Pat Conroy on words.

    Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure. I’ve never met a word I was afraid of, just ones that left me indifferent or that I knew I wouldn’t ever put to use. When reading a book, I’ll encounter words that please me, goad me into action, make me want to sing a song. I dislike pretentious words, those highfalutin ones with a trust fund and an Ivy League education. Often they were stillborn in the minds of academics, critics, scientists. They have a tendency to flash their warning lights in the middle of a good sentence. In literary criticism my eye has fallen on such gelatinous piles as “antonomasia,” “litotes,” or “enallage.” 

     I’ve no idea what those words mean nor how to pronounce them nor any desire to look them up. But whenever I read I’ll encounter forgotten words that come back to me like old friends who’ve returned from long voyages to bring me news of the world. Often, I’ll begin my writing day by reading those words in the notebooks I keep with such haphazard consistency. Though I’m an erratic journal keeper, I admire the art form well enough to wish I’d had the discipline to master that sideshow of the writer’s craft. I lose most of the world around me when I fail to record entries in those notebooks that line my shelves.

     I could build a castle from the words I steal from books I cherish. Here’s a list I culled from a book I read long ago—“sanction,” “outlaw,” “suburbia,” “lamentations,” “corolla,” “debris,” and “periodic table.” I can shake that fistful of words and jump-start a sentence that could send me on my way toward a new book. But if I go forward a single page I can listen to a different reading self who cherry-picked words from another book and recorded “atlas,” “villainy,” “candelabra,” “tango.” Each file of words seems outfitted for a different story or novel. I hunt down words that have my initials branded on their flanks. If I take the time to write one down I want to get it right every time I form a sentence. I’ve known dozens of writers who fear the pitfalls and fastnesses of the language they write in and the glossy mess of the humanity they describe. Yes, humanity is a mess and it takes the immensity of a coiled and supple language to do it justice. Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself. I’ve amassed a stockpile of books in vaults and storage bins in attics and unfinished basements and tortoiseshell-colored boxes that I raid with willful abandon when I try to fix a sentence on a page. Words call out my name when I need them to make something worthy out of language.

—from My Reading Life

The death of a bookstore, the rise of reading

   It was saddening news: Borders was closing its final 259 bookstores, this on top of the 225 it shuttered earlier in the year. Not only will some communities be deprived of a good bookstore, but tens of thousands will be deprived of a job. No one, reader or non, can be glad at the news.

   I have always been an avid reader. I remember reading Hardy Boys books in my upstairs bedroom at our house on B Street in Lindale, Georgia. We moved from there after my second grade year, so I was reading juvenile fiction at the age of seven.

   I love the feel, the heft, even the smell of a book. My idea of a pleasant day at the beach is a large umbrella, a cold drink, and a book. I love to own them, look at them on the shelf, underline, notate, and bookmark. Most of all, I like to read them.

   Yet I am as much responsible for Borders' demise as anyone. I haven't been there in years (I always found the actual stores too sterile, too European, for my tastes). As of late I haven't visited Barnes and Noble much either, for reasons I shall mention below. I do visit two used bookstores on occasion; I enjoy the aroma of older books and the dizzying layouts of the crowded pine shelves, but I seldom leave with a handful of books.

   So why is an avid bibliophile so infrequently in a bookstore? I hope it is the reason many others choose: the amazing variety of books offered by online sellers, and the ability to actually read them in digital form.

   As someone who appreciates physical books as much as I, I didn't think I would enjoy at all the notion of reading a book on an electronic device. Most of the earlier ones were atrocious. And reading on a computer, even a laptop, seemed awkward.

   But that all changed with the Kindle (and the Nook). Finally, here was a digital device that mimicked the look (but not the smell!) of a book,  was easy to use, and compact and light like a book. It took me a while to become accustomed to it, but once there, it became my preferred mode of reading. I especially like the way one can highlight and share passages with ease, and simply click on a word to find its meaning (I now know the meanings of risible and moiety). And another fabulous feature is that, if I pause my reading on any device, I can rejoin it on my laptop, tablet or even my phone, right where I left off. This is the best thing for a doctor's waiting room.

