March 2014 Issue of The Scribblers Newsletter
Welcome to the March issue of The Scribblers. In this issue we have new writing prompts, an article about writing formulas, and a look at Andrew Greeley.
March Writing Prompts:
1. How could I have guessed that a simple 'hello' would have impacted my life so dramatically?
2. Just as I stepped off the curb at the corner of E. Camelback Road and N. 32nd Street in Phoenix, a blue car ran a red light hitting a mini-van. The unattached door of the blue car was flying toward me as other parts rained down.
3. Mason was broke. His bank statement showed it, but he hadn't spent that money.
Andrew M. Greeley (February 5, 1928 – May 29, 2013) was an Irish-American Roman Catholic priest, sociologist, journalist and popular novelist.
Father Greeley was a Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona and the University of Chicago, and a Research Associate with the National Opinion.
For many years, he wrote a weekly column for the Chicago Sun-Times and contributed regularly to The New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, America, and Commonweal.
Greeley was born into a large Irish Catholic family in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. By the second grade, he knew that he wanted to be a priest. In 1954, he was ordained for the Archdiocese of Chicago.
From 1954 to 1964, Greeley served as an assistant pastor at Christ the King parish in Chicago, during which time he studied sociology at the University of
Chicago. His first book, The Church in the Suburbs (1958), was drawn from notes a sociology professor had encouraged him to take describing his experiences. He received a Master of Arts in 1961 and a PhD in 1962. His doctoral dissertation dealt with the influence of religion on the career plans of 1961 college graduates.
Greeley's appreciation for the spiritual power of art inspired him to begin writing works of fiction. His literary output was such it was said that he "never had an unpublished thought."
He published his first novel, The Magic Cup, in 1975, a fantasy tale about a young king who would lead Ireland from paganism to Christianity. A second novel, Death in April, followed in 1980.
His third novel, The Cardinal Sins (1981), was his first work of fiction to become a major commercial success. As one reviewer put it, The Cardinal Sins "did for the Catholic Church what The Godfather did for the mafia." The novel's principal characters were both priests—one a writer-sociologist, like Greeley, and the other a cardinal who had broken the vow of celibacy. At the time of the book's release, Chicago's cardinal was the subject of allegations of having diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Church to a mistress.
Church officials accused Greeley of using the novel to attack the cardinal, although Greeley denied the charges and told the New York Times that the cardinal was "a much better bishop ... and a much better human being" than the character in the novel.
The Cardinal Sins was followed by the Passover trilogy: Thy Brother's Wife (1982), Ascent into Hell (1983), and Lord of the Dance (1984). Thereafter, he wrote a minimum of two novels per year, on average. In 1987 alone, he produced four novels and two works of non-fiction. He once said that he wrote an average of 5,000 words per day.
The explicit treatment of sexuality in Greeley's novels was a source of controversy for some. The National Catholic Register said that Greeley had "the dirtiest mind ever ordained." Greeley responded to his critics by saying that "there is nothing wrong with sex" and that "at the most basic level, people learn from the novels that sex is good." He insisted that, from what they heard in confession from women, priests probably knew more about marriage than most married men; and he drew on this knowledge to write a marital advice book he called Sexual Intimacy (1988).
At the height of the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal, Greeley wrote The Priestly Sins (2004), a novel about a young priest who is exiled to an insane
asylum and then to an academic life because he reports abuse that he has witnessed.
His book The Making of the Pope (2005) was intended as a follow-up to his The Making of the Popes 1978. The Making of the Pope (2005) was a first-hand account of the coalition-building process by which the conservative Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger ascended to the papacy as Benedict XVI. Greeley also dabbled in science fiction, writing the novels God Game and The Final Planet.
Politically, Greeley was an outspoken critic of the George W. Bush administration and the Iraq War, and a strong supporter of immigration rights. His book entitled A Stupid, Unjust, and Criminal War: Iraq 2001–2007 (2007) was critical of the rush by the Bush administration to start the Iraq War and the consequences of that war for the United States.
