Who reads and writes fiction anyway?

Yesterday, a Twitter post challenged writers to describe their readers as a step towards finding and engaging with them and to marketing their books. Of course, I understand how to write for a specific audience - when it comes to non-fiction, especially. The audience determines how much background is needed, the type and level of vocabulary, the length of the piece as well as the assumptions and goals. Again, at least for non-fiction, which I have written a lot. But I took this challenge for Pastor's Ex-Wife, which is fiction.

Perhaps the first time I realized that I love fiction was in 1964 when I was in the fourth grade. Roald Dahl's book, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, had just been released. Each afternoon another chapter was read aloud on an FM radio station in New York City, so I hurried home from school to listen. I became fully engaged with the characters. As the spoken words turned to images in my mind, I found myself inside the story. Already an avid reader, this experience solidified for me that fiction is magic, that fiction conjures imagination.

I knew I, too, would someday write fiction...

... And continue to read it...

Kipling and Dostoevsky, Tolkein and Carolyn Keene, C.S. Lewis and Dickens, Georgette Heyer and Dorothy Sayers, Dan Brown and Steve Berry, Verne and Austin (although I hate Emma), Alcott and L'Engle, Stevenson and Swift, Chaucer and Hemingway, Sartre and Joel Chandler Harris, Konigsburg and Kingsolver - the list could go on and on from chick lit for pure escape to young adult books to mysteries, thrillers, and serious literature: both contemporary and classic.

As long as the story pulls me into its own Narnian space and time, I will read it, no matter who wrote it. As long as it produces an emotional response in me and, even without me putting forth any effort, I see the mind-movie that makes me unlikely to enjoy most movie versions, it is likely that I will keep reading late into the night and early in the morning until the last page forces me to resume living in the normal. Gratuitous sex, explicit violence that is only titillating and adds nought to the story other than to make the reader a voyeur, not a companion on a kind of voyage, will make me stop reading. Usually books that are psychological thrillers, like Gone Girl (which I read all the way through) terrify me because they push me out of the story into my own that I have often read to escape, do not entice me to even start - not because they are not well written, but because of my own frailty.

So, does any of this reflection assist in creating a picture of my target market of readers for Pastor's Ex-Wife? It is not chick lit but the protagonist, Terry Soldan, is a woman. It is not a cozy Christian read but it is about how wounded people wrestle genuinely with issues of faith. It is not a romance but it is about how friendships fail and also endure and deepen. It is not a psychological thriller but it shows what abuse does to distort emotions, decision making and memories. It is not explicitly about race in America but it constantly navigates that issue. It is not about the #metoo clergy sexual abuse scandal in the American Protestant church but it wouldn't be written except for that trauma. It's a story that touches big ideas and opens hearts that may have been scarred over before the pus has been drained out. The story includes pain and laughter, fear and courage, gourmet meals and gardens, and it is filled with people to love, hate and try to understand.

How does any of this predict who the readers should be? I think I wrote it well - filled with sensory detail and authenticity that can and should be critiqued. I guess I am looking for readers who are readers like me - who taste a book's first few pages and have to continue. There is a good sample on Amazon - please taste it and let me know if, in your opinion, it needs more salt. If you decide to keep reading, please consider leaving a review on Amazon when you are finished.

#WhyIwriteFiction

"Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion." - Tennessee Williams in The Glass Menagerie

When I was challenged to write a book about abused pastor's wives by a friend who had escaped such a marriage, I felt it would be more effective to make it fiction. This has seemed to work. My friends who have read Pastor's Ex-Wife have consistently reported that the book has "opened" their hearts. It is a serious book about a timely and horrible issue made even more relevant by the #metoo movement.

I would love people to read and reflect back on this book. Does it open your heart? How? Does other fiction do that? When and why? Does Pastor's Ex-Wife ring true to you? Could you #metoo about something that happened at a church or by a member of the clergy? Do you think it crosses boundaries? Does it violate scripture or offend Christians or does it open an unhealed wound that has grown somewhat gangrene? Could this become a movie?

c. 2018
By Lesley Barker

Religion: Not Yet, Not Here, Not Necessarily Available because It is Not for Now....

My fiction pushes against religiosity by exposing the wounds and the questions that result from being hurt by the church and accused by religious leaders who have become bullies instead of good news brokers. In his book, Kingdom Principles: Preparing for Kingdom Experience and Expansion, Miles Munroe distinguishes between religion and a kingdom-mindset. By unpicking how kings exercise dominion as well as lord over domains, Munroe challenges people, no matter their religious affiliation, to take Jesus' reply to Pontius Pilate at face value: "I was born a king." Munroe claims that "religion postpones the Kingdom to a future experience." When religion is focused on the attainment of something not yet, not here, not necessarily available because it is not for now, there is a space and a potential need created in our minds for some more enlightened guru without whom we might not be able to get to there then, who, if said guru is operating against us out of some impure agenda as a bully, competes against the Holy Spirit for our trust. This mismatch often twists how we understand and lean on God. My book, Pastor's Ex-Wife, is the story of one such victim's journey back to a place of vulnerability after having been bullied away from trust, overtaken by too much fear and chained up by so much religiosity. It takes her on a romp through inner city schools as well as to an assortment of Protestant churches until she finds enough courage to confront and disallow her abuser-pastor-ex-husband any additional power over her life and emotions. Although fiction, it is anything but imagined.