   Amazon doesn't release Kindle sales numbers, but most industry watchers expect that the seller will eclipse the eight million mark on 2011. They did announce that Kindle edition books have overtaken paperback sales, at least in units. Barnes and Noble's Nook is said by some to be the sales leader in books sold, but not in Nook readers. In either case, readers can read titles on a variety of devices (I use three), so proprietary hardware is not mandatory. And there are several publishers (Google Books, among others) that don't even sell hardware, but provide readers for devices.

   Both ease of use and portability are things I appreciate. Yet another key benefit is the price, with digital editions usually selling for much less than their paper cousins. Add the fact that it's available instantly, and tax-free, and it seems a no-brainer. Evidently I am not alone, judging by sales. So I don't fear the industry of writing and reading--it's still there. But it's changing.

   Will I miss Borders? Sadly, no. Would I miss Barnes and Noble, or the neighborhood bookstore, like The Shop Around the Corner in You've Got Mail? Perhaps (like I miss Meg Ryan!). But at its most basic, stripped of the romanticism, a bookstore is where you go to find a book. If I can do that from my home, is that wrong?

   Some people lament the loss of jobs and a sense of community. I regret the former, but question the latter. I can think of no time in my memory that a group of friends and I decided to meet up at a bookstore and spend some time together. I guess it happens.

   What intrigues me most about the digital age of publishing is the opportunities it affords writers like me, unable to attract attention with even modest publishers, to publish a book. And although it is a cash cow for some right now, I would hope that someday college textbooks might also be delivered in this fashion, thus lessening a large expense for financially strapped students.

  I don't know what the future will look like for bookstores, or books either. Music survived the demise of the vinyl record, and indeed thrived. There are more recorded acts now than ever in history. And I will, as long as I can, always buy good old-fashioned analog books (some authors, like Pat Conroy and David McCollough, will always be on the shelf). Yet I do not think it unfair to anyone that I read with pixels instead of ink.

   Because I am a reader. I don't listen to books. I don't wait for the movie. I read books.

—Wayne S.

Pat Conroy on Writing, Reading and Story

"Safety is a crime writers should never commit unless they are after tenure or praise. A novelist must wrestle with all mysteries and strangeness of life itself, and anyone who does not wish to accept that grand, bone-chilling commission should write book reviews, editorials, or health-insurance policies instead. The idea of a novel should stir your blood, and you should rise to it like a lion lifting up at the smell of impala. It should be instinctual, incurable, unanswerable, and a calling, not a choice."

"My mother promised that reading would make me smart, and I found myself recruited in Mom’s battle over her own lack of a higher education. She distributed books to me as though they were communion wafers or the tongues of fire that lit up the souls of the disciples with Pentecostal clairvoyance. Mom would point her finger to a wall of books and tell me she was showing me the way out of a shame that was unutterable. I took whatever book she put into my hand and made it part of me. I made it the life of me, the essence of my own tree of knowledge. With each book, I built a city out of what my heart loved, my soul yearned for, and my eyes desired."

"The most powerful words in English are 'tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself."

—from My Reading Life, by Pat Conroy

My Writing Bucket List

Writers of the world, if you’ve got a story, I want to hear it. I promise it will follow me to my last breath. My soul will dance with pleasure, and it’ll change the quality of all my waking hours. You will hearten me and brace me up for the hard days as they enter my life on the prowl. I reach for a story to save my own life. Always. It clears the way for me and makes me resistant to all the false promises signified by the ring of power. In every great story, I encounter a head-on collision with self and imagination. --Pat  Conroy, My Reading Life.

   Thanks, Pat. I will do my best. Although I don't think it will be a novel.