Reflecting on his life's work, Greeley told the Chicago Tribune in 1992, "I'm a priest, pure and simple.... The other things I do — sociological research, my
newspaper columns, the novels I write — are just my way of being a priest. I decided I wanted to be one when I was a kid growing up on the West Side. I've never wavered or wanted to be anything but."
Greeley was probably the best-selling priest in history, with an estimated 250,000 readers who would buy almost every novel he published, probably generating at least $110 million in gross income by 1999. He was able to live comfortably in Chicago's John Hancock Center, but he donated most of his earnings to the Church and other charities.
In 1984, he contributed $1 million to endow a chair in Roman Catholic Studies at the University of Chicago. In 1986, he established a $1 million private educational fund for scholarships and financial support to inner-city schools in the Chicago Archdiocese with a minority student body of more than 50%. He had originally offered the donation to the Archdiocese, but the then Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Bernardin, had declined the gift without ever publicly offering an explanation. In 2003, the Archdiocese accepted the $420,000 that still remained in the fund to bolster a newly established Catholic Schools Endowment Fund, providing scholarships for low-income students and for raising teachers' salaries in the Archdiocese's schools. Greeley also funded an annual lecture series, “The Church in Society”, at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein, Illinois, where he had earned his S.T.L. in 1954.
In 2008, he donated several thousand dollars to the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama, who was then serving as a U.S. Senator representing Illinois, although Greeley predicted that racism would lead to Obama's defeat.
Greeley had been in poor health since an accident on Nov. 7, 2008, that left him with traumatic brain injury. On that afternoon, an article of his clothing was caught in the door of a departing taxi, he was thrown to the ground and hit his head. He never fully recovered from the injury.
Writing about Greeley in 2010, Eugene Kennedy, said that although he looks at the newspapers daily and scans emails, Greeley “lives now in twilight and
visitors report that they are not sure what he sees or hears.”
*Information courtesy of Wikipedia
We are always looking for articles and short stories to publish, as well as suggestions for the newsletter. Please send any ideas, stories, etc. to colleen. We'd love to see any contributions you'd like to make to The Scribblers.
If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter, please email colleen with the word 'unsubscribe' in the subject line and we will remove you from our mailing list.
2. Just as I stepped off the curb at the corner of E. Camelback Road and N. 32nd Street in Phoenix, a blue car ran a red light hitting a mini-van. The unattached door of the blue car was flying toward me as other parts rained down.
3. Mason was broke. His bank statement showed it, but he hadn't spent that money.
Glimmer Train "Family Matters" Contest
Family Matters. 1st prize: $1,500, and publication. Deadline: March 31.
A bit of 2013 data as we report the results of the December Fiction Open: 7 of 12 of our 2013 1st-place winners were women—please don't feel bad, guys, it
all goes in waves—and 8 of 12 winning stories were those authors' 1st fiction publications.
Most submissions come in at 1,500-6,500 words, but any lengths up to 12,000 words are welcome.
Winners and finalists will be announced in the June bulletin, and contacted directly by May 27th.
Please note: The next Family Matters contest will be held in October. Writing Guidelines.
There are certain people in our lives, for instance, who can say just a few words—I love you, I hate you, I'm mad at you, you've disappointed me—that
suddenly cause the chemistry in our bodies to change. It makes our heart race. Literally the words can change us at the chemical level.—Ben Marcus,
interviewed by David Naimon
Writing 'Formulas'
At a recent meeting, we were discussing whether or not there was a valid writing formula and decided to some research.
I believed there were such formulas. I remember having read many of Sidney Sheldon's novels in the 1980's and noticing so many similarities of descriptions and phrases (what I considered to be 'formula') that I finally became bored and stopped reading him. So I recently looked him up and found the following:
"At his best, Mr. Sheldon was considered a master storyteller whose novels were known for their meticulous research, swift pacing, lush settings and
cliffhanging chapters.
Working in the office of his Palm Springs compound, he composed his books orally, dictating page after page — as many as 50 a day — to his secretary. Like traditional oral epic, Mr. Sheldon’s work depended crucially on formulaic construction, relying on stock characters and narrative boilerplate to keep the plot humming.
