Or maybe you’re just indifferent.

Whatever the case, I don’t think Stephenie Meyer’s going away any time soon; and with the highly anticipated release of Summit Entertainment’s Film—coming tomorrow to a theater near you!—it’s increasingly difficult to escape the hype.

In mid-September, Ellen Degeneres had Meyer on her show to talk Twilight (though they didn’t discuss anything that hadn’t already been said and that’s not readily available on Meyer’s website). Last week, Entertainment Weekly dubbed Meyer “Entertainer of the Year” and roughly two weeks before that, they headlined an in-depth interview with the writer “about the Rob Pattinson casting controversy, Breaking Dawn’s mixed reception, the deal with Edward and Bella’s big [onscreen] kiss, and what she’s working on next.” And this past weekend, USA Weekend’s featured story was “Twilight: The Story Behind this Season’s Biggest Page-to-Screen Sensation” in which Brian Truitt calls Meyer “publishing’s newest literary superstar.”

As a student of (Mormon) literature and culture, as a cultural/literary critic, and in my capacity as creator and editor (with Laura) of Reading Until Dawn, an online literary journal devoted to discussing Meyer and her work (still soliciting submissions, by the way!), this cultural excitement/investment/passion (however you choose to see it) intrigues—and baffles—me. Hence, when Truitt asks, “What […] is the appeal of [Meyer’s] […] dark vampire tales?”, I can’t be completely content with the answer he gives us (right from Meyer’s mouth): “We love to be scared,” she says. “But most of the monsters that you see are disgusting. They are usually oozing something. Vampires are the only ones who are dangerous and scary, and, at the same time, they’re hot.”

Aside from vampires being, in Meyer’s eyes, non-disgusting, non-oozing monsters that are, at the same time, dangerous, scary, and hot, what rests beneath our cultural fascination with Twilight? In my introduction to the first edition of Reading Until Dawn, I point to the realism of the novels’ world and to their “narcotic effect” on readers—on the “physiological response” they seem to evoke. And in a short article that’s docketed for the Summer ’09 issue of Dialogue, I intimate the story’s ties to the always popular Gothic tradition, briefly reading Meyer’s vampires against Freud’s notion of the uncanny, a psychological concept that ties deeply to our experiences with the literarily sublime and the emotion of terror. In addition, William points to the erotic attraction of the books.

In honor (as it were) of Twilight’s birth into cinematic reality, what do you AMV readers think? What rests beneath the incessant appeal of Meyer’s world?

These fall mornings, to get blood going to my brain, I walk out into the desert near my house.  A few days ago I went up onto a nearby ATV route that beats a bare path south.  This I followed a short distance, heading to a spot having clear views east to Sleeping Ute Mountain in Colorado, southeast to Shiprock in New Mexico, and south-southeast to the Carrizo Mountains in Arizona.

Heavily traveled wildlife trails intersected mine—crusted, salmon-colored soil deer hooves had minced, coming and going.  Since the Hunter’s Moon in October, animal traffic across the mesa has shifted from sparse to concentrated and diverse.  Everything is on the move, especially the deer, who are flowing down with the last of the water from their summer range on the Abajos, heading to their winter range around the mountains’ shins and down into the desert canyons.  All summer, the history animals write in dust showed only occasional Cervidae passage, their cloven hoof prints.  Now, the parchment shows constant streams of deer flowing back and forth, up and down.  Often on morning walks I hear or see them around me, snorting or bounding for cover.

This time, though, something different.  As I neared my view point, I came upon a mule deer, a doe, standing in the open less than fifty feet away.  She stood broadside to me, a posture that has particular meaning in the animal world, though I haven’t worked out quite what.  By the time I saw her, her senses had already fallen fully upon me.  Her gaze was open and inquiring.  She displayed little obvious alarm, standing fully exposed, caught up in regarding my presence.    

I stopped and dropped my hands down in front.  For a few seconds, we exchanged questioning looks.  Then I said, “Good morning.”  Her ears twitched as they caught my words.  Then, breaking her gaze, she dropped the moment between us and ambled into the junipers, where I last saw her nosing about, looking for something edible.

The deer didn’t flee—not in the usual way of a frightened deer—though at my words, if not at the constancy of my looking at her, she dropped back.  In that gesture I left the focus of her thought; she relegated me to an object in her world.  For a few seconds, I had seen the guttering of some flame of regard in her doe eyes, but it went out at the language I laid between us.  I became an it to her.  A benign it rather than a predatory it, but an it all the same.