   That was (and still mostly is) always my wish. Much of that desire I do owe to Mr. Conroy, whose novels always inspire me, despite his being, in his own words, "showy with adjectives" and "overreliant on adverbs." Though I sometimes feel his lengthy and florid novels are death by a thousand paper cuts, it is nevertheless a sweet death. I can appreciate them all the more because I have been trying to write a novel for over six years. I have close to 80,000 words towards a story that is going nowhere currently, even in my mind. My characters are thoroughly unruly and disobedient, and the story arc has bent so tight I fear that like an overtorqued steel spring it may break and kill me.

   So, I have decided to look at other venues for writing. I have crafted a bucket list of writing goals I want to accomplish before I die (or my novel slays my ambition). My goal in each case is to have them published in some reputable (and perhaps even financially renumerative) fashion. Here they are:

   1. Write a short story. I do believe I can write a 5,000 to 10,000 word story that would be worth reading, although a shorter one would be harder. In fact, I like the notion of a story collection, where all the stories have a connection, probably implicit (five people who picked up a pack of hotel matches in 1968 Scottsdale, Arizona, for example).

   2. Publish a poem. It is true that "prose is words in their best order, poetry is the best words in the best order." While Eliot's The Wasteland doesn't bring to mind economy, it most certainly is. Of all the written arts, poetry comes closest to both painting and music, where in both you can be as realistic or as impressionist as you dare. Poetry slams sometimes have the same effect as strolling through a museum. Reading poetry aloud is just like listening to live music—there is joy in the silence between notes, and the decaying echo from the back wall. My poetry (two examples here and here) tends to be on the realistic side, but who knows? I would love to see my words in The Atlantic, or The New Yorker, but I must realistically think more towards regional poetry magazines and reviews.

   3.Publish an essay. I love researching. I love interviewing. I simply love observing. Put those three passions to pen and paper and I think an essay would probably be my best shot for my first publication. I have in mind a story from my home town about a supposedly true story of a grave that may, or may not, contain the person named on the tombstone. It's full of politics, family love and hillbilly justice.

   4. Write a song. In my late teens and early twenties I played guitar constantly, and wrote a few songs that I would perform at weddings or just for friends. I still remember a couple of them, and they were decent enough. And while I am becoming accustomed again to the guitar after a three decade estrangement, I think I could write a meaningful, appealing lyric and place it in a competent piece of music. My personal tastes lean towards singer-songwriters, like James Taylor and Jackson Browne, or contemporary songsmiths such as Pierce Pettis, Jason Mraz or Patty Griffin. I fear some of my production may even fall into the "country" category, but it's a hot market. I prefer the term "Americana," the songs of people and places and hopes and dreams. If I can ship off two or three songs a year to publishers, maybe one will find an ear.

   5. Write a screenplay. This fascinates me. And the only thing that encourages me in this venture is that I have seen many TV episodes and movies where I have been able to anticipate the next line, or the next scene, with uncanny accuracy. And there are times when I have obviously had an idea that I am sure would have worked better that what ended up in the script. I would probably feel most comfortable with drama; maybe some short morality tale, that ties up in the end with a few threads still loose.

   6. Write a novel. Again, it's a wish more than an obsession at present. I feel like the fellow who has sketched his dream home on the back of a napkin, and who knows how to use a hammer and a saw. The rest seems daunting to me.

   7. Write my obituary. I can almost assure myself that this might actually find itself published, if there are any local newspapers left.
—Wayne S.

One of the Only

Word confusion on the cover of Parade Magazine.

   It's the cover story; an article about Natalie Randolph, the football coach at Coolidge High School in Washington, D. C. The article is assumed to be of interest to Parade readers because there aren't a lot of female football coaches. And it is an interesting article, and Coach Randolph is quite a person.

   But I couldn't help but get tickled at the subhead on the cover. After the heading, "A League of Her Own," the subhead reads "At Coolidge High School in Washington, D.C., Natalie Randolph is making history—as one of the nation's only female football coaches."