A Sidney Sheldon novel typically contains one or more — usually many more — of these ingredients: shockingly beautiful women, square-jawed heroes and fiendish villains; fame, fortune and intrigue; penthouses, villas and the jet travel these entail; plutonium, diamonds and a touch of botulism; rape, sodomy, murder and suicide; mysterious accidents and mysterious disappearances; an heiress or two; skeletons in lavishly appointed closets;
shadowy international cartels, communists and lawyers; globe-trotting ambassadors, supermodels and very bad dogs; forced marriages and amnesia; naked ambition and nakedness in general; a great deal of vengeance...” ~ The NY Times
Lester Dent’s Magic Formula
However, there is another formula for writing that I found that has nothing to do with repetitive descriptions, phrases, themes, etc. It is called Lester Dent’s Magic Formula. It is not magic, but it is logical and very helpful, especially to the author of short stories. The following is Dent's formula:
"Divide the 6000 word yarn into four 1500 word parts. In each 1500 word part, put the following:
FIRST 1500 WORDS
1–First line, or as near thereto as possible, introduce the hero and swat him with a fistful of trouble. Hint at a mystery, a menace or a problem to be solved–something the hero has to cope with.
2–The hero pitches in to cope with his fistful of trouble. (He tries to fathom the mystery, defeat the menace, or solve the problem.)
3–Introduce ALL the other characters as soon as possible. Bring them on in action.
4–Hero’s endeavors land him in an actual physical conflict near the end of the first 1500 words.
5–Near the end of first 1500 words, there is a complete surprise twist in the plot development.
SO FAR: Does it have SUSPENSE? Is there a MENACE to the hero? Does everything happen logically? At this point, it might help to recall that action should do something besides advance the hero over the scenery. Suppose the hero has learned the dastards of villains have seized somebody named Eloise, who can explain the secret of what is behind all these sinister events. The hero corners villains, they fight, and villains get away. Not so hot. Hero should accomplish something with his tearing around, if only to rescue Eloise, and surprise! Eloise is a ring-tailed monkey. The hero counts the rings on Eloise’s tail, if nothing better comes to mind.
They’re not real. The rings are painted there. Why?
SECOND 1500 WORDS
1–Shovel more grief onto the hero.
2–Hero, being heroic, struggles, and his struggles lead up to:
3–Another physical conflict.
4–A surprising plot twist to end the 1500 words.
NOW: Does second part have SUSPENSE? Does the MENACE grow like a black cloud? Is the hero getting it in the neck? Is the second part logical? DON’T TELL ABOUT IT***Show how the thing looked. This is one of the secrets of writing; never tell the reader–show him. (He trembles, roving eyes, slackened jaw, and such.) MAKE THE READER SEE HIM. When writing, it helps to get at least one minor surprise to the printed page. It is reasonable to expect these minor surprises to sort of inveigle the reader into keeping on. They need not be such profound efforts. One method of accomplishing one now and then is to be gently misleading. Hero is examining the murder room. The door behind him begins slowly to open. He does not see it. He conducts his examination blissfully. Door eases open, wider and wider, until–surprise! The glass pane falls out of the big window across the room. It must have fallen slowly, and air blowing into the room caused the door to open. Then what the heck made the pane fall so slowly? More mystery.
Characterizing a story actor consists of giving him some things which make him stick in the reader’s mind. TAG HIM. BUILD YOUR PLOTS SO THAT ACTION CAN BE CONTINUOUS.
THIRD 1500 WORDS
1–Shovel the grief onto the hero.
2–Hero makes some headway, and corners the villain or somebody in:
3–A physical conflict.
4–A surprising plot twist, in which the hero preferably gets it in the neck bad, to end the 1500 words.
DOES: it still have SUSPENSE? The MENACE getting blacker? The hero finds himself in a hell of a fix? It all happens logically?
