FFT Goes Live on Internet TV
Posted by admin | Filed under FFT2 TV, News
Good news for those of you with broadband connections. The Fantasy Fiction Tour is now on the air through Mogulus. This means our TV channel is broadcasting 24/7 in the sidebar on the right, playing all the video journals from 2007 and the new promo video for the 2008 Tour. Just click “Turn Me On!”
But wait, there’s more!
Not only will we be uploading the daily Video Journals each night of the tour like last year, but we’ll be airing LIVE from every event right here! You watch us at book stores and sit in on the panel discussions and live speaking sessions. You’ll even have the ability to IM us in real time! We’ll do our best to field your questions and respond to you right over the computer!
Check out the Official FFT TV Channel today!
Tags: FFT-TV, live, live broadcasting, mogulus, TV channel, web streaming
Sunday Prayer Day 8/31/08
Posted by sharonhinck | Filed under On Writing
Hello, tour prayer-supporters! We cherish you!
In addition to this weekly public posting of our prayer requests and praise reports, various authors and planners of the tour pray for and with each other in private emails and conversations as well. Last week, Wayne shared a “call to arms” with the tour members, and it was so potent and needed, I asked his permission to share it here. It might give you new ideas about how to pray for us all. AND it will probably stir a new passion to pray with vigor and faith for this adventure, as it did for me. Back to our regularly scheduled prayer requests next week! Blessings, — Sharon
Now - here’s Wayne:
Dear friends, fellow authors, and tour mates
I was praying with my wife tonight and just felt a heavy sense of need for our group. Some of us are battling illness or the illness of loved ones, some of us are battling clinical depression and anxiety, some of us are suddenly feeling overwhelmed with commitments that seemed innocent enough until they all came due at the same time. Some of us are having trouble sleeping. Some of us feel tired way too often. Some of us are distracted by all kinds of things and feeling very guilty about family time that has been lost.
And I’m also thinking about final decisions that have to be made for the Tour. Preparations, bookmarks, motorcoaches, airfares, pop-up signs, posters, etc. etc. All of the above and likely dozens of other things I couldn’t know for each of you are all weighing on our shoulders.
During this time, remember Jesus who said, “Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest for your souls.” I encourage you to take time out of your day or night and just curl up with Jesus. Tell Him you are burdened and ask for His rest.
The Word also tells us to “be anxious for nothing, but in all things through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, make your requests to God and the peace of God, which transcends understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” I confess to you, I’ve never been much of a prayer warrior. But I feel SO strongly that now I need to be…that we all need to be.
We are about to go on what could amount to the adventure of a lifetime. We will literally be assembling a team of knights and swordmaidens and going into battle in unfamiliar lands. The enemy of our souls has already shown us that he doesn’t want this to succeed. His minions will no doubt trouble us exceedingly between now and then and even during. Please let us pray for each other, for the kids and readers, for God’s will through our books to be done, and for the Kingdom to grow exponentially.
For those who weren’t there last tour, there was a time that we went to a church’s youth group–mostly older teens–and we each had time to read or share with them. It was amazingly powerful. And just before we left the room, we were all standing there in the doorway; we were garbed in cloaks and bearing swords…and I just couldn’t contain the emotion. “You did it God!” I thought to myself. “You put a sword in my hand, joined me up with some like-minded warriors, and sent me on an adventure!” I was so full of thanks and love I burst into tears as we walked out.
And now, there are 8 of us. This ROCKS!! God ROCKS!! … So I remind you that nothing can separate us from the Love of God, that those the Father has given Him, He will never cast away. We may take a beating over the next month or two, but we will not be destroyed.
So hear ye, hear ye: I call upon all of you and hereby issue a call to arms. Let us pray without ceasing and encourage and support each other. And let’s get ready to ROCK because God is a God who likes to surprise us.
Never alone.
-Wayne
FFT2 NEW Promo Video
Posted by admin | Filed under News, Videos
Thanks for helping us spread the word about the tour. Now you can show your friends what it’s all about with our new official Promo Video! Watch it, and then pass it on!
