Music and Healing

The following article appeared on Yahoo today.

NEW YORK - Noted neurologist Oliver Sacks has found common ground with the pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church: Both men believe in the healing power of music.

Sacks, the best-selling author of "Awakenings" and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," was to share the church stage Saturday with the famed gospel choir as part of the inaugural World Science Festival, a five-day celebration of science taking place in New York this week.

"It should be an exciting and unusual event," Sacks said in an interview this week. "I will talk about the therapeutic and beneficent power of music as a physician, and then their wonderful choir will perform. ... And the audience will make what they can of it."

I'm sure Dr. Sacks will make fascinating observations. What I would really like to see, however, is the unusual audience that will result from combining the World Science Festival with the Abyssinian Baptist gospel choir!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080531/ap_on_re_us/music_s_healing_power

I recalled this article about music this evening, as we watched a movie called "The Land of Women." The soundtrack was full of beautiful piano music. Because most movies have complete musical soundtracks these days, we get the benefit of two hours of musical healing every time we watch a film. (Of course, not all music is healing, but that's a question I'll have to raise with Dr. Sacks some day.)

A Writer's Voice

For a month now, I've been struggling with my voice. I mean the real, audible voice I use for speaking and singing. It started when I lost my voice completely during a bad cold. Although I've recovered from the cold, my voice is still not back to normal. I can't sing well in my soprano register, and my throat hurts if I talk or sing too much. This probably means that my vocal cords are mad at me because I tried to talk through my hoarseness. In all likelihood, I will have to go on vocal rest, talking as little as possible and not singing at all for several weeks.

My singing is for myself, my fellow singers, and for God. I performed solos when I was younger, but I don't really enjoy that anymore. The chief joy I get from my voice is singing silly, made-up songs to myself or to my family members while we go about our business. It's hard to lose the everyday pleasure of silly singing for an entire month. ENT doctors will tell you that many people who suffer voice loss for any significant period of time go through depression, because voice is so closely tied to a person's sense of self. I'm not quite there yet, but my mood is certainly lower than usual because I can't sing "I'm gonna get you" to my daughter whenever I feel like it.

The loss of my singing voice has me thinking about voices in general, particularly writers' voices. Creative writing teachers often say that a writer must find her "voice." Unfortunately, there's no quick and easy way to do that. (My brother-in-law is a creative writing professor, so he can correct me if he has discovered the quick and easy way!)

I now have a voice as a novelist. I didn't have it ten years ago. For me, the main difference between having a writing voice and not having one is that I no longer ask myself what voice I'm going to use in a piece. I don't experiment with different voices anymore, because I'm more interested in my audience and in the story I'm telling than in my own voice.

A major part of finding your writing voice is finding your audience. I know my audience. I'm not writing exclusively for my grad school friends (though I still love them dearly). I'm writing for believers, primarily women, who come from a wide variety of backgrounds. All of the elements of my craft are at the service of my reader. Having a good vocabulary is nice, but I know the fine line between a word that’s unusual and fresh, and a word that’s too formal or obscure for most of my readers. My choice of diction is one of the elements that has created my writing voice.

When I took singing lessons many moons ago, I found that I sang better when I thought about the song instead of about my own voice. Similarly, I think a writer finds her voice not by searching for her own literary identity, but by considering her audience.

Most academic creative writing programs set limits on the audiences for which their students may write. They don't allow their students to write genre fiction. Instead, the only acceptable audience is a highbrow, literary one. If you want to sell books, choosing that tiny audience is going to make your life very, very difficult. That’s why the average writer-about-town will find a more marketable voice by taking classes at conferences than by entering an academic program.

Tell It To the Telmarines: Prince Caspian (no spoilers)

What a great movie! I really enjoyed it, and so did Brandon. Reepicheep the valiant mouse has always been one of my favorite Narnians. I thought the acting was very good all around, and particularly that of Ben Barnes (Caspian), Peter Dinklage (Trumpkin), and two prominent Telmarines, Pierfrancesco Favino (General Glozelle), and Sergio Castellito (King Miraz).