   Read it again. According to the editor of this edition, Coach Randolph stands out not because she is female, but she is an only female football coach. This is to be contrasted with what I assume are partially female, or even mostly female coaches, which evidently are more numerous, or at least less unusual.

   Of course, the correct description (which is used in the inside article) is "one of the nation's few female football coaches." It's comforting to know that even the big boys (or girls) miss one every now and then.

—Wayne S.

Josh Ritter on Inspiration

The monster is the invisible force that decides what you write about. Some people call it "The Muse," but I've never found that to be a particularly apt description for a creature so voracious. This is no gossamer-clad maiden. I don't know much about it, but I know that it lives deep in the synaptic jungle, its tail twitching lazily, its slow-breathing bulk heaving sulfurous sighs as it waits. You have to feed the monster everything you come across, be it books, music or movies, your friends and enemies and any other shiny baubles you find strewn in your path. You shovel everything you've got--a long-handled snow shovel works best--into its big toothy mouth, and it chews everything up and sighs once again. It never says "thank you," and you don't expect any gratitude, but once in a while the monster will taste something it really enjoys. When it does, you'll notice a slight lift of its scaly brow and a narrowing of its keyhole pupils. It doesn't give away much, but if you know your monster, that's all you need to see.
—Josh Ritter, musician, in Paste Magazine, April/May 2010

Remembering J. D. Salinger, or more accurately, his work.

The silence of a writer is not the same as the silence of God, but there's something analogous: an awe-inspiring creator, someone we believe has some answers of some kind, refusing to respond to us, hiding his face, withholding his creation. The problem, the rare phenomenon of the unavailable, invisible, indifferent writer (indifferent to our questions, indifferent to the publicity-industrial complex so many serve), is the literary equivalent of the problem of theodicy, the specialized subdiscipline of theology that addresses the problem of the apparent silent indifference of God to the hell of human suffering.

—Ron Rosenbaum, speaking of J. D. Salinger in Esquire magazine, June 1997

On Book Critics

"George looked forward to writing his book, and even, dream upon dream, publishing his book. But he was insecure about the reading of his book, especially by critics and reviewers. Most of them, at least towards Southern writers, seem consciousless sadists, who enjoy stabbing and shooting naked people, yet are never brought to justice because no one actually bleeds or dies."



—from a work-in-progress. W. S.



Photo from wombatunderground1 via Flickr

Washing away pride

To be put on a pedestal puts you in a false position. And you can be placed on a pedestal so fast it makes your head spin. So the first thing I do when I come home is put on my green chest-waders and go stand in the river. The lowest place you can stand is in a river bottom, and rivers drown saints and reprobates without preference. So I get to the lowest point, and stand there until I forget myself, and let the dirt of admiration or too much attention wash away.

-- David James Duncan, quoted in Conversations With American Writers: The Doubt, the Faith, the In-Between  by Dale Brown.

"A novel is a symphony"

The best novels are not autobiography. They're more analogous to work of art like a symphony, or a thick collection of poems, or a group of twenty-five or thirty paintings. Nobody expects a symphony to be anything but what it is: an imaginative work made of rhythm and tones. A novel is much closer to that than people realize. It is strange to me when people want me to be the protagonist of my books, want the events and the novel to be true in a physical, literal way. This approach misses the point. A novel is a symphony. The author is the composer and the reader is the conductor. And the imagination --- of both the composer and the conductor --- is the symphony orchestra.

-- David James Duncan*, quoted in  Conversations With American Writers: The Doubt, the Faith, the In-Between by Dale Brown.



*Duncan is the author of many books, including The River Why and Brothers K.

