BOWER OF COMFORT

Enjoy this post!

Stickler Stuff from Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

Increasingly people are (ignorantly) adding question marks to sentences containing indirect questions, which is a bit depressing. Everything ends up becoming a question? I’m talking about statements? It’s getting quite annoying?

I trust we all got the point?
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Inspiration from Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life compiled by Carole F. Chase

Can one be a Christian artist and not know it?

I think that’s the way it always happens, even when one is constantly struggling to be a Christian in daily living. I cannot try, consciously, to write a “Christian” story—even in such a book as Dance in the Desert which (although it is never overtly stated) is about the holy family’s flight into Egypt. When I am working, I move into an area of faith which is beyond the conscious control of my intellect. I do not mean that I discard my intellect, that I am an anti-intellectual, gun-ho for intuition and intuition only. Like it or not, I am an intellectual. The challenge is to let my intellect work for the creative act, not against it. And this means, first of all, that I must have more faith in the work than I have in myself.

This sounds like the advice to get the story down by turning off your editor. We also have to turn off logic and turn on creativity. Prayer doesn’t hurt, either.
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The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart

Morgause, that lady of luxury, would have thought herself ill used had she been denied any of the appurtenances of royalty, and she had managed, with her spoils, to make herself a bower of comfort and colour to cushion her exile and enhance her one famous beauty. On all sides the stone walls of the hall were hung with brilliantly dyed cloths. The smooth flagstones of the floor were not, as might have been expected, strewn with rushes and heather, but had been made luxurious with islands of deerskin, brown and fawn and dappled. The heavy benches along the side walls were made of stone, but the chairs and stools standing on the platform at the hall’s end were of fine wood carefully carved and painted, and bright with coloured cushions, while the doors were of strong oak, handsomely ornamented, and smelling of oil and wax.

Description should enable the reader to picture the scene in her mind. Stewart succeeds here.
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I’ll post again on Monday. Have a good weekend?

CREAMY SEA

Happy Wednesday! I hope you enjoy these quotes:

Stickler Stuff from Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

The name “question mark” (which is a rather dull one, quite frankly) was acquired in the second half of the 19th century, and has never caught on universally.

What else is the question mark called?
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Inspiration from Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life compiled by Carole F. Chase

Your point of view as a human being is going to come over in your work whether you know it or not. There’s no way you can hide it. So if you are a Christian, your work is going to be Christian. There’s no way you can hide that. If you’re not, you can talk about Jesus all you like and it’s not going to be Christian. If you are someone who cares about human beings, that’s going to come over in your work. If you are indifferent to the fate of other people, that’s also going to show.

You cannot hide yourself, and that’s a very scary thing—particularly true, oddly enough, in fiction. Sometimes in nonfiction you can hide yourself behind statistics and facts, but in fiction you are writing story, and story is revelatory. One of the wonderful things that comes out of story is that you not only find out more about your characters, ultimately you are helping to write your own story.

I had a Eureka moment when I realized the anger of one of my characters mirrored my own.
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And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for. Our new (actually returning) author is Mary Stewart in her fourth book of the Merlin trilogy, The Wicked Day.

The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart

It was a bright day of early summer. May, in the islands, can be as cruel as any other month, but this was a day of sunshine and mild breezes. The stones of the beach looked grey and turquoise and rosy-red, the sea creamed against them peacefully, and the turf of the ridge behind was thick with sea-pink and primrose and red campion. Every ledge of the cliffs that bounded the bay was crowded with seabirds claiming and disputing their nesting territory, and nearer, on shingle or turf, the pied oystercatchers brooded their eggs or flew, screaming, to and fro along the tide. The air was loud with their cries. Even had there been a listener outside the cottage doorway, he could have heard nothing for the noise of the sea and the birds, but inside the room the furtive hush persisted.

The last line contrasts with the peaceful shore scene, and the reader knows something’s up.
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Thanks for your interest. Come back Friday.

A BUG CAUGHT IN HER THROAT

Good morning! I hope the day warms up. This morning registered 18 degrees in Denver. BRRR!
Anyway, here are your posts:

Stickler Stuff from Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

Like the exclamation mark, the question mark is a development of the full stop, a “terminator”, used only at the ends of sentences, starting out as the punctus interrogativus in the second half of the 8th century, when it resembled a lightning flash, striking from right to left.

Don’t you love the etymology of punctuation?
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Inspiration from Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life compiled by Carole F. Chase

I think my seeking of God’s guidance is as unconscious as the best work I do when I’m writing. When I am doing my best work, I am not being self-centered. To do something consciously is to be thinking into your own self. When I’m doing my best writing, I trust I am doing God’s work; but I am not thinking about myself or anything except getting out of the other side of selfishness and self-will and listening to the work. And I think that is true of God’s guidance.

When I demand that God guide me, what I’m really saying is “Do it my way, God. I want to go down this path. Why are you pushing me in that direction?” Whereas if I can get out of my way, I’ll know that that’s the direction I really ought to be shoved in.

God directs me in and through my writing as well. Sometimes characters know best.
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God Gave the Song by Kathleen E. Kovach

But as they all walked to the room, the little boy inside him tried to dig in his heels, making Skye’s size elevens feel like lead.

I’ve got a tantrum-throwing girl inside. I hate it when she insists on her own way.

* * *

She no longer spat out Brian’s name as if it were a disgusting bug caught in her throat.

I’ve never had a bug in my throat, but there was that time a cockroach ran up inside my pant leg . . .
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That’s it for today, and the last entry for Kathy’s God Gave the Song. Stay tuned for Wednesday’s author debut.