It amazes me to see the venom spilled on this film and on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe at boxofficemojo.com. If you were the head of this movie review site, would you think it professional and objective to allow someone completely anti-Christian to review Caspian? The reviewer made the following statement about the first Narnia movie:
"I expected the first film to be a boring piece of propaganda, and it was."
Hmmm. There's a really unbiased reviewer. Whatever one might say about the first Narnia movie, I suspect that most non-Christians wouldn't describe it as boring. But I won't waste any energy on someone this clueless.

Prince Caspian is great swashbuckling fun for everyone over the age of 6, with plenty of excitement but no gore. It includes lots of humor plus some INCREDIBLE fight choreography. This may be the best one-on-one fight choreography (and fight cinematography) I've ever seen. You just can't beat the Lewis imagination. It's in a different league from the hordes of children's fantasies that have followed it. Go see Prince Caspian, and encourage others you know to do the same!

Name That Flower: Help This Black Thumb!

Here's the flower from the beautiful bush in our front yard. The bush is about five feet tall, and equally-wide. It was blooming when we moved to this house in October, so I'm guessing it blooms May through October. The blooms give off a heavy perfume. What is it?? (We live in the Southwest desert zone, where this bush could not thrive naturally, but it's irrigated.)

My mother-in-law told me that it will bloom more if I remove the dead flowers. Here's my question: when I dead-headed my petunias in Ohio, I did it by gently pulling the blooms off their stems. Those little petunia flowers were so small and delicate that they came right off in my hand.

For this larger type of flower pictured above, should I trim the dead flowers with little scissors? (I seem to remember this techniqiue from rose gardeners in movies.) I'm pretty sure the pink giants (about 4 inches across in full bloom) are too robust to just pull off the stems.

Horatio the Sea Monkey

I have to confess a terrible thing I did when we went out of town for seven days to the Pepperdine Lectures.
I didn't ask anyone to take care of our Sea Monkeys.

My daughter's friend had given her the Sea Monkeys a couple of months ago for her birthday. We hatched some, then I somehow managed to kill the first batch. I hatched some more. We ended up with four live Sea Monkeys, each about the size of an extra-long grain of rice. No mother will be surprised to hear that I became the Sea-Monkey-keeper.

Sea Monkeys need to have their air oxygenated every day with a little straw. It takes about five seconds. They need to be fed every five days with a tiny scoop of algae. By neglecting to recruit a substitute Sea-Monkey-Keeper, I was condemning the Sea Monkeys to death. And I knew it.

When I returned, I looked in the Sea Monkey tank to see the results of my callous decision. To my amazement, one Sea Monkey was still alive and swimming around the tank!

My lazy, savage heart said: "Let him die. Then I won't have to take care of him anymore." But I was filled with primitive admiration for this last Sea Monkey's heroism and sheer will to live. I reluctantly picked up the air pump and started caring for him again.

I've named him Horatio, in honor of the great Admiral Hornblower. I won't go out of my way to save his life, should he contract scurvy or gangrene. But I respect him, and I'll give him what he needs as long as he's still swimming around his tank.

Servant-Leadership

It's a term we hear a lot in conversations about faith-in-action-- one of those terms much easier to preach than practice.

My husband and I just came up with an interesting parallel to servant-leadership: customer service. Everybody knows that good customer service means that the manager never argues with the customer, but instead tries to find the reason for the customer's dissatisfaction and make things right. It is absolutely the same attitude as "submission" to one another. Yet the manager does draw gentle boundaries. No ordinary customer will have any success if he walks in and demands the cash register and the keys to the store. A good manager, then, finds the balance between submission and assertion, and by doing so becomes an example of servant-leadership.

Our discussion triggered a good memory about mutual submission. At one of our former churches, I ran the drama for our children's summer program (VBS). One night, the youth minister and I exchanged some irritated words because we were both so stressed out by our dealings with teenagers and their parents. We had a miscommunication, and briefly said something to each other that really translated as: "This is all your fault!" "No, it's your fault!"

Of course, I felt guilty immediately. I went back to his office ten minutes later, shame-faced, and apologized for losing my cool. But this is the great part of the memory: he was sincerely apologetic as well, in a way that made it clear that he would have apologized to me with equal sincerity whether I had apologized to him or not.