So you want to be a writer?

so you want to be a writer?



if it doesn’t come bursting out of you

in spite of everything,

don’t do it.

unless it comes unasked out of your

heart and your mind and your mouth

and your gut,

don’t do it.

if you have to sit for hours

staring at your computer screen

or hunched over your

typewriter

searching for words,

don’t do it.

if you’re doing it for money or

fame,

don’t do it.

if you’re doing it because you want

women in your bed,

don’t do it.

if you have to sit there and

rewrite it again and again,

don’t do it.

if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,

don’t do it.

if you’re trying to write like somebody

else,

forget about it.



if you have to wait for it to roar out of

you,

then wait patiently.

if it never does roar out of you,

do something else.



if you first have to read it to your wife

or your girlfriend or your boyfriend

or your parents or to anybody at all,

you’re not ready.



don’t be like so many writers,

don’t be like so many thousands of

people who call themselves writers,

don’t be dull and boring and

pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-

love.

the libraries of the world have

yawned themselves to

sleep

over your kind.

don’t add to that.

don’t do it.

unless it comes out of

your soul like a rocket,

unless being still would

drive you to madness or

suicide or murder,

don’t do it.

unless the sun inside you is

burning your gut,

don’t do it.



when it is truly time,

and if you have been chosen,

it will do it by

itself and it will keep on doing it

until you die or it dies in you.



there is no other way.



and there never was.



Charles Bukowski, in sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way: New Poems

Writing on a computer

“There is something about seeing your words on a screen before you that makes you send the word with a better bite, sighted in closer to the target. I know a computer can’t make a writer but I think it makes a writer better. Simplicity in writing and simplicity in getting it down, hot and real.” He continues, “When this computer is in the shop and I go back to the electric, it’s like trying to break rock with a hammer. Of course, the essence of writing is there but you have to wait on it, it doesn’t leap from the gut as quickly, you begin to trail your thoughts — your thoughts are ahead of your fingers which are trying to catch up. It causes a block of sorts indeed.” — Charles Bukowski, quoted by Jed Birmingham at RealityStudio.



The quote is from a 1992 interview (Bukowski died in 1994), but still rings true for writers seventeen years later. W.S.

Use it or lose it

I have forgotten how to write.

Not in the authorial sense (although I'll leave it to others to determine my ability there). No, I mean in the physical, the manual sense.

Being left-handed, I've always struggled with penmanship. My explanation is that we left-handers always had to write around the metal rings in the middle of our notebooks, requiring digital Jujitzu. I haven't written in cursive since middle school. Attending college in the early 70s, before personal computers, I usually turned in papers with reasonably neat printed characters. When the computer age arrived, I began typing with two fingers. I am now up to four, occasionally five.

In the interim, my handwriting has deteriorated even further. At some point along the line, I gave up lower-case letters. Lately I seem to have abandoned all forms of neatness, and my notes, or forms I fill out, look like the work of an architect on LSD—all caps, but so haphazard and irregular that sometimes even I cannot read them.

I have also found a way to even avoid typing. Many of my longer pieces I create using voice-recognition software. It works very well, once I trained it to recognize my Southern drawl. It does occasionally come up with a howler, like when it hears me say "call doctor" instead of "Golgotha."

It makes me wonder what's next to wither from disuse, at least as pertains to my craft. Will my mind end up as dull as a broken pencil? My vision is corrected, my hearing is fair to good if I concentrate. But what about that vision which sees concepts and truths? Or the hearing that hears beyond the sound? I pray I do not lose these. That is why I exercize them, with disciplines like this blog. As far as I can tell, I only have the occasional visitor (even my wife must be cajoled). So consider this my exercise. Like an overweight guy doing Tai Chi, it may not be pretty, but I believe it is good for me.

Two billion beats

Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two-hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

So much is held in a heart and a lifetime. So much held in the heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think they will come one person who will save us and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by a force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in a distant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words "I have something to tell you," a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, and the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of her father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children. — Brian Doyle, from the essay Joyas Valadorus, in The Best American Essays 2005 (The Best American Series)

Facts in fiction

Facts can help evoke emotion, especially those that transmit texture, tonality, and sensual detail. But facts can't drive a piece. Research, no matter how compelling, may give me the bones of a fiction, but never the breath and the blood. It's a wonderful, sometimes immensely useful tool that helps give me something to write about. But without the transforming force of the imagination, the result is only information.