Tags: bryan davis, christopher hopper, donita k. paul, eric reinhold, fantasy fiction tour, fft2, grandath films and photography, jonathan rogers, l.b. graham, marketting, promo video, promotion, sharon hinck, wayne thomas batson, west coast
Villains & Conflict
Posted by lbgraham | Filed under On Writing
I believe it was Edith Hamilton in her classic work on mythology that suggested the purpose of the monsters in Greek myths was to give the heroes opportunities to demonstrate their greatness. Ie, the more powerful, terrifying and evil the creature, the more courageous, resourceful and wonderful the hero who delivered the world from that monster by slaying it. So, Perseus faces the gorgon and Theseus the minotaur and Hercules, the greatest of them all, faces twelve labors of “herculean” proportions.
For the gamers out there who don’t read Greek myths, perhaps you could think of this as the “bigger boss” theory of villains. When you finish a level in the video game you’re playing, you expect to have to defeat a ‘boss’ to move on to the next level. Generally, as the levels get more challenging and the game goes on, you expect the bosses to get more challenging, until you finally get to the end and have to fight the “biggest boss” of all.
Applying “big boss” theory to LOTR, we could say the Balrog, Saruman (while still in Orthanc), the Witch King of Angmar (lord of the Nazgul) and Shelob are all big bosses on the road to Mount Doom where the biggest boss of them all, Sauron is defeated. In my own series, The Binding of the Blade, the giant Ulutyr is the “boss” in book one, while in the rest of the story, the Grendolai Cheimontyr (the bringer of storms), the Kumatin and Farimaal all serve as bosses and Malek is of course, the “big boss.”
OK, now quickly to the point. This is a lighthearted way of saying all books need conflict & tension and fantasy is no exception. Creating cool villains for your heroes to overcome is one of the great challenges and pleasures of writing a fantasy story. It really is fun to design and then write about a good villain (if you will forgive the paradox of ‘good villain’). However, and this is the big however, for all of you working on fantasy stories of your own, don’t let the important and essential work of creating great villains for your story so occupy you that you forget or omit to give your protagonist internal conflict as well as external. Whether it is a moral dilemma or struggle like a temptation of some kind or a psychological struggle with something like self-doubt or whatever, internal conflict when written well adds extra layers of depth to your story. I think, personally, the best fantasy stories do both really well, where the characters face not only large obstacles without but challenges and turmoil within. This is a big part of why fantasy stories can be about other worlds yet connect with us so powerfully anyway.
I would be curious to hear from some of the other writers about either or both of these tasks - creating internal and external conflict for their characters. How’d you do it? Did you try to keep outdoing yourself by making bigger, meaner villains as you went along? Suggestions or tips or perhaps pitfalls to avoid for young writers seeking to write stories of their own?
Sunday Prayer Day - 8/24/08
Posted by sharonhinck | Filed under On Writing
Thank you for supporting us as we prepare for the tour. We all need your prayers!
From Bryan:
My wife, Susie, is sick. There is some concern that she might have Lyme disease. The tests aren’t in yet. And now she has to go to Maryland to help her parents, because her father is having surgery. He is the primary caregiver for Susie’s mother, who has advanced Alzheimer’s. Fortunately, my wife’s sister is going, too, so they can work together.
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From Eric:
Praise report – good news from cardiology tests.
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From Sharon:
Please pray for energy and strength to move forward in writing this week.
–
Dear Lord,
Thank you for the good purposes that you are working out in the preparations for this tour. We pray especially for Pam who is hard at work scheduling events and coordinating a million details, and Gregg who is communicating with all the publishers and sending out media packets. Please bless their efforts and open doors for them. We ask for favor with book stores, with media, and with potential sponsors. Arrange our transportation and the details of our travel, housing, events, and finances. We trust you to orchestrate wonderful meetings between authors and readers and bring encouragement to both. Thank you for promise that You will fulfill Your purposes for us! Amen.
Friction and Fiction
Posted by jonathanrogers | Filed under On Writing
The thoughts below are a lightly edited version of a long comment I posted to the Speculative Faith blog a couple of years ago. E. Stephen Burnett had written a post about research and fact checking in fiction. He was exploring the question of how much a fiction author is allowed to “cheat” when it comes to the facts of the “real world.” Let’s say you’ve got a character trekking across a remote region of Sweden, and for plot purposes you need him to come to a village. Is it okay to invent a village, even though you know from looking at the map that there isn’t one there?