That exchange translated as: "That was bad behavior on my part." "I think it was bad behavior on mine."

Without excessive breast-beating, we each went to the other with exactly the same intention and without pride. We knew we had offended, and we were mindful of our own offenses rather than focusing on the offenses of the other person. What a beautiful thing! I only wish that type of moment happened more often in my life. I know my own pride gets in the way far more than I would like when it comes to apologies. Especially at home! :-)

Cutting the Mustard: A Post for Language-Lovers

When we arrived home from our small group meeting tonight, I noticed a political flyer that had arrived in the mail this weekend.

"Michael Wiener for County Commissioner," it said. "Only Michael Wiener can cut the mustard."

I have never seen the phrase "cut the mustard" used in a political ad. Perhaps Mr. Wiener is fond of the idiom because it coordinates so well with his name. Whatever his reason for choosing "cut the mustard" as his slogan, he certainly caught my attention.

Hooray for the internet! Ten years ago, I would have languished in my home after reading the flyer, wondering about the origin of that phrase, taking a few wild guesses and then giving up as more important tasks drew me away. By using the internet, I instead satisfied my curiosity immediately.

There's no certain answer to why we use the phrase "cut the mustard" to mean "do the job, meet the standard." It is certain that the idiom appeared for the very first time in an O. Henry story of 1902. That means that in my mid-1800's historicals, no one would be able to say "cut the mustard," no matter how colorful it might be.

Here are the five major suggestions for the origin of "cut the mustard":

1)It somehow derives from the older phrase "pass muster," a military term from the Latin word for "show."
2)It refers to the process for making mustard, in which the mustard is "cut" with vinegar.
3)It came into being because cutting a mustard seed would be a very difficult task, owing to the tiny size of that seed.
4)It's a sarcastic term, because cutting the creamy form of mustard is such an easy task. Someone who "can't even cut the mustard" is pretty lame.
5)It is a strange twist on turn-of-the-century use of the word "mustard" as a compliment, e.g. "He's the mustard!" meaning "He's really cool!"

I think #4 is the most likely, given the relatively recent and American origin of "cut the mustard." Americans were much more likely to refer to creamy mustard than to a mustard seed.

What I most like about "cut the mustard" is that it's a mystery. And also, I love the fact that someone is still using the phrase on a flyer! I guess I will have to vote for Michael Wiener.

Myers-Briggs and Writing

Is it possible for a writer to be an extrovert? To clarify that question, I need to explain how I'm using the term "extrovert."

Myers-Briggs personality tests are based on the identification of four tendencies that form our personalities.

By taking a test, you will find out if you are:
I (Introverted) or E (Extroverted)
N (Intuitive) or S (Sensing)
T (Thinking) or F (Feeling)
J (Judging) or P (Perceiving)

None of the tendencies is positive or negative in itself. Each simply describes a way we tend to interact with the world.

Back to my original question. The most difficult characteristic to figure out for many people is whether they are Extroverted or Introverted. For example, I'm a highly-social person who likes other people and loves to get to know them. Nonetheless, I'm an Introvert according to Myers-Briggs. That's because I derive my energy from private time alone. If I spend time with other people for too long without getting my private time, I become tired and crabby. Contrast this with my husband, who is a true Extrovert. He derives energy fom being around other people. If he spends too much time by himself, he feels out of sorts and will go seek company.

When I think about the nature of writing, I can't imagine that anyone who is an Extrovert would find herself drawn to a writer's life. The solitary task of writing can even wear on an Introvert after a while; that's why online groups like ACFW are so valuable. I don't think an Extrovert could handle the amount of time that a writer spends in an inner world of her own.What do you think? Are there any writers out there who can call themselves Extroverts after reading the Myers-Briggs definition? Let me know if you are out there!

Here's a quick explanation and mini-test to help you take a guess at what your type might be. (Scroll down for the mini-test.)

http://www.personalitypathways.com/type_inventory.html

I'm an Introverted Intuitive Thinking Judging type (INTJ). Here's what that means:

http://www.personalitypage.com/INTJ.html

If you can figure out which four letters describe you, type the letters into Google and you should find a number of sites explaining your personality type. Look for the ones that include drawbacks as well as strengths; they're more accurate than the glowing positive descriptions!

