Old easychair in the rain, Walla Walla County, Washington.

June 29, 2012

Sapolil Road, Walla Walla County, Washington.

June 26, 2012

Rules of storytelling

June 13, 2012

Via Emma Coats’ blog, Story Shots, and the Pixar blog… reproduced here only because I want to make sure I can quickly find these for my own future reference.

#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.

#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

#5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

#6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?

#7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

#8: Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.

#9: When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.

#10: Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.

#11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.

#12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.

#13: Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.

#14: Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.

#15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.

#16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.

#17: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on - it’ll come back around to be useful later.

#18: You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.

#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

#20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?

#21: You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?

#22: What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

April 19, 2012

Levon Helm died today. Here’s the Drive-By Truckers with a song about the deaths of two other members of The Band.

“Christians can embrace all the relativities and penultimacies of history without becoming relativists or skeptics—not because we have a certitude behind us but because we are confident that we have certitude ahead of us.”

—

Peter Leithart, Foundations.

Peter routinely writes things like this that become fixed points in how I look at life (here’s another).

April 18, 2012

“Unless the novelist has gone utterly out of his mind, his aim is still communication and communication suggests talking inside a community.”

— Flannery O’Connor (via commentmagazine)

April 16, 2012

The Trinity and human relationships

April 02, 2012

Some thoughts developed with a little help from Peter Leithart. By “a little help” I mean things like “forming my understanding and belief in the possibility of everything mentioned here”…

The Father gives the Spirit to the Son; the Son receives the Spirit and then gives the Spirit back to the Father, who receives the Spirit and then gives, etc… this inter-trinitarian giving is the basis of human relationships, and the relationship between God and man.

God gives (he initiates), and we receive. When we receive, then we may give. When we give, we give expecting to receive back something glorified.

God’s initial gift to us enables us to enter into this Trinitarian dance of gift. That initial gift is the Spirit. When He gives His Spirit to us, we produce the fruit of the Spirit and thus we offer the Spirit back to God. Giving the Spirit back to God, we expect him to return to us glorified, a fresh outpouring of the Spirit that proves even more fruitful than before.

Likewise, God gives people to us (wife, children, friends, even enemies); we receive them and we then give those people back to God. When a husband gives his wife, he expects her to return to him more lovely, for instance. When parents give their children, they receive them back. This is most dramatically illustrated in baptism: the parents hand the child to the minister. The minister baptizes the little one. Then the parents receive their child back, a new creation over which the Spirit now hovers.

More intriguing, when one gives his enemy, he may receive that enemy back as a defeated enemy—or even as a friend. “Vengeance is mine…” and so forth. We give up enemies by forswearing vengeance, bitterness, wrath, and so on, and commit them to God by praying the words of the psalms of complaint.

March 02, 2012

This shall be sung at Easter by the Trinity Reformed Church choir. Until that time, when the voices of my brothers and sisters are singing it, this recording shall have to do. If you listen to this, stop whatever else you’re doing to take it in.

Lalibela Church, Ethiopia

The town of Lalibela in northern Ethiopia is renowned for 12 Christian churches that were hewed out of solid stone some 800 years ago. The most stunning is Bieta Giyorgis, shown here, a massive monolith 40 feet (12 meters… — ***Lalibela Church, Ethiopia***

The town of Lalibela in northern Ethiopia is renowned for 12 Christian churches that were hewed out of solid stone some 800 years ago. The most stunning is Bieta Giyorgis, shown here, a massive monolith 40 feet (12 meters) tall, intricately carved and shaped like a cross.

Via: NPR

March 02, 2012

February 27, 2012

“O thou who art the sparrow’s friend,” he said, “ have mercy on this world that knows not even when it sins. O holy dove, descend and roost on Godric here so that a heart may hatch in him at last. Amen.”

— Buechner, Godric, p. 38.

February 06, 2012

“Erc was a great cairn of a man. His belly was where the stones buckled out under their own weight. His feet was where a pair of them had tumbled to the ground. His head was a boulder on top that was cracked straight across. He could open this jagged crack of a mouth wide as a stone cave and bellow out of it all manner of wild flummeries he’d learned from the days when he was a druid.
“Ah-h-h-h! Yah-h-h-h! God is the wind that blows over the sea… the wave of the deep… the bull of the seven battles… the tear in the eye of the sun.”
His breath had the musty moulder and damp of caves to it. The words rushed forth thick as bats but more of them got left within that ever come out because there’s never been the likes of druids for secrets.”