Mr. Burnett wasn’t talking about fantasy fiction–obviously, in fantasy fiction, every village is made up–but it got me thinking about one of the dangers of fantasy fiction writing: the seeming frictionless-ness of the process. When you’re not limited by “facts”–historical facts, geographical facts, anthropological facts, to name three–you face a freedom that can hurt your storytelling if you don’t manage it. Living in a world without friction sounds like fun. But friction, for all its aggravations, is one of the things that makes it possible to put one foot in front of the other and go in a particular direction instead sliding around like a hog on ice. Without friction, you would fall down and never get up again.
Because the “the facts” aren’t imposed on a fantasy author, the author has to establish limitations (or friction, as I’m calling it) on his or her storytelling. In the piece below I touch on some of the self-imposed limits I observed in the Wilderking books. I’d be interested to hear about some of the limitations that you fellow writers have imposed on your storytelling–and perhaps times you’ve chosen to break your own rules.
It occurs to me that the introduction to my post is now almost as long as my post. Oh well. Here it is:
In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis describes hell’s housing crisis. The problem isn’t that houses are hard to come by, but that they are too easy to come by. In Lewis’s hell, all you have to do is imagine a new house–a little farther out from the city center–and there it is. Are you quarrelling with your neighbors? No need to work things out, just think yourself a new house. The very frictionless-ness of the process drains vitality out of the place.
A temptation in fiction–and I think it’s probably a stronger temptation in fantasy fiction than elsewhere–is to keep thinking new houses rather than actually wrestling down narrative problems presented by the material. Let’s see, my hero needs to overcome a difficulty right about now, so how about we invent a red-antlered, venomous, mountain-dwelling skink to bite him? Of course, invented animals are half the fun in fantasy fiction–I don’t mean to be a killjoy–but I do mean to suggest that the discipline of storytelling can break down if you give yourself permission to be too “frictionless-ness” in your creative process. Storytelling is problem-solving. Just as your heroes are getting themselves into messes and having to get themselves out, so are you as a writer. Nobody wants to read a story about a hero with magic bullets; writers ought to pocket their magic bullets too.
I love essays–or, as they’re sometimes called, creative non-fiction–because an essayist is forced to take the stuff of real life and find the meaning in it. The essayist’s discipline, in the end, is a worldview: there’s meaning in this world, and it peeps out in the facts on the ground. The real world is a web of metaphors for an essayist, everything representing truths much larger than itself. They’re stuck with the facts of real world, but that limitation–that friction, if you will–forces them to dig out meaning they might have missed if they could just make stuff up.
There’s no village near a particular mountainous region in Sweden? A fiction writer is free to invent one. Or he can say, Why isn’t there a village there? What is there instead? Maybe something much mroe interesting than a village; maybe trappers’ camps or smugglers’ lairs. The real world can unfold all sorts of possibilities if you let it–if you don’t go thinking new houses too quickly.
When I wrote the Wilderking books, I set the story in an imaginary kingdom in which the climate, topography, flora, fauna–the whole natural world–was exactly like Georgia and Florida. One reason was that I just couldn’t bring myself to invent a whole new world. But an equally important reason was that I believed that limiting myself to the real facts of the natural world would serve my storytelling well, even in a “fantasy” genre. As I read about the Okefinokee Swamp or Providence Canyons or Florida Caverns, new subplots unfolded left and right. I discovered that fact-checking wasn’t a necessary evil, but integral to the storytelling process. It seems strange, I know, to talk about “fact-checking” in a fantasy book. But the facts of this world are forever revealing truths that outstrip the world’s ability to contain them.
Sunday Prayer Day - 8/17/08
Posted by sharonhinck | Filed under Prayer Support, The Authors
Thank you to everyone willing to be part of this tour by supporting us in prayer!
Every Sunday, I’ll post updated prayer requests and praise reports from the authors and tour organizers.
Feel free, if you are so led, to write a prayer about one or more of these requests in the comment section. It’s a way to have a little “prayer service” together via the cyberworld.
