious Mormon fiction is "Fiction that explores contemporary Mormon life as it is lived, not as we pretend that it is or should be."

In my efforts to write serious Mormon fiction, I find myself looking to Dostoevsky for inspiration. I have always liked the way his characters struggle with faith and doubt. In The Brothers Karamazov, he has the faithful Alyosha and the doubting Ivan dramatize that veritable Yin-and-Yang connection between the two extremes. This struggle and the relationship between the two is definitely a theme in my fiction, for better or worse. (Faith and doubt grapple, tumbling through darkness.) My novel-in-progress, No Sacred Grove, explores this dialectic. If your faith survives a "long night of darkness," it's the stronger for it. Sometimes faith wins out, sometimes doubt, but the wrestling is a process.

I hope to take up other subjects for my fiction in the future, but we'll see. These are the worlds I know best so far.

Photo by Julie Jordan Scott

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