These outlines or master formulas are only something to make you certain of inserting some physical conflict, and some genuine plot twists, with a little suspense and menace thrown in. Without them, there is no pulp story.
These physical conflicts in each part might be DIFFERENT, too. If one fight is with fists, that can take care of the pugilism until next the next yarn. Same for poison gas and swords. There may, naturally, be exceptions. A hero with a peculiar punch, or a quick draw, might use it more than once. The idea is to avoid monotony.
ACTION: Vivid, swift, no words wasted. Create suspense, make the reader see and feel the action. ATMOSPHERE: Hear, smell, see, feel and taste. DESCRIPTION: Trees, wind, scenery and water. THE SECRET OF ALL WRITING IS TO MAKE EVERY WORD COUNT.
FOURTH 1500 WORDS
1–Shovel the difficulties more thickly upon the hero.
2–Get the hero almost buried in his troubles. (Figuratively, the villain has him prisoner and has him framed for a murder rap; the girl is presumably dead, everything is lost, and the DIFFERENT murder method is about to dispose of the suffering protagonist.)
3–The hero extricates himself using HIS OWN SKILL, training or brawn.
4–The mysteries remaining–one big one held over to this point will help grip interest–are cleared up in course of final conflict as hero takes the situation in hand.
5–Final twist, a big surprise, (This can be the villain turning out to be the unexpected person, having the “Treasure” be a dud, etc.)
6–The snapper, the punch line to end it.
HAS: The SUSPENSE held out to the last line? The MENACE held out to the last? Everything been explained? It all happens logically? Is the Punch Line enough to leave the reader with that WARM FEELING? Did God kill the villain? Or the hero?"
"Divide the 6000 word yarn into four 1500 word parts. In each 1500 word part, put the following:
FIRST 1500 WORDS
1–First line, or as near thereto as possible, introduce the hero and swat him with a fistful of trouble. Hint at a mystery, a menace or a problem to be solved–something the hero has to cope with.
2–The hero pitches in to cope with his fistful of trouble. (He tries to fathom the mystery, defeat the menace, or solve the problem.)
3–Introduce ALL the other characters as soon as possible. Bring them on in action.
4–Hero’s endeavors land him in an actual physical conflict near the end of the first 1500 words.
5–Near the end of first 1500 words, there is a complete surprise twist in the plot development.
SO FAR: Does it have SUSPENSE? Is there a MENACE to the hero? Does everything happen logically? At this point, it might help to recall that action should do something besides advance the hero over the scenery. Suppose the hero has learned the dastards of villains have seized somebody named Eloise, who can explain the secret of what is behind all these sinister events. The hero corners villains, they fight, and villains get away. Not so hot. Hero should accomplish something with his tearing around, if only to rescue Eloise, and surprise! Eloise is a ring-tailed monkey. The hero counts the rings on Eloise’s tail, if nothing better comes to mind.
They’re not real. The rings are painted there. Why?
SECOND 1500 WORDS
1–Shovel more grief onto the hero.
2–Hero, being heroic, struggles, and his struggles lead up to:
3–Another physical conflict.
4–A surprising plot twist to end the 1500 words.
NOW: Does second part have SUSPENSE? Does the MENACE grow like a black cloud? Is the hero getting it in the neck? Is the second part logical? DON’T TELL ABOUT IT***Show how the thing looked. This is one of the secrets of writing; never tell the reader–show him. (He trembles, roving eyes, slackened jaw, and such.) MAKE THE READER SEE HIM. When writing, it helps to get at least one minor surprise to the printed page. It is reasonable to expect these minor surprises to sort of inveigle the reader into keeping on. They need not be such profound efforts. One method of accomplishing one now and then is to be gently misleading. Hero is examining the murder room. The door behind him begins slowly to open. He does not see it. He conducts his examination blissfully. Door eases open, wider and wider, until–surprise! The glass pane falls out of the big window across the room. It must have fallen slowly, and air blowing into the room caused the door to open. Then what the heck made the pane fall so slowly? More mystery.