—
From Wayne:
1. Continued health for whole family.
2. Negotiations continue about my next series.
3. I start the new teaching year this Monday; I really want to honor God with my efforts.
4. Tour promotion, press, sales, and spiritual impact.
—
From Sharon:
1. Ability to move forward on current writing project in spite of health issues and distractions
2. My children - especially one son bound for college and one daughter starting back to high school next week
—
From Eric:
Please pray for my wife, Kim, who is going through several physical and emotional issues right now. She was kicked by a horse (at the end of our vacation) in the shin and still in some pain – coupled with the fact that she got food poisoning yesterday and had to go to the doctor for a shot to stop vomiting. Getting back into “regular” life, with school starting next week, has created quite a bit of anxiety. Also, pray for our church (First Baptist Sweetwater) as we have been searching for a new pastor and the search committee is bring a pastor for the weekend (in two weeks) for the church to meet and vote on.
—
From Donita:
I need prayer for continuing good health and building my stamina.
And a praise! I got my manuscript in to the publisher.
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From Gregg (one of the tour coordinators/publicists):
Please ask the Lord for favor as we place press kits and book review copies in the mail to west coast and national Christian and secular media. Pray that the fun, inspiring and unifying message of Motiv8 Fantasy Fiction Tour would be received and acknowledged by the best reporter/producer/editor/guest contacts and that the message would pique the media’s interest in a way that will move them to give it generous, positive coverage. Ultimately, ask that the Lord will be glorified and many people will be drawn to Him as the fantasy authors, their books, their publishers, and the Christian fantasy fiction genre receive priority attention in top-tier mainstream media. Pray, too, for unity, clarity of message and significant coverage as publicists from each publishing house pitch the Motiv8 story to their contacts along the tour route.
Tags: Add new tag, Prayer Support
The Naming of Names
Posted by lbgraham | Filed under On Writing
Over the course of the last two months, each of the Motiv8 authors has introduced himself or herself with an interview. For the next two months, running right up to the actual ‘08 Fantasy Fiction Tour itself, we will feature each week a discussion about some key aspect of Fantasy writing. We begin this week with this post, “The Naming of Names.”
Those who read more broadly in Fantasy and Sci-Fi might recognize this title. I took it from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. “The Naming of Names” is the story/chapter that describes how settlers from earth brought “earth names” with them and imposed them on the Martian landscapes & bestowed them on the newly created towns as they quickly spread over the face of the Red Planet. It’s a critical section, in a way, because it subtly suggests that the “earth names” didn’t fit the Martian world, and so it plays into Bradbury’s larger theme, which was a critique of earth society in the atomic era (the book is from about 1950 and like a lot of books from that time, it wrestles with the destructive forces unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) We’ve failed to learn to live at peace with one another and our world, Bradbury implies, and so the narrative questions the wisdom of duplicating that same society on Mars.
So what’s my point? Names matter, is my point. When Herman Melville set out to write a story about a monomaniacal sea captain in search of the great white whale, he didn’t just “coincidentally” name him “Ahab” - a reference to one of the most notoriously wicked Israelite kings. The name had meaning, as do many of the other names in Moby Dick with clear biblical allusions behind them.
Well, what about fantasy? Aren’t all those names just made up? Do they have meaning? Are they arbitrary or intentional? These are the kinds of questions that hopefully some or most of the other authors will address in their own way when they have time this week, so you can get a variety of perspectives. For now, I will give you a glimpse at my own view of selecting names.
In order to be brief, I’ll simplify my “process” for selecting names by dividing them into three basic tiers.
First, there are the names you create & use simply because you think they “sound right.” Think about the orcs and goblins and the like in Tolkien, with their guttural, unpleasant names. Think about how the Elven names flow and are almost musical. Mordor simply sounds like an unhappy place. These can also be the more obviously descriptive terms like “Mount Doom.” Face it, LOTR would read a lot differently if Frodo had spent three books trying to get to Mount Sunshine in The Happy Valley. That just wouldn’t work. (Of course, Tolkien invented his own languages, so you could argue there was more than “sound” at work in his names, but there’s a reason the language of Mordor sounds so nasty & the language of the Elves doesn’t…)
In my stories, this happens with both good and bad characters. Some names sound appealing to me, so I use them for good guys, and others not so much, so I use them for unpleasant ones. For example, I like “J” sounds, so I have names like Joraiem, Aljeron and Benjiah used for heroes.