Over the last year I’ve been working my way through Martin Buber’s treatise on relation, I and Thou.  This experience with the doe recalled for me Buber’s story about his cat, which I happened to have read the night before.  “An animal’s eyes,” he says, “have the power to speak a great language.”  He explains that this language expresses through the animal eye “the mystery in its natural prison, the anxiety of becoming.”  This anxiety is the tension a creature feels between “the realms of [its] vegetable security and spiritual venture.”

Buber says his cat doesn’t have the capacity to address him in language, only the capacity to turn its glance upon him.  He remarks how, under his gaze, the cat’s gaze lights up and indisputably questions him, but the questioning extinguishes itself quickly in disquietude.  The sun of relation rises and sets in the cat’s eyes as a single movement.  “For other events,” he says, “possessed between morning and evening their day, even though it might be brief, but here morning and evening flowed pitilessly mingled together, the bright Thou appeared and was gone.”

The bright Thou.  In Buber’s map of relation, man speaks primary words in accordance with his attitude toward being in the world.  These primary words are actually word pairs: I-Thou and I-It. 

I-Thou is spoken with the whole being and takes its stand in relation.  Between the I and Thou in I-Thou, there is no subject-object span of distance and no bounds.  In I-Thou, there is “mutual giving: you say Thou to it and give yourself to it, it says Thou to you and gives itself to you.”  The I-Thou word of relation does not sustain you in this life in any practical manner, as I-It does, though it immerses you in eternity for brief or possibly more extended moments. Furthermore, the meeting with Thou “tears us away to dangerous extremes, loosening the well-tried context, leaving more questions than satisfaction behind them, shattering security—in short, uncanny moments we can well dispense with.”

The primary word I-It is never spoken with the whole being and takes its stand in the world of experience, or of separation: I perceive something, I imagine something, I will something, I feel something.  In the speaking of the I-It primary word, I becomes a subject which experiences and uses, objectifying what it sees with “the field glass of remote inspection,” separating particulars and arranging them according to casual, advantageous connections that the I makes for its own purposes.  In I-It, the I profits itself, turning any given moment toward “the sustaining, relieving, and equipping of human life.”

The success of a person’s life in the world depends on his/her ability to move back and forth between the I-Thou, I-It dual human reality, but the deeper a person ventures toward speaking Thou to what and who he/she meets, the more sustained is that person’s constancy of immersion into “the whole stuff of life” and the more fully the mystery of life, even the face of God, turns its gaze upon you.  “Thus the time of human life is shaped into a fullness of reality, and even though human life neither can nor ought to overcome the connexion with It, [that connexion] is so penetrated with relation that relation wins in it a shining streaming constancy: the moments of supreme meeting are then not flashes in darkness but like the rising moon in a clear starlit night.”

I thought my meeting with the doe so like what Buber described happening between him and his cat that I wondered, for a moment, about whether our life with nature indeed swayed “in gloom,” unable to cross “to the threshold of speech,” as he asserts.  Maybe, I mused, Buber just had a stupid cat.  They exist—I know it.  As for the deer, this close-in meeting was our first.  It would be too much to expect a deer or anybody else to engage in a hale volleying of Thous at first sight.  Though sometimes I wonder about lizards.  There’s something strangely forward going on with some of them.

Buber believes a person’s capacity to say Thou in speech to other people meets with greater success than his/her saying Thou to nature.  Language , Buber says, is spirit’s primal act—it’s in speech that relation opens between people.  Ultimately, through the saying of Thou, the relation between man and God lights up.  Check out this extraordinary passage:

…there is a cosmos for man only when the universe becomes his home, with its holy hearth whereon he offers sacrifice; there is Eros for man only when beings become for him pictures of the eternal, and community is revealed along with them; and there is Logos for man only when he addresses the mystery with work and service for the spirit.  Form’s silent asking, man’s loving speech, the mute proclamation of the creature, are all gates leading into the presence of the Word.  But when the full and complete meeting is to take place, the gates are united in one gateway of real life, and you no longer know through which you have entered.

Nor, I think, do you care.  You’re just there, and the other being’s there, God’s there, whether physically present, as with nature and its creatures, or whether, as is the way with humans, language and the revelatory moment catches you up in presence in streaming beams of Thou.