In 1936, when a different war was looming on the horizon, Walter Benjamin wrote this:

• Every morning brings us news of the globe and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep the story free from explanation as one reproduces it... The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time.

Slowly I began to relearn something I’d once grasped but had lost sight of: that emotion -- that central element of fiction -- derives not from information or explanation, nor from a logical arrangement of facts, but specifically from powerful images and from the qualities of language: diction, rhythm, former, structure, association, a metaphor. And sometimes I also had glimmers of another thing I'd once known: how effectively information can be used to wall off emotion. — Andrea Barrett, from the essay The Sea of Information, in The Best American Essays 2005 (The Best American Series)

The birth of a character

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. — Milan Kundera, from The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Reaching out from solitude

Writers live paradoxical lives, spending much time alone in an attempt to connect to others. — Philip Yancey

Why I Write

I used to

 

write to remember

as if

by putting words on paper

I could at some point in the

future reconstitute flesh, heat, light

like adding water to orange juice concentrate

or thawing out an embryo. But

I found

I could often recognize

only the words written about a thing

with no more depth than the typeface

on an old-fashioned business card.

I could not remember the thing itself.

Certainly not the deep beneath the words.

Then

 

for a while I wrote to chronicle,

with spare and lean prose

drawing fine-line portraits of what

I had seen and heard

with the India ink of consonant and vowel.

But as

my eyes grow dim and

motes swim across my vision

like diaphanous fairies in the slanting

evening light through the blinds,

as the voice of a friend and the

burble of a mountain brook

begin to sound disturbingly similar

to my failing ears, I find that it seems

pointless

to write of things

which my senses will tell me are not so.

So now

 

I write not what I remember,

or see, or hear.

Now

 

I write

to be

at least for a moment

in the deepest part of me

   the prophecy in a sun breaking over the sea

   the love in the salty tasting skin of her neck

   the persistence of a full moon scudding between clouds

   the eloquence of a tear rolling down a young boy’s face

No longer

 

depending on my synapses,

my eyes, my ears

victims of a life lived

with a continuous diminuendo.

WS

Dancing on the head of a pin?

I can believe in an angel who dresses like a long-haul truck driver, and who occasionally chews tobacco.

A couple of years ago, I had an idea for a novel with a novel idea. To tie together four disparate lives in a small town, I wanted the narrator to be the only one who could really see what their lives added up to—God. However, despite the potential, the idea soon collapsed under the weight of its own imponderables. Writing third-person omniscient is a valid, effective way to tell a story. But true first-person omniscient? I don’t think it’s ever been done. Now I know why.

While rummaging about for a suitable narrator, I read a remarkable little novel by Markus Zuzak entitled The Book Thief. Set in Germany during WWII, Zuzak tells the story of a young girl via a most unusual narrator—Death. And as you can imagine, during the Holocaust, Death is busy.

So, I considered the idea of having an angel narrate my story. The angel tasked with the responsibility of caring for these four souls. Soon after I began my effort, Nancy Miller brought to TNT an amazing new TV series, Saving Grace, about a last-chance angel named Earl who is charged with bringing the protagonist, hard-living police detective Grace Anadarko, to faith. (For more insight, read Cathleen Falsani’s interview with Nancy Miller at The Dude Abides.) Earl, (pictured above, and played by Leon Rippy) while not exactly what I envisioned, nevertheless has opened up my thinking. And research has shown me many things.

Angels are fascinating creatures. They can be found in all three major religions. In Judaism, they flourish—an angel stayed Abraham’s hand just as he was about to sacrifice Isaac. Another stood between Daniel and some very hungry lions. In Christianity, an angel told Mary that the child she was carrying was God come to earth. Muslims believe angels are messengers assigned at birth, who keep track of rights and wrongs. Even smaller religions, such as Zoroastrianism, believe in angels. Suffice it to say, most people of faith believe in angels.