Second, some names have a specific story or reference behind them, but pushing it for a deeper meaning probably doesn’t take you very far. I like the name “Jean Valjean” from Victor Hugo’ s Les Miserables, and so my wisdom figure in The Binding of the Blade has a name that sounds similar, Valzaan. (If “Valjean” and “Valzaan” don’t sound similar when you say them, you’re not saying one of them right.:) I like Tolkien, so in some places I included allusions to his work, as a tribute so to speak. Further, I called one particularly nasty breed of monsters “Grendolai” as a tribute to the first of the three monsters of Beowulf, Grendel. These are just a few samples of names with specific stories but no really deep meaning.
Third, some names are meant to have symbolic or deeper meaning. When John White wrote The Tower of Geburah, a Christian fantasy work from a generation ago, he named his land “Anthropos” and the king of that land “Kardia.” Anthropos is the Greek word for “man” and Kardia means “heart.” He was making the spiritual layer of his story clear with his transparent name choices.
For me, in BOTB, there are many examples of this as well. I created my own version of the story of “the Fall” and I named my evil Titans who mirror fallen angels after pagan deities referenced in the Old Testament. So I have names like Malek and Charnosh, which are references to Molech and Chemosh. I named the God of Kirthanin “Allfather” as a reference to Norse Mythology. Some Norse tales refer to Odin as Allfather, but others (some say from the time when northern Europe was being Christianized) use Allfather to refer to a God who is the creator and above all the lesser gods of Asgard. I used that term because I saw it as a word others had used long ago in this world to come to grips with a God who rules all things, a sovereign God, not a petty deity.
There are many other names I could use as examples, but this post is long enough. Hopefully you see that names matter, and that in some ways, names in Fantasy they can be especially challenging. They need to sound right (convey pleasant or unpleasant things), be unusual (we can’t have Fred and Darlene as our hero & heroine) but still “work” for the reader. Further, names also provide opportunities to add layers of meaning and depth.
I think readers intuitively grasp the importance of names, in part because I get a lot of questions about them. At this point though, I’ll finish by encouraging the young writers out there not to dismiss too quickly the importance of names. And now, I’ll sign off so some of the others can weigh in as their schedules during the week allow with their thoughts about names.
L.B.
Meet the Author - Episode 8: Jonathan Rogers
Posted by jonathanrogers | Filed under On Writing
To those of you who log in first thing Monday morning to see the latest Motiv8 ‘Meet the Author’ feature, I beg your indulgence. But here it is (or here I am?)–the final installment of ‘Meet the Author.’ The questions and answers below are cobbled together from three of my favorite interviews from recent years: from Gina Holmes’ Novel Journey blog, Sally Apokedak’s Children’s Publishing News, and the CBD website.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I live in Nashville, Tennessee, where my wife Lou Alice and I are raising six kids. I originally came here to go to Vanderbilt University, where I got a PhD in 17th century poetry. I’m a native of Warner Robins, Georgia. I got an English degree at Furman University in South Carolina, where I met my wife.
You grew up near the swamp, right?
Actually, I grew up in a comfortable ranch house in the middle of town. But I had ample opportunity to explore the swamps and riverbottoms in Georgia’s southern half. For whatever reason, swamps have always fascinated me. One of the pleasures of writing your own book is that you can give people reason to be interested in the things you’re interested in!
What were your favorite books when you were a kid?
I mostly read things like animal encyclopedias. There was a grocery store around the corner from our house that was always having some kind of promotion. For a couple of years there, if you spent a certain amount of money at the grocery story you could get that month’s volume of a 20-volume animal encyclopedia. I doubt each volume was even a hundred pages long. I would just go nuts when we got a new volume—devour it in a day or two. I was always spouting off little-known facts: “Did you know the screaming hairy armadillo fends off predators by spraying them with super-concentrated urine?”
But I digress. You were asking about my favorite books as a child. Animal encyclopedias. The regular encyclopedia. Stuart Little. I also loved a history book called This Is Your Georgia. I actively disliked the Little House books, which is something I can’t explain. Now they’re the kind of thing I love, and I should think I would have loved them when I was little. There’s no accounting for taste.
