Category Archives: Writing

Reading, Uncategorized, Writing

The Battle of Holy River, YouTube, and ‘Seraffyn’s European Adventure’

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There’s a sort of a book review hidden in this rambling post, somewhere further on, but to start with I just want to bellyache a little about how much I’m suffering my art. Which is writing novels, in case you’ve forgotten due to all the time I take between publications.

I’m happy to say that, to my own surprise, I’ve been keeping up my new regimen of getting up at 6:30 a.m. to write. My goal, nothing superhuman, is 1,000 words a day, and most days I do at least that much.

But right now I’ve been slowed down a little. From time to time my story runs up against actual historical events and real locations, and that calls for research. Stuck in the 20th Century though I am in spirit, I have to admit that the internet provides opportunities that weren’t available back when I wrote The Year of the Warrior (which, if you don’t recall, was only about twenty years after the events in the story).

My challenge is to describe a voyage by Erling Skjalgsson, under the leadership of King Knut of Denmark/England, to the Baltic Sea to attack King Olaf Haraldsson (St. Olaf) of Norway. I have to get them through the Skagerrak and the Kattegat, the entrances to the Baltic, and into the Limfjord, where the saga says Knut gathered his fleet. And then over to present-day Sweden (the border of Skåne, which was Danish at the time) to fight the Battle of Helge å (Holy River). There Olaf pulls off a clever (but slightly confusing) stratagem that I’ll have to work out too. I might mention that historians disagree about the actual location of the battle – there are two Holy Rivers in Sweden, and a third site has also been proposed (purely, I think, out of meanness). I believe I’m going to stay with the traditional site unless somebody makes a strong argument to change my mind.

Anyway, the great thing I’ve “discovered” (and by discovered I mean figured out long after all the other writers did) is YouTube videos. The best resource I found is a series of videos called Sailing Magic Carpet (Episode 1 above), produced by a young couple (I think they might actually be married, which is nice) taking a sailboat into the Baltic. They sail the Limfjord the wrong way for my purposes (it had no western mouth during the Viking Age), but they still provide a lot of vicarious experience with sailing conditions and topography. Unfortunately, they sail up the wrong coast of Sweden for my purposes, but still the videos were useful.

They also recommended a book called Seraffyn’s European Adventure, by Lin and Larry Pardey. This book describes a similar voyage made back in the late 1970s by the Pardeys, in a pilot boat built by Larry himself. Lin was a very good writer, and she does an excellent job describing a simpler – but more dangerous – voyage, back before satellite navigation. Recommended.

I think I may be able to get back to 1,000 words a day tomorrow.

Writing

Adventures in novel writing

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Illustration of Erling Skjalgsson and his thralls, by Eric Werenskiold, from Heimskringla.

Hello there, Brandywinians. I have a little time before I leave for Brainerd, so I’ll fill you in on an experience I had this morning, working on my new novel The Baldur Game.

I think I’ve made it clear, both in my reviews and my posts on the writing process, that I believe in character-driven stories. I am moved more by personalities than by puzzles.

So now I’ve got Erling Skjalgsson, my hero, along with Father Ailill, my narrator, in England. They’re at Winchester where King Knut, the Dane who conquered England, keeps his court. I just finished a big scene where Erling is forced to make a hard decision in order to make an alliance possible.

I wrote the scene. I resolved the situation.

Then I realized I’d poked a hole in the plot. A source of dramatic tension I needed had been neutralized. I needed Erling to make a different choice.

But that would mean manipulating my character to suit plot requirements, wouldn’t it?

I re-wrote the scene, though I was unhappy about it.

But I read it over. You know what? This worked better.

And I realized a potential weakness in letting characters drive the plot (at least when I’m doing it). The thing I’d had Erling do the first time wasn’t what he’d actually do. It was what I’d do.

And I’m not like Erling at all. This scenario worked way better.

Lesson learned. Let your characters be themselves.

Authors, Writing

James Scott Bell’s best writing advice

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Still haven’t finished the book I’m reading for review. This would seem to argue that I’ve been busy and productive, but I don’t feel busy and productive. However, this is irrelevant. I learned long ago that my feelings are of very little practical use.

So, another video tonight. Here’s a short clip from one of my favorite authors, James Scott Bell. He’s talking about a discipline many writers have found valuable — giving yourself a daily quota of words to produce. Like compound interest, this practice yields remarkable results over time.

I have written this way at times in my long life, but it’s been a while. Most of the time, I can write only so much at a sitting. After my small ration of creativity has run out, I end up sitting at the keyboard, frustrated. I am then overcome with guilt and turn to drink and drugs.

Okay, I don’t turn to drink and drugs. But I understand the appeal.

Anyway, I just took up rising early to write, and that’s upped my output considerably. So get off my back, James Scott Bell.