Characterizing a story actor consists of giving him some things which make him stick in the reader’s mind. TAG HIM. BUILD YOUR PLOTS SO THAT ACTION CAN BE CONTINUOUS.
THIRD 1500 WORDS
1–Shovel the grief onto the hero.
2–Hero makes some headway, and corners the villain or somebody in:
3–A physical conflict.
4–A surprising plot twist, in which the hero preferably gets it in the neck bad, to end the 1500 words.
DOES: it still have SUSPENSE? The MENACE getting blacker? The hero finds himself in a hell of a fix? It all happens logically?
These outlines or master formulas are only something to make you certain of inserting some physical conflict, and some genuine plot twists, with a little suspense and menace thrown in. Without them, there is no pulp story.
These physical conflicts in each part might be DIFFERENT, too. If one fight is with fists, that can take care of the pugilism until next the next yarn. Same for poison gas and swords. There may, naturally, be exceptions. A hero with a peculiar punch, or a quick draw, might use it more than once. The idea is to avoid monotony.
ACTION: Vivid, swift, no words wasted. Create suspense, make the reader see and feel the action. ATMOSPHERE: Hear, smell, see, feel and taste. DESCRIPTION: Trees, wind, scenery and water. THE SECRET OF ALL WRITING IS TO MAKE EVERY WORD COUNT.
FOURTH 1500 WORDS
1–Shovel the difficulties more thickly upon the hero.
2–Get the hero almost buried in his troubles. (Figuratively, the villain has him prisoner and has him framed for a murder rap; the girl is presumably dead, everything is lost, and the DIFFERENT murder method is about to dispose of the suffering protagonist.)
3–The hero extricates himself using HIS OWN SKILL, training or brawn.
4–The mysteries remaining–one big one held over to this point will help grip interest–are cleared up in course of final conflict as hero takes the situation in hand.
5–Final twist, a big surprise, (This can be the villain turning out to be the unexpected person, having the “Treasure” be a dud, etc.)
6–The snapper, the punch line to end it.
HAS: The SUSPENSE held out to the last line? The MENACE held out to the last? Everything been explained? It all happens logically? Is the Punch Line enough to leave the reader with that WARM FEELING? Did God kill the villain? Or the hero?"
Andrew Greeley, an Unusual Novelist*
In the 1980's I was 'hooked' on Andrew Greeley's novels and thought he'd be a good subject for the newsletter. He was a very unusual novelist and a very unusual priest.Andrew M. Greeley (February 5, 1928 – May 29, 2013) was an Irish-American Roman Catholic priest, sociologist, journalist and popular novelist.
Father Greeley was a Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona and the University of Chicago, and a Research Associate with the National Opinion.
For many years, he wrote a weekly column for the Chicago Sun-Times and contributed regularly to The New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, America, and Commonweal.
Greeley was born into a large Irish Catholic family in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. By the second grade, he knew that he wanted to be a priest. In 1954, he was ordained for the Archdiocese of Chicago.
From 1954 to 1964, Greeley served as an assistant pastor at Christ the King parish in Chicago, during which time he studied sociology at the University of
Chicago. His first book, The Church in the Suburbs (1958), was drawn from notes a sociology professor had encouraged him to take describing his experiences. He received a Master of Arts in 1961 and a PhD in 1962. His doctoral dissertation dealt with the influence of religion on the career plans of 1961 college graduates.
Greeley's appreciation for the spiritual power of art inspired him to begin writing works of fiction. His literary output was such it was said that he "never had an unpublished thought."
He published his first novel, The Magic Cup, in 1975, a fantasy tale about a young king who would lead Ireland from paganism to Christianity. A second novel, Death in April, followed in 1980.
His third novel, The Cardinal Sins (1981), was his first work of fiction to become a major commercial success. As one reviewer put it, The Cardinal Sins "did for the Catholic Church what The Godfather did for the mafia." The novel's principal characters were both priests—one a writer-sociologist, like Greeley, and the other a cardinal who had broken the vow of celibacy. At the time of the book's release, Chicago's cardinal was the subject of allegations of having diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Church to a mistress.