Tell about your journey to publication.
After I got out of academics I took a job at a technology company for four or five years. It was a great place to work in most ways, but as the years went by the total disconnect between my talents and abilities on the one hand and my work on the other was just taking it out of me. It was extremely draining to spend 45-50 hours a week doing work for which I had no particular talent, while the talents I did have sat idle. I felt like I was becoming another person—or, more to the point, I felt like I was becoming nobody in particular.I reached a turning point in January of 2002. In one week, my boss gave me a terrible review at work, and my mother was diagnosed with lymphoma—a development that put my work troubles in perspective and also gave me occasion for much soul-searching. I decided life was too short to live the way I had been living. Friday of that week I drove straight from the hospital in Atlanta to my office in Nashville for the face-to-face portion of my annual review, where I resigned my position.
One way or another I was going to make a living as a writer. I figured that would mean writing mostly advertising copy and technical manuals, but I hoped I could figure out a way to include some books in the mix.
The last of my vacation days I spent in Orlando with my best friends from college. It did me a world of good to sort things out with people who still thought of me as the person I had been ten years earlier. And just being in swampy Florida seemed to stir up some creativity that had lain dormant. After a canoe trip down an alligator-infested river, I went to a bagel shop and outlined the story that became The Wilderking Trilogy.
I went home and wrote the first chapter of The Bark of the Bog Owl and showed it to agent John Eames, who was a friend of a friend. I told John, “My wife is pregnant with our fifth child. I’m in no position to do art for art’s sake. Does this look like the sort of thing you could sell?” John said he thought he could sell it if I could write a whole book that lived up to the promise of that chapter.
I think that meeting was late May 2002. I wrote The Bark of the Bog Owl throughout the rest of 2002… I finished it between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Starting in January of 2003, John Eames pitched it to about a dozen publishers as the first book of a trilogy. A couple of publishers made offers in the spring, and we settled on Broadman and Holman.
The David story is so rich, first to last. Eugene Peterson’s book Leap Over a Wall does an incredible job of teasing out the narrative possibilities in the life of David. But there were two aspects of the story that really jumped out at me. The first is the gap between the Now and the Not Yet. Many long years pass between the day David learns he’s going to be king and the day he actually becomes king. A whole lot happens in that gap. Over and over again David is called to act decisively, confidently. And yet, wouldn’t there always have been the slightest doubt? Did the prophet get it right? Am I really destined to be king? And if I am destined to be king, what are we waiting for? What does loyalty look like in such a situation?But over against that doubt, we have the certainty of a boy who hasn’t yet learned how to be a hypocrite. It was the grown-ups who taught David that the Living God would deliver them from the Philistines. But when David showed up at the battlefield, it was the grown-ups who were paralyzed with fear. It took a certain naïveté not to be intimidated by Goliath.
In Bark of the Bog Owl, we are introduced to Dobro and the Feechies. How did you come up with the idea for the Feechie people—their distinct culture?
Believe it or not, there’s a person out there who inspired Dobro. I came back to my hometown for a couple of summers, while I was in the PhD program at Vanderbilt, to work for a remodeling crew. I worked with a fellow named Jake, who lived way out in the woods somewhere. Most nights he went out hunting wild boar in the riverbottom forests. He didn’t carry a gun. He had some dogs that would catch the hog, and he’d whirl in with a length of rope and tie it up. He and his buddies would carry the boar out of the woods on a pole, alive. He came to work crying one morning because an alligator had eaten his dog. I thought, “Wow, what a world this is; I’m living this suburban, academic life, but I’m working shoulder to shoulder with a guy who lives this way!”
That’s the idea of the Feechiefolks—their wild existence is buzzing in the trees around the civilizers, and the civilizers don’t quite realize it. I had thought, back when I worked with Jake, “If I ever write a book, I’d love to have Jake in it.” And there he is. Dobro is a bit exaggerated—Jake wasn’t quite that wild, but he was pretty wild. That notion of valuing physical courage that’s so important to the Feechiefolks came from Jake and his crowd. I might value physical courage, but I’m not going go out in the woods and tie up a wild boar!
Your books have a sense of adventure, nobility and honor that may remind a reader of The Lord of the Rings. Was that one of your influences?