It’s a great temptation for human beings to abide in the I-It realm of experience, treating everything, including language, as just another It.  Then we fall to using written or uttered speech as a hammer to drive home a point or a wheelbarrow to cart some matter from one spot to another, sometimes raising words as swords or guns, wielding them wholly in service to ourselves or to our interests.  In so doing, we likewise reduce the receiver of our pointed meaning to It, some thing we are trying to do something to or with, perhaps fix into place or arrange to our liking. Human language, a teeming environment in which a person might happen, shrinks down to a processing device that limits prospects to the merely expedient.  It’s I-It that greases the wheels and pulleys of deterministic systems of thought and rigs up the illusion that life bears no freedom.  I-It, in the fictions it mocks up for itself, sets the confines of its stifling fate, the inevitable outcome.  People are little more than machines “which must be taken into account and utilized for the Cause”; God becomes just “another means by which we profit.”  The impulse to speak I-It to another is the stone in the clenched fist of Us-Them.        

On the other hand, I-Thou, spoken with the whole being, steps into torrents of revelation, which in Buber’s language is not the same thing as the idea about God’s word being spoken through an anointed mouthpiece—a prophet—who dispenses it to those waiting for word.  Revelation erupts in the meeting between man and his Thou, and when he emerges he comes out with “something more that has grown in him, of which he did not know before and whose origin he is not rightly able to indicate.”  This is to say that, having gone through the moment that “tears us away to dangerous extremes, loosening the well-tried context, leaving more questions than satisfaction behind them, shattering security,” the man turns out differently. When he emerges from his Thou moment he leaves not only the moment but what he was prior to it, he advances toward his destiny.  Destiny differs sharply from fate.  For one thing, it moves in man through his mounting freedom.  Freedom infuses the I-Thou relation because, unlike the world of It, the “world of Thou is not closed.  He who goes out to it with concentrated being and risen power to enter into relation becomes aware of freedom.  And to be freed from the belief that there is no freedom is indeed to be free.”

Buber’s model appears mostly to assign art to the realm of experience, an act of arranging matters to one’s liking, and thus to the world of I-It, since to attempt to express the inexpressible, especially the moment when your Thou steps in close to meet you, is to render it a thing, not to mention that your rendering becomes itself an exercise in futility.  But I think there must be a way in which art can be a saying of Thou, not just in the act of creating, as address to the supreme Thou, but also to the reader of a work or the hearer of a musical composition or the soul whose gaze falls upon art in whatever form.  Art might also stand at the doorway of revelation, I think, offering the potential for what Buber calls “turning.”  He certainly sings with delight over the spirit in the work of Goethe, Socrates, and Jesus, their beaming I that abides in the shine of endless dialogue able to accompany man into the “stillness of death and becoming.”  Whatever the case, even as It, there is hope for art when the artist’s immersion into the whole stuff of life results in his work transfusing and being transfused with the warmth and glow of relation.

In all fairness to Mr. Buber’s cat and that curious deer, I’ve been there, hung up in that tension between vegetable security and spiritual venture.  If it hadn’t been for people in my life who, when the dawn of questioning did arise in my eye, stepped up to meet it before it set and slowed with their power the arc of the sun of each meeting, I might be there still.  Sometimes I slip back toward that tension when matters become too much, I sink back toward the creature comfort of It.  Yet experience shows that always the bright Thou awaits my return, meets my gaze for as long as I can sustain it, and teases me further out into the world and meaningfulness.  For there’s a more radical dance to life than fate allows for, there’s always more to the story than what I try to write into it.  Every word bends toward what lies beyond, aching to explode into showering fireworks of Thou.

If any of you have the same question, well, the answer (besides being 42) is an enthusiastic yes. Here’s why:

My family of origin has always been big on impassioned discussions–especially my father.  Just after his mission he majored in Literature at the Y, got married, had a bunch of kids, and then went on to get his PhD in something that would support his family (business, computers, stuff I don’t understand).  But being an English major at heart meant he could never walk away from discussing ideas. It was a gift he has given to all of us kids. The election of 2008, combined with email, blogs, texting, RSS feeds, and hyperlinks, has taken our family passion to new heights. Issue of choice these days: Prop 8 and the question of bigotry in the Church.  This has been an especially intense discussion for my brother, all the more so since he has come across some disturbing things (ah! the wonders of the Internet!)–one of which happens to be the Journal of Discourses. For awhile he figured he couldn’t go to Church any more. What were we, his loving family members, to do?