I would love to hear from a few writers who either know their types already or have a good guess. Post in the comments section if you have a chance!

Deeper Magic: Evil and Your Story

I have fabulous critique partners. When I was halfway though the first draft of my novel, I had the feeling that something was not quite right. One of my partners finally put her finger on the problem.

"Rosslyn, I figured it out," she said. "You're placing your characters in serious jeopardy, but you're still protecting them. I never fear that something bad is actually going to happen to them, because they always get through without too much damage."

I knew she was right. As the shepherd of my characters, I was so attached to them that I hadn't allowed evil enough power in my draft. I didn't want even my supporting characters to suffer and die, to leave this world with no earthly victory. Yet the majority of human beings don't live in peace or happiness. Evil does triumph in our fallen world, and people die in terrible circumstances with no one to help them in their last hours. Opening the newspaper will tell you that. What allows us to bear the suffering and injustice that run rampant on earth is our confidence that eventually, there will be no more tears--that our hope and joy don't rest on the events of our mortal lives.

If a writer refuses to depict the full power of the darkness that we inflict on one another, then she has not reflected the true human condition. We can't offer comfort to our readers by denying the darkness or trying to make everything OK; no human being can do that. We can only offer comfort by showing how faith responds to serious pain and evil.

I rewrote, and caused a few awful things to happen in my novel. I didn't enjoy it. I know I'm not the only writer who sits in front of her screen with tears running down her face. Yet, despite the pain I felt about causing suffering and allowing evil into my narrative, I knew I had just broken through to the "deeper magic" that C.S. Lewis gives to Aslan in Narnia. That deeper magic is the love that faces darkness and death to offer hope. It's the ministry we offer our readers.

Writing, Faith, and Confidence

I spent my undergraduate years at Yale. This was both a blessing and a curse. The academic education I received there was very fine, but the effects on my personality and my confidence were not so fine. When I describe my experience there, I want to qualify my words by saying that this is only the viewpoint of one undergrad. I'm sure that numerous Yale grads would tell you that they didn't have a similar experience. But for me, and for many people I knew, this is the way it was:

The college was full of prodigiously-gifted people. That made it a very rich and exciting place to be. Unfortunately, those gifts often came with a level of perfectionism and ambition that made the college an exhaustingly-competitive place as well. Success was the idol of the campus. Some undergrads had already published novels, won major music competitions, or appeared in Broadway tours before they turned 20. Others were the children of very famous people, which granted them celebrity-by-osmosis.

This culture of success-worship and perfectionism led me and many of my peers to be very self-critical and critical of others. No matter what worldly success you might find later in life, you knew that someone would always find a way to criticize you for it. Every time you encountered other Yalies after graduation, the question: "What do you do?" took on tremendous significance. For far too many people, your answer to that question would determine whether they regarded you as a "winner" or a "nobody." At age 25!

The Ivy League obsession with success and status crippled the psyches of many people I knew. Neither they nor I had religious faith to ground us and give us a set of healthier priorities. (I was agnostic during my time there--but that's another story.) It took me several years to break free of that worldview and not regard myself as a failure because I didn't have a stellar career in my mid-twenties.

What changed my approach to life was moving to a town in the deep South and meeting my future husband (a Christian, but that's also part of the other story). When I met him and his siblings, I was struck by their tremendous self-confidence. I saw that they were all happy and achieving their goals, partly because of their talent and hard work, but also because they had never considered the fact that they might be "failures" and "nobodies." I realized that I had been sabotaging myself with my harsh self-criticism and fear of failure.

Self-criticism is an essential part of being a good writer, but it's also the reason why many highly-gifted writers never release their gifts into the outside world. That's where I think faith really helps. If you believe that your gifts are not just the product of your own narcissistic desire for success, but instead tools to put in the service of the highest cause, then your confidence is not in yourself but in your service to God. Sometimes, of course, people are mistaken in identifying their gifts, and they are not actually suited to minister through publishing their writing. But when a writer has both the necessary gift and the necessary training, faith grants that writer a unique blend of confidence and humility that allows him to accept constructive (or even destructive) criticism without giving up.