Missing the Clam Juice

I do not enjoy gratuitous sex scenes in novels. In fact, I see very little reason for there ever to be explicit descriptions of such activity. Nuance and innuendo works just fine for me as a reader. But, now that I have moved on to writing the second chapter of Stuck in the Mud, I find myself wondering how essential it is to make the protagonist - Aileen, in this case- the victim of some violent targeted effort to get her off the track of the killer or killers. Perhaps it is expected. But is it a must-have ingredient for a successful mystery novel?

I resist following patterns, recipes, or the usual procedures when there is obvious space for creativity.

People who have known me for a long time understand that they will never get exactly the same recipe twice when they eat at my house. I may knit dozens of Christmas stockings but I'll never use the same design twice. I love to read cookbooks but I don't make the meals described. I read them for the ideas - this spice goes with that set of ingredients, this technique makes that effect, this tool produces that result... If I eat something at a restaurant that I like I'll try to duplicate it at home and usually succeed on the first try.

The longest it ever took me to figure out a recipe was for the pasta con broccoli at the Rich & Charlie's restaurant in St. Louis. The ingredient that nearly stumped me was clam juice.

So writing this first mystery novel - hopefully this first of a series of mystery novels- feels a lot like recreating that pasta recipe. I'm trying to identify and properly incorporate the essential ingredients and I hope I'm not missing the clam juice.

Inevitable Unexpected

According to Aristotle, cited by Hallie and Whit Burnett in Fiction Writer's Handbook, "We keep reading in hopes of coming to a conclusion both 'inevitable and unexpected'".

I think this is right - but that more than just applying to our motivation for reading could it be a description of any authentic truth: inevitable and unexpected? Like when Solomon concluded that the resolution to the dispute about which mother's baby was the live son was to slice the child in two or when resurrection forced the grave open to deny Satan the crucifixion's booty and any legitimate power over us earthlings...

The issue for me now is how to craft Stuck in the Mud so that it leads readers to such an inevitable unexpected resolution .... I think Pastor's Ex-Wife does that - you'll have to read it and let me know if you agree.

Meta-cognition and Story Structure

When I write a poem I usually impose a stringent structure on myself - it may be a rhyme scheme, a recurring pattern of syllables, or some other combinations of devices that make it necessary to craft and recraft the piece before it is finished. This has assisted me in some mysterious, serendipitous fashion, to discover my true intent, pushed as I am to make the piece work - as with solving a Sudoku, there is one right set of answers even though the building blocks rearrange themselves forever.

I had a similar set of rules, a template, if you will, for each chapter when I wrote Pastor's Ex-Wife. Each chapter had to advance the plot and also contain:

• A church service - using a fictitious construct which was a composite of a different church building, congregation, pastor, and service
• An anecdote from when I taught music in an inner city elementary school district
• A metaphor or symbol that carried the psychological/emotional impact of the chapter
• Dialogue

I have a similar set of rules for a historical novel - the working title is Isabel -that is based on a series of letters written in 1894 between Benjamin Edwards and Isabel Woods. Most of the research for that book is done but I am not ready to write it yet. However, I can watch it unfold in my mind as though the book were a dance choreographed for the stage - each chapter is one day in the week before Isabel dies. When I do write it, I think it will flow fairly freely - at least for the first draft.

My current struggle is with Stuck in the Mud. It is a murder mystery - think "cozy", not "thriller." But I want to incorporate big issues into the story - the pain that spiritually abusive marriages cause the children, how gender issues play out in today's American Protestant churches, and how the issues of class, philanthropy, and status intertwine in the context of a nonprofit organization. The setting is contemporary Ste. Genevieve, Missouri - the Bolduc House Museum, in fact, so at some level I hope that the novel will be a marketing device for both the museum and the town. There are three corpses: one in St. Louis, one washing up at the Mississippi River marina in Ste. Genevieve, and one accidentally plowed up behind one of the houses at the museum. The requisite but uncertain romantic sub-theme is there.

I'm thinking that the plot itself has to be the driver of Stuck in the Mud....unlike the shifting settings and symbols of Pastor's Ex-Wife, or the character-driven Strindberg-like expose of Isabel. So for me, the task of planning Stuck in the Mud is unexpectedly the most difficult writing task I have undertaken to date.

So much for a writer's meta-cognitive process, right?

Robert Louis Stevenson on Fiction's Transformative Power

I agree with Robert Louis Stevenson about the power of fiction. Do you? This is what he wrote:

"The most influential books and the truest in their influence are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterward discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson which he must afterward unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change - that monstrous, conserving ego of our being, for the nonce, struck out."

If you have experienced this kind of transformative power of fiction, please post a comment that includes the book that most impacted you.

You wanted to know what else I'm writing....