Others turned to prayer, but I immediately *wink* turned to a recent issue of Irreantum–the one that has a play about a RM who is contemplating leaving the Church because of what he read in the Journal of Discourses.  For me, the things my brother came across in the Journal of Discourses were not spiritually dangerous or even too troubling. I could talk with him about it and try to see his point of view because I had already encountered this problem vicariously through literature. And, I think, because of my study of LDS literature I aided him in navigating his crisis.

A similar thing happened when my sister came across some lesser known facts about Joseph Smith and polygamy and Violet Kimball.  She was pretty upset, but I was not because I had already encountered and fended off  that beast through literature (both Virginia Sorenson’s more libidinous telling and OSC’s more faithful telling.)

So why does all this blogging and writing (and painting and sculpting and composing) matter?  Because it helps me understand my oh-so-Mormon-place in this not-so-Mormon-world and it gives me opportunities to grapple with the weightier matters of my faith when the risks are low. I get the chance to consider the issues without throwing out the testimonial baby with the quasi-intellectual bathwater.  A careful study of literature helps me cultivate sophisticated ways of thinking (and feeling) about living a life of faith and, ultimately,  strengthens my resolve to do so.

Of course all this begs the question, why do Mormon arts matter to you? How does a study of Mormon literature (and the rest) interact with your faith? Has it strengthened it or strained it?

She later joined the Church.

I don’t mean to suggest that she joined the Church solely because of this book. [It is a delightful read, but, IIRC, not particularly conventional as far as LDS market titles go. Its largely about the main character's struggle with his coffee addiction, and his unintended deception that got several members of his ward, including the bishop, to also drink coffee.]

But the book may have been an ancillary factor in our nanny’s conversion in spite of exposing the foibles of Church members. I hear stories like this from time to time. Authors and publishers tell anecdotes of how their books helped some non-member join the Church. And while I have many doubts about many of these stories, I do see how some of these stories might be true to a small degree. I’ll bet LDS books have made a difference, if only a small one, in at least a few conversions. [I must say that I doubt toeing the LDS market standards line is a requirement -- Signature, Sunstone & Dialogue probably get a share of those conversions also.]

I’m not saying that LDS publishers should produce books with a missionary goal in mind. [In fact, I think its perhaps a sure way to loose money.] But I do think that missionary considerations are legitimate. If you are going to publish a book anyway, why not make it non-member friendly if you can? or why not make it available to non-members?

Few LDS publishers do this, even for books that could be of interest to or reach a non-member audience. Here is a few quick suggestions that might help:

• Consider reducing or eliminating LDS jargon, or somehow defining the term in the text or in the book. [The Mormon Terms project may be of help.]
• Make the content relevant to non-members where possible.
• Use recognizable cover images that draw-in non-members so that the title isn’t as LDS-centric.
• Make sure that the book is actually available where non-members can purchase it. If you only sell to LDS bookstores, non-Mormons aren’t likely to see it. If the book isn’t categorized the way that the national audience expects it, they will have a hard time running into it on Amazon.com.
• If there is something about the book that might appeal to the general public, consider actually selling the book to the national market — come up with a marketing message for that audience, prepare sales kits and materials, contact bookstores and get them to stock the book.

I’m sure there are other things LDS Publishers can do. It may not be possible to create a publishing program with a missionary goal, but there may be a role in any case.

These culture wars are nothing new of course, and Mormons’ place in them is precarious. Southern evangelicals on the right and homosexuals on the left—just two examples—both consider Mormons wrong-headed and dangerous. Members of both groups probably wish for our extinction. The former group will gladly take our money and manpower to fight certain battles. But I haven’t noticed many evangelicals rushing to our defense. Some of them probably even enjoy watching us take the heat for Proposition 8. To the latter group, we are hateful, bigoted scum. And, generally speaking, Mormons are convenient punching bags for so many reasons.

Still, Mormons can live and thrive flanked by cultural adversaries on all sides as long as cultural disagreements play out through meaningful discourse and fair political processes. This is what has been so troubling about the past week or so: it seems that both of these—productive discourse and democracy—are threatened by the shameful, cowardly attacks on Mormons related to the passage of Proposition 8.

