About a year ago or so, in the process of following links here and there from a comment made by a friend of mine on Facebook, I happened upon a blog post by someone who was either officially declared as, or was certainly self-confessedly on the road to being, a Former Mormon.  The post was all about the events leading up to being summoned to a Church tribunal and the tribunal itself.  There were descriptions of the process and suppositions about the motives and intentions of the men involved, but, laying those details and other forms of editorializing aside, the thing about the post that intrigued me the most was the anxiety suffered by the individual telling the story.  Perhaps intrigued is the wrong word to use here because, truthfully, I was somewhat confused. More...

Cain’s Sacrifice

I was thinking about the spiritual dangers that come with being an LDS writer (or artist of any kind, really) when the following came to mind:

And in process of time it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock, and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel, and to his offering; but unto Cain, and to his offering, he had not respect. (Moses 5:19-21)

And the eyes of my understanding were opened, and I did wrest the scriptures to fit my own purposes...

Writing is an exercise of the ego as much as the intellect. I don’t personally know any writers who are truly capable of separating themselves from the works they create. To appropriate Yeats (after all, I just did it to Moses, why not Yeats as well?): “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” More...

I’m a novelist. Fiction is what I have loved to write since about second grade. My first publications were with magazine and newspaper articles, and I still freelance on the side. I’ve added blogging to my list of types of writing I do. Now I’m on Facebook and Twitter, which have their own styles—learning to put a thought into a succinct 140 characters is skill all its own.

Last fall, Marion Jensen asked for volunteers for different kind of writing project, and I signed up. It’s not a paying gig, but it’s new, it’s exciting, and totally different from anything I’ve ever done before: I got to play Heber C. Kimball on Twitter. More...

When I made the decision to pursue writing more seriously, I determined to call myself a writer. To make it feel more true and to psych myself about it, I began sharing my triumphs with the people around me, very few of whom were writers. This included announcing my awards during the Relief Society "good news minute." I suppose these announcements (or the publications in The Friend, which continue to gain me more respect than any award for poetry ever could) were why a woman in my ward called me and asked if her son, who had written not just a novel but a trilogy, could talk to me about what he should do now.

When I wondered to myself whether I, who have yet to publish any book-length work, would have anything at all to share with him, I realized that I actually did know quite a lot about the journey he was setting out on--and I had gained this knowledge mostly through attending writers conferences. More...

In 1964 The Rolling Stones had a hit with the song “Time is on my Side.” You know the tune. In the lyrics, the speaker talks about a girl who’s playing the field. He says, “You’re searching for good times, but just wait and see. You’ll come running back to me.” The stance of the speaker is patience, confidence. Okay, maybe some male arrogance, too. The lyrics make me think about the relationship of the writer to the muse. The writer is a lover who can choose to desperately chase the muse … or wait for her. Patience is the best approach. Kenneth Atchity says as much in his book A Writer’s Time. Too many writers wait for the muse to begin to write. But Atchity says “she is the last person you want to depend on”: “If you write only when she beckons, your writing is not yours at all. If you write according to your own schedule, she’ll shun you at first, but eventually she won’t be able to stay away from your workshop.” More...