The Heavens Before, by Kacy Barnett-Gramckow

Though The Heavens Before was published in 2004, I'm going to give it a brief review because it's the best inspirational fiction I've read recently. Kacy Barnett-Gramckow retells the story of Noah's Ark. Don't stop reading! That description doesn't do justice to the imagination and creativity she brings to her narrative. It really reads more like fantasy than like a biblical re-telling. By using the term "fantasy" I don't mean to imply that she departs from the original story, because she doesn't. Instead I mean that her work shares some of the best qualities of good fantasy: she creates a fascinating and rich pre-flood world that is simultaneously alien and convincingly prehistoric.

Here's the real shocker. I told my friend that this was the least predictable inspirational novel I had read in the last few months.

My friend laughed. "How can it not be predictable? It's the story of the flood! We all know how it comes out!"
I laughed too, but here's what I meant.

Any form of genre fiction is "predictable" in the sense that we usually can figure out the ending. The protagonist will survive, and, if there's a romance, it's pretty clear who's going to end up married to whom.What makes a novel unpredictable is how its author takes you to that inevitable conclusion. It's not just a matter of plot, although creative plotting certainly helps. It's also about creating characters who don't behave in pre-programmed ways, and settings that "live" and affect the characters who move through them.

Here's an example of pre-programmed writing. A romance author introduces you to her hero. The hero is hot-tempered, slams his fist into walls, and yells at adversaries. It becomes obvious very quickly that the hero is going to "grow" by mastering his anger over the course of the novel. Some writers make the mistake of doing it because they hear that their characters need to grow, and that the way to do that is to give each character a character trait that changes. But if that's the only solid character trait the hero possesses, or if the depiction of that trait is heavy-handed, discriminating readers will lose interest.

None of this is new insight; we all know the difference between cardboard characters and three-dimensional ones. I'm just using this example of flat characterization to point out how wonderful it is that Kacy Barnett-Gramckow takes a story that should be more predictable than most and turns it into a surprising and interesting read. Her characters breathe, they don't emit robotic beeps. They don't have single flaws that mechanically evaporate by the end of the narrative, but instead are more mysterious with their complex emotions and problems. Just like real people, they grow on you (or repulse you) as you get to know them. When she places her characters in an alien but fully-realized society, the combination is hard to resist. That's what made me lose sleep for this novel--and I'm rarely willing to exchange sleep for a novel!

Truth in Fiction

I am pitching my completed novel as part of a trilogy. Each part of the trilogy is based on a real event in the life of a real family who lived in nineteenth-century Ohio.

Writing a novel based in historical fact presents different challenges than writing a novel drawn completely from the imagination. History doesn't always follow the rules of narrative, or the conventions of genre. But I enjoy the challenge of shaping my story to be exciting and appealing while remaining faithful to the basics of the historical record.

Here's an example of the kind of narrative puzzle I like to solve: the genre called "historical romance" requires that a romance develop very early in the novel, say, in the first two or three chapters. If the romance doesn't begin quickly enough, the novel will fall under the label of "historical fiction" instead.

For the second novel in the trilogy, following the pattern of real historical events would mean that the romance wouldn't start until halfway through the novel. Problem. You can't switch genres in the middle of a trilogy. So while I was puttering around in my bathroom today, I figured out a plot twist that will allow me to get around that problem and stick to the historical romance genre. What makes this especially fun is that these plotting solutions usually add depth and complexity to the story. It's like looking at one of those pictures made of thousands of tiny colored dots and letting your eyes unfocus so that a coherent picture emerges from the field of dots.

Kingdom Quest

I just ordered 25 yards of red tissue lame' to make capes for the kids' summer musical, Kingdom Quest. That's just the beginning--we may need as much as 60 yards eventually! We're going to make prototypes to make sure that the capes work for dancing and that we can handle the fabric.

If the cape idea works, it will be great onstage. The musical is about a videogame in which two kids must acquire the armor of God (Ephesians) in order to conquer the dark forces of the enemy. My plan is to make the stage look like a vintage videogame with neon colors and a dark backdrop. If you remember the movie Tron from the eighties, combine that with Pac-Man and you have the general idea. The capes will make splashes of color against the darkness when the kids dance.