Sure—especially in The Secret of the Swamp King. Although it’s hard to say where The Wilderking is influenced by The Lord of the Rings and where The Wilderking is influenced by the same things that influenced The Lord of the Rings. With any quest story, your plot structure is to a certain extent laid out for you already—it’s about going “there and back again,” as Tolkien put it.
Speaking of Tolkien and influence, I love his phrase, “the leaf-mould of the mind,” which contains a whole theory of artistic influence. Everything you read, hear, experience goes into your mind where it roils around and decomposes, like compost (or leaf-mould) into something that’s no longer recognizable as itself, but is dark and rich, ready to nourish and give sprout to something new. In other words, we don’t always know what influences us. I remember reading a review of one of the Wilderking books in which the reviewer made a remark about the obvious influence of Mark Twain on my writing. It had never dawned on me, but I had to agree: of course, Huckleberry Finn was a major influence on The Wilderking, even if I hadn’t realized it.
The sense of courage, nobility and honor also came through in your books, which may also remind a reader of The Lord of the Rings.
You’ve got the Feechiefolks and you’ve got Aidan and the other civilizers, and though there are many things that separate them, they do share a sense of nobility and honor. The Feechiefolks’ sense of honor may be a little skewed, since it starts from some peculiar presuppositions, but it is the strongest social adhesive in their society, which to us seems very wild and unorganized. For instance, rudeswap, whether or not we 
think it’s a good policy, is certainly the very basis of some of their relationships. They might fight with each other, but they’re also going to fight alongside each other.
Virtue is one of my favorite words—when it entered the language, a good synonym would be ‘manliness’—the word meant ‘power’ or ‘strength’ before it ever meant ‘good behavior.’ Virtue is a kind of power, of course (John Milton is very strong on this point).
You obviously believe children are intelligent and creative beings – do you prefer to write for children/teens or adults? Why?
C.S. Lewis remarked that any children’s book that’s not worth reading as an adult isn’t worth reading as a child either. I agree whole-heartedly. When I wrote the Wilderking, I was writing what I thought was funny and interesting, not what I thought kids would find funny and interesting. I do the same thing when writing for adults. I write what I find interesting on the assumption that somebody else will find it interesting too.
What age range did you have in mind when you wrote this series?
When I go to a school to read, I find that the first and second graders will listen and enjoy it, but it’s the third through fifth graders who really respond. They get the jokes and laugh. When I read aloud, I’m not expecting the kids’ jaws to drop because of some new wisdom that they’ve gained, but I do want them to laugh at the funny parts! The kids that are a little bit older start to do that, and I also get great response from middle schoolers. I was actually picturing a little younger audience than what has been responding to it. For me it’s hard to know what age range I’m writing for. I write what I find to be interesting or funny; people of many different ages find the same things interesting and funny. The goal was definitely to write something that parents wouldn’t mind sitting down and reading with their kids. I think I accomplished that goal. I’ve gotten good response from grown-ups; they like The Wilderking too.
What do you hope that kids and adults, too, take away from reading this series?
I would boil it down to the value of wildness. We spend so much time telling kids, especially boys, to calm down and sit down. Even I do it: “Sit down and be quiet, boys! Can’t you see I’m trying to write a book about the value of wildness?” But boys’ wildness isn’t just something we need to discipline out of them; it’s something that can be channeled and used for God’s glory, and for the good of the people around them. I guess the most important theme is this notion that wildness is one of those things that’s not good or bad, it just is. What really matters is what you do with it.
There is the ongoing debate in Christian fiction on the overtness of the gospel in novels. You’ve used allegory and hints, but no outright salvation plan on the back page. What are you hoping to accomplish through your stories?
A lot of times when people use the phrase “the gospel” they’re talking about evangelism. Of course that’s an extremely important part of the gospel, but it’s not the whole gospel. Once you’re converted, you’ve still got the rest of your life stretching out before you. And the fact of God’s grace in your life ought to impact every decision you make. It ought to shape every interaction. It ought to define your attitude toward work and family and community. That’s the gospel too. It’s true that there are no conversions in the Wilderking (actually, there’s an implied conversion in Book 3)—but I hope the gospel is pretty overt.
Parenting – did it prepare you for the trilogy?