First, the level of discourse has been extremely poor. For obvious reasons, homosexuals attempt to equate themselves with blacks fighting an epic battle for civil rights. You either agree with them completely or you are a hateful bigot. End of discussion. Begin the mobilization of shame.

And the commitment to democracy displayed by some has been chilling. I am not talking about simple disappointment. Or filing lawsuits or pledging to try again. I am talking about violence, intimidation, vandalism, false biological terrorism, forced resignations, boycotts of small businesses, interference with worship, hacking Mormon websites to replace benign content with gay porn, slanderous advertisements depicting Mormon missionaries as home invaders, and so on. This is bullying, and it is vile. It is an attempt to scare Mormons silent—to prevent us from participating in the political process.

I have been proud of the rhetoric of Mormon general authorities concerning this topic. The pleas for people to take a moral stand—but to show love and respect. And the statements of non-opposition to domestic partnership laws. And so on. While the church’s basic moral teaching on the subject has not changed, we have witnessed in the space of a few years a dramatic liberalization in the church’s treatment of homosexuals.

I did not personally get involved in the Proposition 8 campaign. Now I feel compelled to demonstrate that the events of the past week or so have not shamed or silenced me. On the contrary, I am probably more likely to get involved the next time around. My sense is that many other Mormons feel the same way.
* *
The public image of Mormonism has been battered in the past year or so. Journalists repeatedly raised Mitt Romney’s Mormonism simply to invoke fear and shame. The treatment of Mormonism in these one-note stories was audaciously uninformed, stereotyped, and generally negligent. Mike Huckabee did his best to stir up anti-Mormon bigotry in the Republican primaries. Atheist demagogues and glib entertainer-types (from Richard Dawkins to Tobias from Arrested Development to Bill Maher) have taken all kinds of cheapshots at Mormonism and religion in general. And the polygamy raid in Texas churned up even more confusion and distrust. And now Proposition 8.

Increased marginalization will be the product of all this. Or perhaps the degree of marginalization is the same, but now it has been brought out into the light. Perhaps we always had few friends and many adversaries. Perhaps people always held us in contempt—but have only recently become comfortable expressing contempt in public.

Will these events impact the viability of Mormon Art and artists? Just as some people want to silence the political voice of Mormons, will people do what they can to silence Mormon stories and images? Mormon-themed work was already a tough sale in non-Mormon journals and markets. Is it reasonable to assume that the situation is getting worse? To assume that a vast majority of the people who control literary journals, publishing houses, theatres, galleries, and the like—now also consider us hateful, bigoted scum?
* *
I am not all that holy. But I try to moderate my tendency to fear, hate, and be angry. I try to understand what charity means in a given situation and to approximate it in my behavior. This situation is testing me. It is hard to answer bullying with kindness and love. But I am resolved to try.

This situation also presents a creative test: how can Mormon artists contribute to the discourse? How can they break through all the polarizing and reductive rhetoric? How can Mormon artists create something timeless that captures our whipsaw experience of this tumultuous time? Can we imagine some work of art that is compelling to outsiders that insists—contrary to our critics—on our humanity?

I would love to read some in-depth explorations of both of these works (and maybe even write it), but in the interest of sparking some discussion and hopefully getting more Mormons to read these books, I thought I’d post a few things. These are sort of spoilers, but not really.

But before I get to the Mormon elements — these books are very much part of the current trend in high fantasy (one that OSC has championed, actually) for magic systems that are robust, bounded and physical) where the magic has a cost and a physics (albeit metaphysical ones), where heroes make major mistakes out of pride or ignorance or immaturity, where the enemies aren’t wholly evil, where deception is a major aspect to the plot, where decision making and leadership is just as important as physical/magical prowess.  They both also have some killer action scenes, and their magic systems are quite cool.

1. Both feature voices from the dust e.g. ancient records (one even written on metal plates) that help the protagonists defeat their enemies. But that also require a certain amount of interpretation, a likening of the records to themselves.

2. Both works have a certain conservation of good and evil — an opposition in all things approach. And a metaphysics that places a huge emphasis creation, and creation using the matter at hand.

3. Both have some fascinating things to say about leadership, and I think a particularly Mormon exploration of leadership — how one inspires people in spite of ones own failings, how one reaches people who aren’t ready for change, how one keeps from becoming a zealot, how one saves as many as possible with limited resources and time, etc.