— Buechner, again, this time describing the monk Erc, in Brendan.

February 06, 2012

“Ailred was fourth. They say as a babe he reared up like a lily in his tub and spoke the Pater Noster through nor would take of his mother’s teat for the forty days and night of Lent save Sabbaths. He grew to a sheaf of bones made fast round the middle with a monk’s rope.
The pictish king of Galloway was the devil fleshed. He had the gold eyes of a toad and a forked beard. On cold nights he’d slit a slave’s belly open like a sack so he could dabble his feet in the warm bowels. He tied together the limbs of women in labor for sport and drank blood. Ailred went to him. Throned on a rock, the king was picking his teeth with the bone of a weasel when Ailred knelt and watered his shins with tears. They say a light went forth from Ailred then that blinded the king’s gold eyes, and a creature was seen passing forth out of the king hung all over with bottles of the blood he’d drunk, and the king swore holy faith from that day on and took him the name of Ailred for his own. Thus with no loss of seed or purity, my friend got him a son that day upon the rock, and Jesu a forkbeard, pictish knight though blind as a bat from that day on.”

— From page 5 of Godric, by Frederick Buechner. Open this book at random and you will find a miraculous piece of writing wherever your eyes land.

February 06, 2012

“In his 1939 lecture on Sacred and Secular in Art and Industry, Eric Gill compared the artist and the modern industrial laborer. They have much in common: “Both are normally engaged in making things. Both are normally workers with their hands. Both are normally paid for what they do and not paid if they don’t do it. (In this respect unlike either the man of business or the politician.) Both are commonly instructed as to what is required of them before they begin working.” Gill argued that the key difference is one of responsibility: “The artist is responsible for the form and quality of what his deeds effect; he is the responsible workman; he has responsibility and would be insulted if he were denied it; but the workman, the labourer, the hireling, the factory hand has been, as the theologian puts it, reduced to a sub-human condition of intellectual irresponsibility; he neither has responsibility nor does he now desire it. He is too deeply corrupted by his serfdom. The hireling flieth, because he is a hireling.”
Gill argues further that the detachment of labor from artistic responsibility for the products of labor distorts modern understanding of the “fine arts.” Fine arts are “very important and even enthralling,” he says, but “only as important and enthralling as they now are by reason of the fact that the common arts in our sort of mechanized society do not give any scope for the satisfaction of those specially fine feelings which our fine artists are now the special purveyors of.””

— Peter Leithart, Irresponsible Labor. Cf. this.

January 24, 2012

January 23, 2012

Flannery O'Connor reads A Good Man is Hard to Find at Notre Dame in 1959, I believe. Good Man is the first Flannery story I read, and it was probably the first story that ever shocked me—my jaw actually dropped. I remained completely startled and unsettled by it in my subsequent readings of it until I heard this recording, when for the first time I could hear how funny it is, too (“his head was as smooth and round as a cabbage…”).

Western Steam no. 17: Union Pacific passenger special, Medicine Bow, Wyoming by Joel Jensen (first discovered in his book Steam: An Enduring Legacy). — Western Steam no. 17: Union Pacific passenger special, Medicine Bow, Wyoming by Joel Jensen (first discovered in his book *Steam: An Enduring Legacy*).

January 17, 2012

Great Plains no. 15: Last light by Joel Jensen.

January 17, 2012

Birmingham Is Not New York: 5 Cautions for Arts Ministry →

January 13, 2012

Via commentmagazine:

Start with where you are. If your church is in a region with a strong history of quilt making, that should be the starting point for your arts ministry. Don’t open with a white cube gallery space. Take a lot of time to listen to the artists and designers in your church to understand the history and legacy of the creative process in your region. Think outside just painting and architecture. Contra dancing, shape-note singing, and street art murals are a few of the examples of regional art that you ought to spend time thinking about and participating in. Before turning your narthex into a gallery, why not ask experienced woodworkers in your congregation to make a table for communion? Before trying to create a concert space where touring bands can play, support already existing local efforts to promote music.

What if your church is in a region that doesn’t have a strong tradition of anything?

January 04, 2012

A short Washington & Idaho Railway freight trundles over two of the few remaining rails left on the Palouse. Near Belmont, Washington, mid-December, 2011.

As it happens, my buddy Joel P. King was at the throttle on this one.

January 03, 2012

Rules of storytelling

The Trinity and human relationships

Birmingham Is Not New York: 5 Cautions for Arts Ministry →

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