Music, Uncategorized, Writing

Chronicling my decline

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Not having a book to review tonight, busy as I am with non-paying work, I post the video above. Sadly it’s not a live performance video (there doesn’t seem to be one), but I discovered it and thought it rather nice. This is a song I’ve posted before in its original Swedish version, but there seems to be this English version too. As an expert, I pronounce it a successful translation, since with songs, subjective impressions are more important than accuracy. I realize it’s the wrong time of year for a Christmas song, but who knows if I’ll need it at Christmas?

A day in the life of an obscure author:

In accordance with my recently adopted custom of getting up to write in the morning, instead of lying in bed trying to get back to sleep, I rose at 6:30 a.m. to work on The Baldur Game, my work in progress. What I’d done yesterday was to take a block of text I’d written, which I realized was out of historical sequence, and move it back into its proper year. So today I commenced a review of the whole text written thus far, to see if there were any anachronisms left that I need to fix. I think the work is good so far.

At lunch I went to The 50s Grill, one of my favorite local places, and tried something new — the grilled walleye. It was good, as expected, and I topped it off with a piece of their French Silk pie. They do pie extremely well.

This afternoon, I worked on my book narration. This is the cause of considerable fear and trembling for me right now. Friends have generously provided me equipment to begin doing narration on my own. My first project will be The Year of the Warrior. I am confident — nay, a little arrogant — about my ability to do narration with the best of ’em. But the technical aspects — the software and specifications, etc. — scare me to death. (Back in radio broadcast school, I was the best copy reader in my class and the worst engineer.) This delays my progress, but I press on heroically.

Tonight, after I post this, I propose to work on a PowerPoint presentation I’ll be doing later this month in Iowa for the Georg Sverdup Society. Not Vikings this time, but the background of the Lutheran Free Church movement in America.

These things matter in my world.

Oh yes. I’ve committed to attending the Midwest Viking Festival in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Oct. 6 and 7 (used to be in Moorhead, MN). An opportunity to sell books, and my experience is that venues where I have not yet flogged my wares are the most fruitful.

Writing

Adventures in saga writing

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Snorri Sturlusson dictates to an amanuensis, in a woodcut for “Heimskringla” by Christian Krogh.

You may find this hard to believe, admiring me as you do, but I’ve gotten lazy. I watched a video about sleep problems on YouTube recently, and it occurred to me that instead of lying in bed as I am wont to do in the morning, trying to get back to sleep (and generally failing), I should just get up and work on my novel. Maybe I would a) get to sleep more easily at night, and b) actually make progress on this Erling book. My work so far has been mostly thinking about it and plotting.

And what do you know? It worked. I’m sleeping better and I’m actually getting text written. I’ve made progress every day this week. Yesterday I wrote a big scene that even kind of gave me chills. One of the worst things about indolence is that you forget the rewards inherent in the labor.

It’s also a little embarrassing, like one of those times when you’re a kid when you’re trying to do something the way you think it should be done, and your parent says, “I think you should try it this way.” And you say no, because you know how you want to do it. And finally, in desperation, you try it their way, and it turns out they knew more than you did. Proving you’re not as grownup as you thought you were.

Even when you’re over 70 and your folks are dead.

Anyhow, I like how the book’s coming at this point. I was looking for a fantasy element to interweave in the plot, because historical fantasy is what I do, after all, and I think I found just the thing. It comes from northern folklore and feeds into a theme I wanted to explore in the book anyway. Creepy, and with just a touch of contemporary commentary.

In short, I feel like a writer again.

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Religion, Uncategorized, Writing

What Is the Essence of Story?

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The essence of a story is conflict. We may think the essence as theme and remember some stories for a moment of discovery or clarity that moves us, but that moment must come through conflict to carry meaning.

In a 1959 text called Understanding Fiction, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren write, “A story is a movement through complexity to unity, through complication to simplicity, through confusion to order.” Both adventures and mysteries follow this path. You begin with many questions and maybe competing statements of fact. The confusion may be as simple as being lost, and finding the way out takes a lot of problem solving. When order or simplicity is found, when the events finally make some sense, then you have a story.

There are many types of conflict, Brooks and Warren note, but an account of “purely physical conflict” can’t be called fiction. Motives and ideas are necessary. We need characters, not just actors. A writer needs to “investigate motives” and “imply sympathy or antipathy” for the characters involved. Dr. Jones wants to preserve the ark or save Marion and himself. Belloq wants to use the ark to conquer the world. (And there are layers of conflict despite what fan critics have said.)

In another Saturday post, I said games and sports could hit the points of story, and I think motives and character is what I was talking about. The conflict is there, and if you impute evil intent onto the other team, you’ve got something that smells like a story.

What else have we got?

Book Banning: The ALA asks us to believe “2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship” in mostly “school libraries, classroom libraries, or school curricula” in 2022. That’s a 38 percent increase over 2021. Though you may suspect the ALA of cooking the books to raise this number, a glance at the top 13 most challenged books shows “claimed to be sexually explicit” on every title. Why are any of these recommended in schools?