4. Both have Holy Ghost like moments where the protagonists struggle to tune in to what the supernatural (or more like hypernatural or natural-but-more-refined) forces on their side. This leads to some lovely scenes — there is a baptism-like scene in the secone Runelords book that’s just amazing.

5. Both place a huge emphasis on couples as the main protagonists. And both feature strong female characters and sensitive male characters. I’ll make no claims that these are feminist works. But the nature of the relationships and the strengths of the female leads, in particular, seem to be very much in a Joseph Smith/Emma or Alvin Maker/Peggy mold. Indeed, Iome and Gaborn in Runelords and Vin and Elend in Mistborn come across (and I don’t mean this in an insulting way) as quite similar to many of the young, well-educated, cosmopolitan American Mormon couples I know. Granted these books feature extreme situations, but there’s a whiff of the Mormon couples who have succeeded in the American meritocracy, I think.

6. Runelords features a very interesting political-social-religious philosophy that’s centered around the family.

7. Mistborn is in the end very much an enacment of Brigham Young’s maxim that all truth can be circumscribed in to one great whole.

8. Certain langauge/terminology creeps in — that doesn’t mean that it’s used in a Mormon way, but they add a certain Mormon tint to the works. There are, for example, “Endowments” in Runelords.

9. Finally, I’d say that there’s a certain overall Book of Mormon flavor to these two series. The movement of armies, the bloody battles, the using of “spiritual” power to try and halt the bloodshed and save some people — yes, all part of the fantasy genre and so maybe not all that different, but further work is justified, I think.

There’s probably more, but I’ll stop now.

Now, readers can fully enjoy these works without any knowledge of Mormonism. And just because these elements are there, doesn’t necessarily mean that the works have anything profound to say about Mormonism. But, I found that they resonated with my Mormonism. Anybody else have the same experience?

* Farland has extended his Runelords series (it’s up to 7 books now, but it’s the initial quartet that’s of most interest, in my opinion).

How quickly should you write, if you want to succeed as a writer? Answer: More quickly than I do.

One of the things I found dispiriting, back a few years ago when I first started trying to restart my creative writing, was just how slow things went. Every time I started writing a scene, it seemed like a hundred questions would pop up in my mind. Just how does one make candles anyway? What would a candlemaker’s shop be like? How big? What materials would they use? How many candlemakers would there be in a city of 20,000? Inquiring minds needed to know.

And that was just questions about the setting. Trying to figure out what to say, how to say it, what would happen next—it all added a toll. That slowness was probably the single largest reason why I gave up on that novel after a year or two.

So. Jump ahead to a little over half a year ago, when I started writing again—mostly little throwaway pieces that had the advantage of not actually needing any real research or advance plotting. Not surprisingly, these went much faster, though they also didn’t really go anywhere as stories. Case in point: a set of six one- to two-page conversations among middle schoolers written purely for my own amusement (since I can’t imagine any venue where they could be published). Composing them them was a bit like eating popcorn, one handful right after the other.

And then I dusted off a side-story to my fantasy novel, one I started six years ago and abandoned after 20 pages. It went well. It went relatively quickly, for one thing. I’d already put in a lot of the effort of creating the milieu, and the story I was trying to tell was relatively simple. 20,000 words later, I had me a novella.

And then I made what was probably the smartest decision I’ve made in a long while, relative to my writing: I didn’t try to go back to my “big” fantasy novel.

#####

One of these days, maybe I’ll comment on the oddity of a wannabe fantasy author writing a mainstream Mormon novel. For now, though, suffice it to say that out of several projects I puttered with, that’s the one where I wound up putting my next major effort.

I’d had the basic idea for some time, though I thought of it mostly as a possible short story. Then I was struck with some ideas that might turn it into a novel. And so, after a few initial stutters, I got started—without a detailed outline, but with a basic sense of where I wanted the story arc to go and some of the main plot events on the way.

At first it went quickly. Then I showed it to a friend whose opinion I respect, and he pointed out some fairly substantial problems with what I’d written, including the fact that my teenage boys didn’t always sound like teenage boys, or at least not the same teenage boys I wanted them to be.