My kids are always reminding me what it was like to be a kid. That’s a big help when you’re writing children’s fiction. But the main way parenting prepared me to write The Wilderking was simply that it gave me an audience to write to. I love having somebody specific to write to. I know what my kids like…and I know there’s a good chance other kids will like the same thing. Also, once I got well into The Bark of the Bog Owl, the kids were demanding more chapters. Not knowing if the book would ever find a publisher, it was good to have somebody who was demanding that I finish the thing. They held me accountable—pretty loudly at times.
How did your educational background—especially your PhD in literature—prepare you for the Wilderking books?
I don’t often doubt whether what I’ve written is good enough. I usually succeed in writing the sort of thing I like to read; and since that’s the best way I know of judging whether a piece of writing is “good enough,” I rarely experience doubts at that level.What I do doubt—every day—is whether or not I’m faithfully pursuing my calling. What is an appropriate use of my talents? Should I spend next three hours writing the best prose I can write, or should I devote that time to self-promotion? I can rationalize either choice. If I apply my talents toward writing bank brochures (something I frequently do), does that count as pursuing my calling? After all, feeding my family is part of my calling too.
I’ve got a couple of novels I want to write—I would even say I feel called to write them—but I don’t have any reason to believe they would help me provide for my family. What constitutes faithfulness in that situation? And what does a string of rejections mean? Is it a fiery trial for the purpose of hardening my resolve, or is it a signal that it’s time to go back to the cubicle?
What’s the best advice you’ve heard on writing/publication?
I don’t know if this is the best advice I’ve ever heard, but at least it’s something you may not have heard before: if you want some serious training as a writer, get a job writing advertising copy. I know it sounds pedestrian. But every day you’re forced to try out several different voices, speak to several different audiences about several different subjects, some of which are so dull you can’t imagine saying anything interesting.
But you need to get paid, so—lo and behold—you find you’re able to come up with something after all. And deadlines…sometimes you have 2 or 3 in a single day. Obviously, being a copywriter isn’t going to teach you everything you need to know about writing. But I’ve learned things about my own capabilities that I could have never learned from a writing class or seminar. Yoking my creative tendencies to the matter-of-fact, professional approach required of a copywriter has done me a world of good.
Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block. Lawyers don’t get lawyer’s block. They get up in the morning and do their jobs. Are you a writer? Then get up in the morning and write.
I once had a well-meaning person from a marketing department advise me to turn the character Dobro Turtlebane into a girl. Anybody who is familiar with the Wilderking books will know how funny that is.
Do you have a dream for the future of your writing, something you would love to accomplish?
Sometimes I hear from a person I haven’t seen or talked to in ten or fifteen years, and they say, “When I read your book, I knew it was you. I could hear your voice in it.” I love knowing that when I’m dead and gone, my grandchildren and great-grandchildren can read my books and hear me talking about the things that are most important to me. They can read The World According to Narnia and have a pretty good idea of my theology. They can read the Wilderking books and have a pretty good idea of what I think is funny or interesting.
Our “family verse” is Philippians 1:9-10: “And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve the things that are excellent…” I love that phrase, “approve the things that are excellent.” Sometimes we’re called upon to disprove the things that are wrong, but on a day-to-day basis, I believe it’s more important that we approve the things that are excellent. It’s always my prayer for my family that we might demonstrate an excellent way of living. It’s the same with my writing; I hope it’s excellent, and I hope that through it I’m approving of the things that are excellent.
Sunday Prayer Day - 8/3/08
Posted by sharonhinck | Filed under On Writing
Thank you to everyone who is praying for God to be glorified and His work to be done during the tour.
Here are a few specific requests:
From Bryan:
Praise that I finished book 3 of the Echoes from the Edge series. Now the editing process begins, and I’ll start writing another book.
Susie and I will be traveling to Montana from July31 through August 5 for mountain trail hiking. Pray for safety for us and for our children while we’re gone.
From Wayne:
Prayers for full health.
Prayers for pending negotiations with publishers.
From Sharon:
Thanking God for progress on a new book
Prayer needed for encouragement in the writing journey
Please pray for the upcoming release of Stepping Into Sunlight – that God would get it into the hands of readers and open doors for it.
