How do you know a story is done?

When you write the last word and go back to make a minor correction only to find out your pen is dry.

Interesting

I was listening to this.

It is full of this.

Handel & Dryden. What times!

Handel was a great man; I kneel at his grave.

Studies have shown that if you don’t post, people won’t look at your blog.

I have way too many people looking at my blog anyway. Do you know what brings most people? The post on hamburger paragraphs.

The worst chapter in all my book was the fourth chapter. It was full of clumsy and tedious dialog, huge chunks of the ungainly exposition of unsubtle ideas. I had my boy, Alde, and his guard, Waerd, setting out to kill the dragon. How to show the character of Waerd? I did it in long, preachy speeches, huge chunks of un-sculpted and un-literary masonry of text. I was going to go through the chapter and chop down the dialog, add some more activity, and narrate in shorter paragraphs. Sort of smooth things out, you know . . . but the chapter was so bad I did not think it could be saved.

At last I thought of putting in a game of chess. Waerd is a soldier, so a metaphor for battle would be the fitting thing. The idea did not take off too quickly, but it grew on me. And it is amazing what the game of chess has done to that chapter. The chapter has come into focus; the metaphor has allowed me to find the statues hidden in the blocks of stone. I have other chapters that I look on with reluctance. They all need their own games of chess.

I was listening to an interview of Ray Bradbury today, and he talked about trying to figure out the metaphors. Once he figured out the right metaphors, he kept saying, the stories would all fall into place. Then he could work feverishly for long hours writing a good story.

I am retro-fitting my story with the metaphor, but it really fits what I wanted to do in the chapter. It gives aptness to what was clumsily before. I can weed out tedious overstatement, I can move things along briskly, I can show the story clearly rather than telling it vaguely.

This business of re-writing is marvelous stuff. Never had I thought poring over something I had written could be so interesting. When I was in Bible school I never revised a paper; I turned it in when I had typed out the last word. In college I was bothered to read through it once, and near the end, maybe even twice. In seminary I was still more careful and soon learned not to fool around, to read my work critically. In the post-graduate seminars I would have to face my oversights when I read my paper for the rest; so I learned the discipline of being more careful, but not the joy.

Now I know the joy. It is because I know better what I am doing; I know which way to start thinking about my problems. It is also because I am better aware of the problems; I know what mistake has been committed. Will my joy increase as I get better? I think so. The greater joy will accompany an increasing awareness of my failures. The better writing will result from the humility and joy of long revision.

I remember asking Braithwaite once how it was that all the names before Babel worked out so conveniently with Hebrew meanings. He told me that he thought the language spoken before Babel was probably something like one of the Semitic languages. I thought for a long time that that made Semitic languages more desirable than all the rest. After all, if it were not for the fall we might all still speak a Semitic language, the language of old earth. But the other languages were not contrived by humans either. They were given by God and wondrous gifts.

I thought of it this afternoon when hearing an unusually good thing on the radio, at the end of my ride home. Some Romanian chap with a refreshing, grim outlook and a way with words was talking about language. He was disparaging machine translators and saying translation is the last thing left for humans to do. Then he went on to say we do not do it very well explaining that languages do not like to be translated. He gave two reasons for this. He said that the people of the valleys do not speak the language of the people of the mountains because the valleys speak through their language, just as the mountains speak through the language of the people of the mountains. He said the other reason was that the people of the valleys did not want the people of the mountains to understand what they were saying.

I wonder how right he is about the second one. I am inclined to believe there is some truth to it. But we also know that the differences in language were not intended by men to set themselves apart, but by God to set men apart. Still, knowing what we know about human nature, it is perfectly understandable.

He is right about the language growing out of the place where people live, and speaking, as it were, with the voice of the valley, or the arid desert, or the sunny seacoast where the people live. And that is when I thought about that Semitic, or proto-semitic language, the language of old earth, perhaps the language of Eden. Was this Semitic language the medium in which Adam was conscious, naming all the animals, seeing the new wonders of the world? Was it the language in which he realized the consequences of his act as they worked themselves out over the centuries as life? I have to think that Adam, who knew the splendor of Eden and the joy of uninhibited communion with God, saw the dark consequences of the choice he made more clearly than any after him. What darkness did his meditations follow in that most ancient language?

It fills one with wonder, with antique longing and with haggard mournfulness. What a wealth is the knowledge of a language, what a wondrous invention and what a heavy burden!

Words, words, words.

We got the DVD.