Faithfulness: A new book tells the stories of Lutherans under Stalin.

But the Communist Party sought also to erase Christian ethics. “Love your neighbor” violated the Marxist principle of “class struggle.” Thus, pastors could be charged with “preaching class peace.” Lutherans had an extensive network to help the poor and the disabled, but this was held to compete with the state and to keep the deprived “in thrall to their exploiters.” Consequently, the church was defined as an enemy of the state. One of the Lutheran bishops summed up the goal: “Everything that is connected to the Christian faith or reminds one of it must disappear from the life of the people and its individual citizens.”

Ukraine: “[Victoria] Amelina is one of Ukraine’s most celebrated young literary figures and a common presence at literary festivals both in Ukraine and abroad.” Now, she researches war crimes, starting with what happened to children’s literature writer Volodymyr Vakulenko.

Reader Reviews: A writer gets angry that ARC readers aren’t leaving reviews.

Grassroots Hatred: Will anti-Semitism ever die?

Authors, Writing

Mano on the exclamation point

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From Dave Lull, the following citation. I don’t know where he got it.

Priscilla Jensen’s review of “An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark!” by Florence Hazrat (Bookshelf, April 7) reminds me of something the novelist D. Keith Mano wrote in National Review in 1975: “The exclamation point may be used only in dialogue and then only if the person speaking has recently been disemboweled.”

Edgar Isaacs

Salisbury, Md.

Authors, Fiction, Non-fiction, Writing

An Endless Night, Culture Wars, and Editors Make Rotten Writers

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I read The Diary of Anne Frank in sixth grade and don’t remember thinking much about it. Something of the oppressive air stuck with me. Something of the final terror. One of my daughters read it last year and went on a rant against it. Maybe I read an abridged version, because I don’t remember reacting to any nasty thoughts or talk of her period. I think I would have noticed something like that in sixth grade. Then again, I could have drifted into a fog here and there, not realizing what I wasn’t reading.

I read Elie Wiesel’s Night for the first time recently. The author won a Nobel Prize in 1986 “for being a messenger to mankind: his message is one of peace, atonement and dignity.” While reading, I thought he had won the prize for literature for this book. Its sparse prose is marvelous, gripping, and conveys much of the dread of his experience.

In the opening pages, Wiesel’s family and neighbors didn’t know what was coming. Two people tried to warn them, but they couldn’t believe the outrageous truth. Who would do take 100s of people into the woods to dig their own graves before shooting them? Men couldn’t do that to each other. When the Germans came to town, one officer brought chocolate to his Jewish “host.” See? The Third Reich isn’t so bad. Many of them clung to any scrap of human decency they could imagine. Even when others were being killed, surely they would be shown mercy.

Such fantasies about the essence of mankind persist throughout the world and are one reason the museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau exists. Many, perhaps most, would say loving your neighbor as yourself is fairly easy if you just try it. They don’t recognize that Christ called this the second commandment, related and subordinate to the first. The first one they would call a nice premise or its own kind of fantasy, and there we have the seed for the hatred Weisel called an endless night.

What else do we have to talk about?

Spring Books: Goodreads has a long list of anticipated books. Some of these look good, not that I’ll ever get around to ’em. My supply of round to’em is a mite limited.

Writing: Jenny Jackson, an accomplished editor with many years of experience, suggests editors make terrible writers. They are used to calls shots, not executing the shots called.

College Closure: The King’s College in New York City has been running deficits for years and experimenting with online education without success. It will likely close by the end of the current semester.

Culture War: Professor Elizabeth Stice argues for living in the truth. “Those who think our culture can be changed only by those with obvious power should consider an alternative philosophical perspective. In 1978 Václav Havel published an essay titled “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel was writing from behind the iron curtain in Czechoslovakia, in a society he described as ‘post-totalitarian.’

“For Havel, the Soviet system was much bigger than the imposition of rules from a handful of powerful figures. It had come to rely on its own subjects for perpetuation. Using the example of a greengrocer who unthinkingly puts a ‘Workers of the World Unite’ sign in the shop window simply because life is easier that way, Havel explained that the people in Czechoslovakia were engaging in ‘auto-totality.'”

Photo: John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Writing

Gioia: What I Didn’t Learn in College English

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Ted Gioia writes about the types of papers college professors want to see and what a writer must do to actually write well. It’s a good overview of part of his college career and the aftermath in the workplace.

“A writer must be curious, because the readers are. A writer must seek inspiration and mind-expanding experiences, because the readers do. A writer must try to find wisdom, because that’s what readers are after.”

Authors, Fiction, Writing

Jonathan Kellerman interview

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Tonight I’m giving one of my lectures, and it’s turning into an adventure (and not in a good way). So this post is scheduled ahead of time, and I’ll tell you all about my travails tomorrow.

Above, a short clip of an interview with Jonathan Kellerman, whose Unnatural History I praised the other day. Enjoy.