As the Catholic Writer's Festival Conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville is going on, I have an observation about fantasy/fiction writing.

I just completed Barbara Korsness' Book, Ancient Fire. Here's a summary from her page:

While on vacation in the Bahamas, Laura is transported back in time. She learns that she is in the same location, but the period is some time between the Great Flood, and the birth of Abraham. Rayland, an old mystic, has brought her here. He is a member of the Ancient ones, and needs her help to preserve the belief in One True God. In a land with a tyrent ruler, where human sacrifice is practiced, Laura must become a priestess of the moon in order to fulfill her destiny. Now she has to face the dilemma of sacrificing those she had come to help.

I enjoyed it and recommend it. My rating, for what it's worth, is a 3 stars out of five. Here's how my ratings work. No stars means do not even look at the book. One star is a read only if you have a four hour delay at the airport and you have read every newspaper there is to read . . . twice over, including the personals. Two stars is readable and possibly enjoyable, but not memorable. Three is good, solid, pleasurable read. Four is excellent and five is exceptional. For her first novel, it is great effort. Like I said in an earlier post, I enjoyed the novel and couldn't wait to pick it back up whenever I had to put it down. The story is highly creative, heart warming and intruiging. I hope you all reading this post purchase the book, we need to suport Christian and Catholic fiction writers.

Slight change of Subject: One thing I notice about many new novelists, is tendency to to make their work, perhaps overly-exciting, understandably. For which reason, there is a tendency to concatenate plots. So what you get is intense drama followed by intense drama and a chain of intense dramatic episodes, when in fact, the work can do very well with half of those dramatic episodes explored in depth more fully. As an unpublished novelist, I struggled with this for years when I wanted to write. I would be extremely dissatisfied with what I wrote because it seemed so superficial. My break through transformation came when I wrote a short story for my undergrad school magazine. The story was called Smunch. I realized then that I could proceed slowly and somberly when writing, as long as I captured something and based on the response from the story, I felt like I did. Since then, I have tried writing from the inside out and let the mind of the characters lead me. I guess time will tell if it works.

I think with novels, my uneducated theory is that there should be one overarching plot with nested plots ( I prefer nesting to concatenation). The principal plot could be linear or circular, i.e., clear beginning and end, or contained but without clear beginning and end. I find also that I tend to love books that explore the psychology of the protagonists, something to explain their motivations. The funny thing is that I feel the opposite about movies. I do not want to think when I watch a movie.

My view on writing was affected significantly when in a course we read James Joyces', The Dead. At the end of the short story, it struck me that nothing happened. It was quite simply a story about an evening with family, with nested themes. it was then I realized that interest is not directly related to the spectacular but depth of characters and relationships. Your interest is captured by the fact that you either identify with a character, or understand a character(s) so well that you have a need to live vicariously through the person. So a story about three inseparable friends who go through a difficult period is just as dramatic as a story of a sinking ship and the bid to save the passengers.