And so I went back and revised my early scenes, adjusting them in ways I hoped would make them work better. It was very slow going, since I was reconceptualizing conversations and events that I had already thought of once in a different way. Maybe it would have made more sense to keep pushing ahead instead of going back to the beginning, but I felt like I couldn’t do that, since knowing what had gone before would affect what came after. Besides, I felt like I had to make and stick to some fairly basic decisions about the nature and voice of my characters.

And then when I got back to writing new scenes, I found that my pace was slower than before. I’d sit for long moments, staring at the paragraph in front of me and wondering how to get the characters to say what I wanted them to say. Surely, I thought, if only I had a better grasp of my characters, dialogue would fly off my keyboard instead of being forced off one jerking phrase at a time. I also worried that composing it this way would make it sound just as uneven as the composing process was. But I didn’t seem able to make it go any faster.

And I would stop writing whenever I felt uncertain about what to write next, instead of pushing on and making something up—mostly because I’d found that the “make-it-up-as-you-go-along” approach took me down strange paths that had to be retraced later on. Given the negative impact on my writing morale—and thence on my writing output—when I’m exposed to negative feedback (including my own), I eventually decided it was worth taking a little more time during composition so that I’d be forced to hate my own writing just a little less.

(That’s three paragraphs in a row that started with “and.” Maybe there’s something to Orson Scott Card’s suggestion that as Mormon writers, long exposure to the Book of Mormon trains to us to think that all really true, profound, meaningful sentences have to begin with “and.”)

Mostly, I think it worked. But my writing was very slow for several months afterwards, and I very nearly gave it up completely.

#####

Working on a story is a lot like taking care of a whiny child. It’s always there in the background, wanting a toy or a cookie or some chocolate milk and complaining that you didn’t fix its sandwich just right, and please let me watch just one more YouTube video before bedtime.

Okay, so maybe I got a little too much into that comparison. (Can you tell I’m a parent?) The point is, though, that once you invite a story into your mental space, I find it tends to nag at you if you don’t work on it. That’s what I probably owe for the fact that I didn’t actually quit writing, all that summer that I was bummed out over just how slowly my writing was going and how uncertain I was that it was going anywhere worthwhile.

Eventually, though—sometime in September when I finally realized that I was actually making progress on the thing—I decided there were some advantages to the way I’d been doing things.

First, there was the whole dialogue-thing. On rereading what I’d written since my big slowdown, I thought it genuinely had fewer problems than my first few chapters. Of course, I still need to get my first reviewer to look at my latest stuff and see if he agrees. But that’s my impression, anyway.

Second, I found that pausing every now and then gave an opportunity for more cool ideas to bubble up to the top for things that could go in my story.

Pause now for transition to Jonathan launching into an extended comparison…

See, writing is like a Christmas tree. (Bear with me here.) For any kind of writing, there’s the trunk: the main idea, thesis, or primary conflict. And then there are the branches: the main arguments, plot threads, etc.

But when it comes right down to it, the part of writing that wins the oohs and aahs is the ornaments: the shiny glittering details, insights, bits of conversation, memorable characters, vivid metaphors, and so forth. For a piece of literary criticism—the type of writing that first provoked me into developing this comparison—it’s the new insights you provide into the piece you’re critiquing. Who cares about the theory or underlying argument? Really, the main importance of the trunk and branches is to hold up the glittery bits, which are what we really care about. So long as they don’t snap off under the weight, we hardly even notice their existence. (As someone who came very close to becoming an English professor, I can say that this is far closer to the truth than many literary types would like to admit.)

Applying this to stories, it’s my theory that these ornaments (like Douglas Adams’s fiddly bits around the fjords) are a big part of what impresses us as readers, and thus a big part of what we as writers should be trying to provide. Dawdling along the way gave me more opportunities to go rummaging around for more shiny sparkly decorations to add to the tree.

#####

I’m still hoping that I’ll get faster as this goes along, especially if I ever start writing fantasy. There’s a sense in the fantasy and science fiction universe that if you don’t publish fairly frequently, your name will drop out of sight. Certainly a book a year is the right pace for keeping interest in a fantasy series, or so it seems based on my observations.

At the same time, I don’t want to lose the hard-won lessons of my current experience—the most important being that simple persistence does in fact add up over time. Despite my slow pace and the weeks when I basically lost my nerve and did nothing, still six months after starting my novel, I’m at 50,000 words and halfway through my projected plot. So something seems to be working.

