The Small Boys Came Early to the Hanging

Writer’s Log, Stardate 12-1-2

I am hunkering down on Creating Adam today. For over a month I have been struggling with how best to start that book. It’s a secular book, with a secular press, on a religious topic.  My target audience includes both secular and religious readers and I want to make sure I open the book as strongly as possible.

Careful attention to the writing process is essential for good books. Too many books, especially written by people with academic pedigrees like mine, assume that the primary ingredient in a good book is good information.  The reader is treated like a “student who has to read this book,” rather a “reader who has many choices about what to read.” 

Good books have openings that work—that tell the reader on the first page that this is going to be an engaging book that they will enjoy. Key over-arching themes and big questions are established early and the text remains faithful to these early promises of what the book will do.

My favorite story about openings involves Ken Follet’s sprawling thousand-page novel, The Pillars of the Earth. A close friend was raving about this book and wanted me to read it. “What is it about?” I asked—a natural question. “The construction of a medieval cathedral,” was the hardly promising response.  So I told my friend I would read the first sentence and, if I liked it, the first page; and if I liked that, the first chapter; and if I liked that I would keep on going.

I can still recall the first sentence 20 years later: “The small boys came early to the hanging.”  Who can stop reading there?

By the bottom of the first page, it was clear that something was remiss about this hanging. I needed to know what it was.

The first chapter ended a few pages later with a strange woman leaping onto the scaffolding with a live chicken. She tore the head off the chicken and sprayed the executioners with blood, pronouncing a curse on them.

Pillars of the Earth turned out to be the best novel I have ever read but I would not have read it if Ken Follet—who had a cameo role in the mini-series based on the book—had not crafted his opening so carefully.

Works of non-fiction need to have equally crafted openings. I began an essay about revisiting my home town, years after I had moved away, like this: “’The wind is not right’ said the man who could fly.” This short essay was one of my most popular pieces and was reprinted three times. One of the books I am using for Creating Adam is New Worlds, Ancient Texts by Anthony Grafton. It begins: “Between 1550 and 1650 Western thinkers ceased to believe that they could find all important truths in ancient books.”  This is a great opening and the book does not disappoint. On the other hand, another book I am using is Adam’s Ancestors by David Livingstone.  It opens with a dense half page of text from the beginning of the Bible followed by this sentence: “Ever since 1611, when the King James Bible first appeared, these words have introduced Bible readers to Adam, the father of the human race.” The book contains absolutely fascinating information, presented competently and authoritatively, but with little excitement.

I want Creating Adam to have an opening that pulls in the reader.  Hopefully by the end of the week I will have found one.

Writer’s Log Supplemental:  I just got word from Brazos that they are giving me enough copies of Peter Enns’ just published Evolving Adam for everyone in my class at Gordon College. The students have to read it and do reviews on Amazon and one other place but that is a good assignment for a writing workshop, even if the book is not free.

A Writer's Resolution

Writer's Log: Stardate 12-1-1

The beginning of a new year is a great time to think about trying new things, refraining from old things, and retrying things you gave up on from previous resolution. I have the usual list: I want to lose 25 pounds, spend less time bashing Republicans (although I don’t think I can give that up entirely in an election year), get my basement cleaned out, and spend more time with my daughters. But I also want to try an experiment with my writing for 2012: I want to post a comment every day about my life as a writer, focusing on the most important aspect of that day. 

This is the first time I have started the New Year with virtually all my professional energy focused on writing and its associated speaking engagements, grant writing, and media appearances. And—also for the first time—I am teaching a writing workshop that I am really excited about. I have 8 students at Gordon College who will be working with me on my new book. This is something I have been trying to get going for years and I am eager to see how it goes. I am also planning a year-end non-fiction writing symposium at Gordon.

The writing events that will dominate 2012 for me include the following:

1)   Working on my book Creating Adam that has a year-end deadline. All 8 of my students at Gordon have told me they want to work on this with me. A couple of them have already started.

2)   Promoting my book Wonder of the Universe, which comes out in April and, as far as I can tell, is 100% complete at the moment.

3)   Finishing the last few editorial details on my book God Saw that it was Good, which is scheduled for September. That book is completely written but I think I will have page proofs to approve, an index to create, and I will probably have to hit up some of my big shot friends to write blurbs for the back cover.

4)   Getting my next book project set up.  I don’t want to ever be without a major writing project and it takes so long to get a book contract that I will probably start thinking about my next project in late spring.  I have several ideas to explore but I need to get further along on Creating Adam before I start thinking about that.

5)   Speaking and media appearances. I have quite a few speaking gigs set up and various requests from the media to deal with. I actually enjoy interacting with the media but it can be nerve-wracking because you lose some control of your message. Reporters really want you to say inflammatory things to make their stories exciting and sometimes things appear in print that are more dramatic than you intended. One example is the title that our editor put on the op-ed that I wrote (with Randall Stephens) in the NY Times.  He called it “The Evangelical Rejection of Reason,” which was a bit hyperbolic since the piece was about tensions within evangelicalism, not tensions between evangelicals as a whole and “reason,” whatever that would look like.  But I was honored to be in the world’s leading newspaper so, on balance it was a positive experience. I have a request now from a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Ed who is working on a story about what it is like to be a controversial scholar at a conservative college. I plan to navigate that quite carefully.

6)   Blogging and other writing. Writers like me, who are not so famous that their books automatically fly off the shelves like those of Stephen King, have to work on growing their “platform.” For me this includes things like blogging as often as I can on the Huffington Post and other media outlets. I am fortunate that I have “broken into” this level of exposure and I can basically post something on Huffpo whenever I want. But it takes time and, alas, it does not pay anything. I am also trying to figure out how to effectively use facebook, my website, twitter, and other media.  And frankly, all that is quite overwhelming…

OK. So this is post #1 for 2012. See you tomorrow!

Useful Shortcuts

I ran across this bit of wisdom today from a guy who runs a major blog and used to write speeches for George Bush.  I can't think of what to do with it, so I am posting it here.

When I was in law school, I devised my own idiosyncratic solution to the problem of studying a topic I knew nothing about. I'd wander into the library stacks, head to the relevant section, and pluck a book at random. I'd flip to the footnotes, and write down the books that seemed to occur most often. Then I'd pull them off the shelves, read their footnotes, and look at those books. It usually took only 2 or 3 rounds of this exercise before I had a pretty fair idea of who were the leading authorities in the field. After reading 3 or 4 of those books, I usually had at least enough orientation in the subject to understand what the main questions at issue were — and to seek my own answers, always provisional, always subject to new understanding, always requiring new reading and new thinking.

—David Frum (January 1, 2008), National Review^[8]

Is Free Will a Mystery?

By Dr. Karl Giberson via The Huffington Post

This piece was loosely inspired by Martin Gardner's great essay on free will in The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener that I used in my freshman seminar course.

Excerpt: Are there Big Questions that don't have answers? Are some things simply beyond our capacity to understand with the finite lumps of gray matter in our heads? Are there "mysteries" in the world that simply can't be sorted out no matter how much gray matter is applied to the problem?

Read full article here