I was talking to a friend at work and the movies came up. He is an older chap who has been an attorney. Originally he went to school to go into the foreign service but graduating in the days of Nixon and Kissinger, decided he might have to go another route. Now he works in our fraud department and we have interesting conversations. He recently recorded the season premiere of the NY Philharmonic and also something the Vienna Philharmonic put on to give me the DVDs. He told me about the old masters collection currently at MIA (worth seeing, but don’t go on a Saturday when it is crowded – we only lasted an hour because it was so hard to get a painting to oneself). Although he likes Lukacs he considers himself an old fashioned liberal and he is decidedly a political junkie. Anyway, he told me I really ought to carve out some time to watch movies.
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This is the weather in which life is lived. I love the cold, I love the long weeks below freezing. I like always wearing sweaters and not getting too hot. I like always drinking hot drinks and avoiding the cold ones. I like boiling water on the stove to restore some moisture to the air, water with cinnamon or orange peels or apples. I like the drifting, slow-ascending plumes of vapor from the buildings and the extra warmth of indoor lights in winter. I like warming up the car, and I love feeling the cold air on my face. I like to walk through the cold because it amazes me that all the world should be so cold. I love the snow to walk through, to drive through, to watch as it comes down in utter silence. I love the long darkness of winter, with candles and Christmas lights. I wish, I heartily wish I had a fireplace and a sauna. I love the short and poignant hours of winter daylight. I love to watch the sun rising at eight on the coldest days, knowing it is the coldest moment of the day and far below zero.

Heheheh

I have just finished the fifteenth chapter of my long story for Sophia. I have it all in a password protected page. It is a story for children about three children who go to another world.

I’ve enjoyed writing it. I suppose I’ve enjoyed it because I always had the person in mind I was writing for. It helps your writing to enjoy it while you write.

If you have time and inclination and would like to read it or read it to a kid, let me know and I can email you the password. I entertain hopes of publishing it eventually and so I don’t want to make it public before its time.

For two years running we went down to the L’Abri Conference in Rochester. The first time we did we got up early and drove down the Friday morning it began. It was -17 that morning. So the next year we decided to go down on Thursday and stay the night before. We got a huge blizzard and the trip down was one of those harrowing drives through the snow. The Geo Metro we had back then had square, recessed headlights which would fill up with snow and had to be scooped out.

But when we got there we would park in the parking ramp held in the deadly grip of ice and head indoors. They use the Kahler Grand Hotel and it is pretty grand throughout, although the rooms are not too grand. But you can get grand rooms. You don’t really have to go outside unless you want to because they have tunnels and skywalks in downtown Rochester for all the patients.

I remember looking out the window and watching the snow fall in the evening. I like being there in the winter. And I like the hotel restaurants without all the annoying thematic stuff other restarants have to get up.

You can usually count on seeing some Arab in flowing robes at the Kahler Grand Hotel. And on the TV you can find quite a few more Arab channels than you would think. It is quite an exotic place.

The best part of the Rochester L’Abri conference is not that it is thronged by evangelicals, that Dennis Haack is going to show you clips from a movie and get teary about how he witnessed to somebody after watching a movie with them, or the lunch at the Marriott Hotel where you end up sitting with people you never would have thought would be interested in something put on by L’Abri. Besides the pleasant time you can have in Rochester and Rochester’s book stores the best thing about the conference is that they always include John Hodges.

Even now, when I have no illusions about what they do, when I also would tell somebody asking me where to start reading Francis Schaeffer to start by just reading C. S. Lewis instead, I still think about going just to hear John Hodges.

He introduced me to Arvo Part. He may have done two sessions on him that first year. He also did a session on music in the 20th century which was wonderful. He played ‘sacred’ and secular rock and most of the audience couldn’t tell the difference. He was a nice guy though, which is why his kind fail. He told them he thought the church should not be indistinguishable from the world but so nicely they could all laugh nervousely and then the thought went clean away. It was like Ken Myers’ All of God’s Childen in Blue Suede Shoes which makes the case and then backs down in the conclusions.

The second year Hodges didn’t have as many workshops. He played some very modern stuff in his main session and could not get the evangelicals to pay attention to it. He even knew they would want to talk during the listening and urged them to refrain. In his workshop he was full of a new person he had met in England who was translating St. Augustine’s De Musica. I remember suggesting during the question time that some music was better than others and how gracefully he handled the predictable objections from the audience–long practice.

Hodges main session at the coming conference is called The Word of Truth and the Beauty of Music: Brahms A German Requiem. I can tell he’ll say worthwhile things. I love to hear worthwhile things. He’s also got two other workshops on the work of the artist and the power of art. I keep thinking to myself, you know, the price is not too bad for two nights and three sessions. The hotel has a sauna and a pool. One can fill up the time wonderfully writing or reading. And who knows, what if they have some spindly Cambridge professor to read a paper that summarizes all the works of C. S. Lewis and most of Shakespeare’s plays? That happened one year . . . in one of the workshops. Maybe it will happen again.