But what are they like? In my writing, although I am writing as a Christian about characters who are either nominally Christian or agnostic, I have resisted any theological weightlifting, preferring, like Nancy Miller, to focus on the uniqueness and doggedness of their nature. And here are some things I have realized:

• Angels narrate in first-person almost omniscient. Angels don’t know everything, but after living a few millennia, they know a lot. They cannot read minds, but they can read faces, posture, and behavior like the best detective ever. In performing their tasks, they don’t always know why they are doing something, but they trust the Boss, and do it with only a modicum of curiosity.

• Angels are not omnipresent. They are not always with us, or everywhere at once. That attribute applies only to God. However, angels are called beings of light, and light is very fast (186,000 miles per second—it’s the LAW). Therefore, if the greatest distance between any two points on the earth is approximately 12,000 miles, an angel can get anywhere in roughly .064 seconds. Between the time you step down from the curb into traffic and the moment Earl grabs you by the collar to jerk you back, he could have circumnavigated the globe three or more times.

• Angels are rational and emotional. In the Christian scriptures, man is described as being “a little lower than the angels.” In my writing, I have taken that to mean that the differences between men and angels are corporeal, not spiritual or emotional. Although they lack a body and a brain, they can think, decide, understand. While they may not laugh or cry, lacking a voice box and tear ducts, they can be joyous or sad. One emotion which I believe is common in man but absent in angels is fear. The most common phrase they utter in the Bible is, “Fear Not!” And although they are faithful to their roles, they don’t have to be. In fact, we know that—

• Angels sin, too. There are two truisms among the nominally religious—they believe in heaven, but not hell, and they believe in angels, but not demons. Yet, why would there be one without the other? What sense would it make if there is all this struggle and spiritual bloodshed here on earth, while everywhere else in God’s creation there is none? There are no stories of encounters with demons in my novel (yet), but my narrator hints broadly about those among the corps who have turned away, and how he’d rather not talk about it. Somehow, I get the feeling that, in pondering it, he becomes more susceptible to it. That sounds familiar.

• Angels serve God, not man. While we are the primary beneficiaries of angelic assistance, they don’t work for us. They do what the Boss says, not what we say. Which means sometimes they do things contrary to our wishes. And sometimes, they stay their protective hand, and the worst may happen (at least it seems worst to us). This is when I know angels have emotions. But in this, they seem to have learned something the human rarely learns—not only is it fruitless to wonder why, it is unnecessary. Perhaps the closer you get to the One who does know why, the more you trust.

• Angels have names that end with "-el." That’s because el, in the Hebrew, means “of God.” And they are servants of God. Only two are named in the Bible: Michael and Gabriel. However, in Christian tradition and, curiously, in the traditions of other faiths, many of the names of angels still end with –el. Even Superman was called Kal-el on Krypton, and his father Jor-el (Superman being an angel in the symbolic sense). My narrator is yet unnamed. Earl-el, perhaps?

There are so many other “facts” about angels that can play in my novel. How many are there? Who knows, but there many, many, many. Do they talk to one another? If they need to. Do they live forever? According to the Bible, they do, although they were created at some point, just like you and me.

Perhaps the most persistent question about angels is this one: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? I will let my narrator answer:

“Angels don’t dance. We play in the band.”

Good fiction is like a life of faith...

This is precisely what readers are saying: that reading good fiction is like reading a particularly rich section of religious text. What religion and good fiction have in common is that the answers aren't there, there isn't closure. The language of literary works gives forth something different with each reading. But unpredictability doesn't mean total relativism. Instead it highlights the persistence with which writers keep coming back to fundamental problems. Your family versus your country, your wife versus your girlfriend. --Shirley Heath, quoted in Jonathan Franzen's book of essays How To Be Alone.