Now all I have to do is finish the darned thing… But that, once more, is a topic for another time.

Show Dates

• November 14th, 2008 @ 7:30pm
• November 15th, 2008 @ 2:30pm
• November 15th, 2008 @ 7:30pm

Tickets

It wasn’t until one particularly difficult rehearsal near the opening of the show that my director told me my interpretation was wrong. Emily was saying George didn’t understand. When you consider her earlier monologue with the line, “Do human beings ever realize life while they live it–every, every minute?” her comment about “they” failing to understand was obviously geared at the humans. I privately decided my reading was better  and stuck to it, but I realized for the first time that I had “Mormon-ed” a book.

In my first college English course, Intro to Lit. Theory, we briefly touched on Queer Theory and again in my May Swenson class. I never really understood how to apply it, though. It always felt a little random to me. Like a group of people was taking a particular paradigm and its values and randomly applying it to literature.  Looking at the way I read now I have to wonder if I sometimes do the same thing with books I read. However, instead of applying the values and paradigms of Queer Theory I am applying the values and paradigms of “Mormon” Theory.  Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis is a recent example for me. (Perhaps this is what Gideon Burton was driving at when he wrote “Toward a Mormon Criticism“? I read that while I was in college too but never really got to delve into it.)

I think this happens a lot. When I was a kid my favorite movie was Labyrinth starring David Bowie (!) and, I gotta say, one of the most interesting family reunions I have ever attended was when my uncle took me aside and deconstructed the film to show how it was really all about the plan of salvation, the Book of Mormon, and agency. My husband tells me that he and other missionaries had similar feelings about Star Wars (for the funniest tribute ever to Star Wars and John Williams click here); you know, the force, the priesthood, it’s all in the mix, right?

What books have you “Mormon-ed”? And, um, is there a technical name for this kind of reading?

The answer for the reader depends on a lot of different criteria, especially the subject and theme of the work. I suppose in most cases (for run-of-the-mill genre novels not in an LDS setting or including some LDS reference, for example) the author’s religion is largely irrelevant to the reader. But, on the other hand, a book on LDS doctrine should usually be by a church member, if not by a General Authority.

All this is probably obvious to the reader. But what about to the author? Does it make much of a difference to the author that he or she is LDS? What is the difference between an LDS author and those that are not LDS anyway?

I’m not at all sure that I can give a complete answer to the differences between LDS authors and other authors. As I’ve considered the question, I came up with two possible areas where I’m sure there are differences:

First, like all authors, LDS authors have some kind of moral or ethical standard that they apply in their writing — but in the case of LDS authors the standard is one that the author believes is compatible with the gospel. Its really not possible to write without reflecting some kind of standard, and it is natural for LDS authors to reflect the standards they believe are LDS.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the standards of all LDS authors are the same. I don’t think that the standard of any particular author is uniform or universal by any measure. But I do think that LDS authors try to apply some gospel-influenced standard to their writing and what it means–and this probably makes the bulk of LDS authors more uniform than others.

Fortunately, at least in my view, the lack of uniformity in these standards means that LDS authors can write a wide variety of works. There are very few works that can’t be honestly seen as fitting gospel standards.

For readers these standards may make no difference whatsoever. They may not even be obvious. Many LDS authors write stories that can’t be distinguished from those written by other authors simply because issues that make Mormons different from the general population don’t happen to come up in these stories. The LDS author has maintained his standards, but its not obvious.

A second area of difference is, I think, the presence of a separate LDS market. This market has an influence on LDS authors in a couple of different ways. First, it provides a choice of market, or an outlet for works. LDS authors who run into conflicts with the national market (and I do believe that this sometimes happens) or who can’t find a national publisher can try the LDS market. [This works in reverse too.] Second, the LDS market communicates a rough standard for what is acceptable in a work. Even for those LDS authors who reject or discount the LDS market standard, it still has some influence on those authors, perhaps mitigating their deviations from the standard, or influencing the type and extent of the deviation.

Combining these two ideas, an LDS author becomes simply an author who writes stories according to standards he or she believes are based on the gospel, or that are influenced by the LDS market or audience.

I’m not yet sure that I like that definition. I’m not sure that a definition should be controlled simply by what these differences, and somehow, I think there might be more differences between LDS authors and those that are not LDS. But I’ve not yet come up with other differences that make sense.

What have I missed? What differences do you see?