Suppose Aileen, a young college graduate with a history degree, got hired to develop children's programming for a history museum thanks to the interference of her very pushy, very affluent grandmother who is acting out of guilt for the drop-out dad her only son proved to have been. As far as Grandmother is concerned, his first offense had been to side-step attending a respectable seminary and go traveling rogue as a contemporary Christian singer/preacher with charismatic tendencies. She might not have intruded so directly into Aileen's life had her mother not died just before the girl started college or if her son had been man enough to pick up any of the parenting obligations. 

Neither Aileen nor her Grandmother would ever have guessed that one spring morning the body of this same son and father would wash against the same bank of the Mississippi River where his daughter and her dog just happened to be walking. Amazingly his was not the only dead body to end up in Aileen's way....

This will be my first murder mystery. It's pretty well plotted. I'm done with the first chapter at least for this first draft. Right now it does not have a working title, though.

I started working on it last spring.

Then the tourism season took over followed by a huge turnover of my museum staff and truly this is the first time I have had to do anything but muse over the story since its beginning.

My plan is to spend about 10 hours each week writing it beginning immediately.

When it is finished, I'll let it percolate while I write another story which has been brewing for at least ten years...research is mostly done, plotting is done, it just needs to be written. I'll tell you about that one another day. In addition, there is one more pretty well developed novel and about five nonfiction books in my mind. Hopefully in the meantime I will recruit enough of an audience for Pastor's Ex-Wife that women who share Terry Soldan's story will be willing to contribute their own in the forms of letters to Terry.... which letters will become the sequel to Pastor's Ex-Wife.

I have a friend who recruited his readership by playing Mafia Wars on social media. It worked for him and now he has some traditional publishing contracts for his sci-fi fiction. It makes me jealous but not enough to emulate his strategy....I'll just blog along so you all can watch what happens......

Btw, today Pastor's Ex-Wife became available for sale on any ebook platform you like via smashwords.com. It's been for sale as a Kindle book for almost a year. If you haven't read it yet....there are links to the right on this blog....just saying.....:)

Who's William?

There were 13 students in my kindergarten class at a Lutheran school in New York City. William was the new kid in first grade who cried when his sister was born because he already had a sister and had wanted a brother. He also threw up on my desk. We became very close friends. He gave me permission to use his name for the William of my novel, Pastor's Ex-Wife. Now he is a successful ob-gyn. The fictitious William is an elementary principal in an inner city school district. In fact he, like most everything else in the book is a fictional construct made up of three men who have loved me well: William, Mike (a real principal), and my dad - the inspiration behind the fictitious William's passion for gourmet cooking. His passion for gardening is from me. In all, William represents all the positives in contrast to Pastor Ed who is the villain.

TAPF - Planning to write Pastor's Ex-Wife

When I taught elementary school students writing I helped them begin every project by filling out a form to identify a few standard parameters. It asked for the Topic, Audience, Purpose, and Format. You can't write a successful piece without knowing these from the beginning unless you are just journaling - Virginia Wolff style using stream of conscious free writing. I do that but I usually do not share that stuff with anyone kind of like my painter daughter keeps her sketchbooks very private.

I did not use the actual form but I did think through the parameters from the very beginning. The only thing that really shifted away from my original plan while I was writing Pastor's Ex-Wife was the format.

Originally I planned to write just a short story to get the idea to stop dominating my imagination because I did not want to summon the personal courage to actually work on it. Read the earlier blogs to see more of what I mean...

So here is how I would have filled out that simple 4th grade writing planner.
Topic:  the clergy abuse scandal/issue from the American Protestant side through the perspective of a wife of an abusive pastor
Audience: people who have been wounded by the American Protestant church and who are conflicted about their faith as a result - especially women who have been victimized or sexually violated by pastors
Purpose: expose the problem of clergy spouse and sexual abuse, show how it manifests in a variety of church and denominational contexts, help victims delineate between abusers who, like all humans, are deceitfully wicked, and God, who is good but who gets redefined through the lens of every authority figure
Format: fiction - this is the biggest problem for getting the book noticed by a publisher, since it does not fit nicely into any of the publishing categories not being a Christian book nor a romance nor any other readily definable anything except perhaps contemporary women's fiction. But I believe that the format, a novel,  is also the best way to reach the intended audience and fulfill its purpose effectively.

You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.     

Clergy Sexual Abuse - the Protestant Side

My biggest goal in writing Pastor's Ex-Wife, the fictional account of Terry Soldan who for 24 years was the wife of an abusive pastor until she escaped by having an affair- not exactly..., was to confront the issue. I wanted to engage a conversation about and among women who have wrestled with issues of faith and authenticity because one lens (their abusive pastor husbands) through which they view God has returned a very distorted image. Now, I am hoping to engage enough readers to interest a publisher. You can help by going to www.authonomy.com. Create a free profile. Then search for Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker. Click on View the book. Then BACK the book. Read as much or as little of it as you'd like. Leave comments- be critical and honest about how you find the story. Then pass the link on to others who would be interested. This issue is too big and too important to leave unchronicled. Thanks.