Church officials accused Greeley of using the novel to attack the cardinal, although Greeley denied the charges and told the New York Times that the cardinal was "a much better bishop ... and a much better human being" than the character in the novel.
The Cardinal Sins was followed by the Passover trilogy: Thy Brother's Wife (1982), Ascent into Hell (1983), and Lord of the Dance (1984). Thereafter, he wrote a minimum of two novels per year, on average. In 1987 alone, he produced four novels and two works of non-fiction. He once said that he wrote an average of 5,000 words per day.
The explicit treatment of sexuality in Greeley's novels was a source of controversy for some. The National Catholic Register said that Greeley had "the dirtiest mind ever ordained." Greeley responded to his critics by saying that "there is nothing wrong with sex" and that "at the most basic level, people learn from the novels that sex is good." He insisted that, from what they heard in confession from women, priests probably knew more about marriage than most married men; and he drew on this knowledge to write a marital advice book he called Sexual Intimacy (1988).
At the height of the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal, Greeley wrote The Priestly Sins (2004), a novel about a young priest who is exiled to an insane
asylum and then to an academic life because he reports abuse that he has witnessed.
His book The Making of the Pope (2005) was intended as a follow-up to his The Making of the Popes 1978. The Making of the Pope (2005) was a first-hand account of the coalition-building process by which the conservative Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger ascended to the papacy as Benedict XVI. Greeley also dabbled in science fiction, writing the novels God Game and The Final Planet.
Politically, Greeley was an outspoken critic of the George W. Bush administration and the Iraq War, and a strong supporter of immigration rights. His book entitled A Stupid, Unjust, and Criminal War: Iraq 2001–2007 (2007) was critical of the rush by the Bush administration to start the Iraq War and the consequences of that war for the United States.
Reflecting on his life's work, Greeley told the Chicago Tribune in 1992, "I'm a priest, pure and simple.... The other things I do — sociological research, my
newspaper columns, the novels I write — are just my way of being a priest. I decided I wanted to be one when I was a kid growing up on the West Side. I've never wavered or wanted to be anything but."
Greeley was probably the best-selling priest in history, with an estimated 250,000 readers who would buy almost every novel he published, probably generating at least $110 million in gross income by 1999. He was able to live comfortably in Chicago's John Hancock Center, but he donated most of his earnings to the Church and other charities.
In 1984, he contributed $1 million to endow a chair in Roman Catholic Studies at the University of Chicago. In 1986, he established a $1 million private educational fund for scholarships and financial support to inner-city schools in the Chicago Archdiocese with a minority student body of more than 50%. He had originally offered the donation to the Archdiocese, but the then Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Bernardin, had declined the gift without ever publicly offering an explanation. In 2003, the Archdiocese accepted the $420,000 that still remained in the fund to bolster a newly established Catholic Schools Endowment Fund, providing scholarships for low-income students and for raising teachers' salaries in the Archdiocese's schools. Greeley also funded an annual lecture series, “The Church in Society”, at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein, Illinois, where he had earned his S.T.L. in 1954.
In 2008, he donated several thousand dollars to the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama, who was then serving as a U.S. Senator representing Illinois, although Greeley predicted that racism would lead to Obama's defeat.
Greeley had been in poor health since an accident on Nov. 7, 2008, that left him with traumatic brain injury. On that afternoon, an article of his clothing was caught in the door of a departing taxi, he was thrown to the ground and hit his head. He never fully recovered from the injury.
Writing about Greeley in 2010, Eugene Kennedy, said that although he looks at the newspapers daily and scans emails, Greeley “lives now in twilight and
visitors report that they are not sure what he sees or hears.”
*Information courtesy of Wikipedia
And Finally...
We are always looking for articles and short stories to publish, as well as suggestions for the newsletter. Please send any ideas, stories, etc. to colleen. We'd love to see any contributions you'd like to make to The Scribblers.
If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter, please email colleen with the word 'unsubscribe' in the subject line and we will remove you from our mailing list.
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