Anticipation – Part One

I am in a state of anticipation on several levels, right now.

The one most on my mind today deals with the, as it were, secular seasons.  Or, more specifically, the change of seasons.

In reality, each season has its own  . . . variety . . . of things.

Each season has its beauties, certainly.  Each season also has its own potential problems.  There is winter cold and the accompanying heating bills and sometimes precipitates such winter illnesses as flu and colds, summer heat that can cause its own potential health problems including such things as heat prostration and respiratory distress brought on by poor air quality, and Spring has the potential for bringing with it flooding concerns.  Well, at least in my area it does.

The upcoming change of season from Winter to Spring is on my mind just now because of a few things.  First, where I live we have a warming trend over the next few days. 

After a very mild winter this year, we had a snowstorm late last week.  It was only the second actual snowstorm of the season, and started on the last day of a Leap Year February.  It was, however, an extended storm that lasted two full days.

After that storm, the temperatures dropped to the low-to-mid 30s up until the day before yesterday [a Tuesday, after a storm that ran Thursday, Friday, and into the wee hours of Saturday last week.]

Yesterday, however, the milder weather that characterized most of our winter returned for a few days.  It was in the 50s.  Today, it actually got into the 60s, and then it cools again but only to daytime temperatures in the 40s [lows of 30s are forecast, but I anticipate that is overnight temperatures.]

In addition to this warming trend prompting thoughts of Spring, the Springtime clock change to Daylight Savings time is scheduled for this weekend.

And the official first day of Spring is only a week and a half away.

This winter has been mild, and I have been grateful for the savings on heating oil.  It has in many ways been a quite difficult winter for me in other ways, and I’m not sorry to move on to the warmer [and longer] days of Springtime.

And so, I’m anticipating . . . and looking forward to the kind of events and opportunities that Spring may bring about this year.

Certainly, we don’t want to live our lives too much in the past or the future:  there is much to be said for living in the moment as much as we possibly can.

Yet, there is something in a way delightful about a state of anticipation.  This is true in creative writing as well as in life.  And true on the flip side of the writing coin:  a build-up of anticipation in the reader.

There’s a certain highly enjoyable tension involved in reading a book that we can anticipate some element of the outcome without anticipating the details.  In a romance, for example, we generally can rest assured that the hero and heroine will form a lasting, loving relationship.  The book may or may not take us to marriage, but by the end we likely have some sense of a firm commitment between the primary male and female characters.  In an artfully done such book, the anticipation of that basic formula of ‘girl meets boy, they fall in love’ lends a deepening of the enjoyment of the read to the details that we don’t anticipate:  the ‘how’ of the relationship’s realization.  The little surprises.

Indeed, I have noticed some particular trends in Christian romance in recent books, and they often lead to this balancing act between what the reader does and does not anticipate.

But that is a Blog post for another time:  the trends in Christian romance.

What about you?  What are you anticipating at this time?  In your own life, or in your creative writing.  If you are involved in a creative writing project, how are you setting the stage?

If you haven’t thought about that as you work on your fiction, perhaps now would be a good time to consider the element of reader anticipation of your character’s progress in the story you are creating.

Using Epiphany [the concept] as a segue

I’m going to talk about the books, interspersed over a series of upcoming posts, that I most enjoyed in the past year or so of reading.

I’ll be posting about books in three categories, here.  Possibly get to four.

Why is that?

Well, I have done extensive reading in Christian romance for my own study of that genre.

BUT, it turns out, that while I would recommend certain of those over others, the three books I would most recommend from my reading of the past year do not fall in that category.

I’ll recommend one Christian fiction that is not a romance, a set of contemporary romances that are serialized, and an older secular book that is neither a romance nor Christian-oriented.

So, if and when I get to it, Christian romance is actually that “fourth” category.

Of all the works I’ve read this past year, if I had only one to choose to recommend to someone, and it is precisely because of the epiphany of the book . . .

The number one Christian book I would recommend is The Cross Gardener.  Not sure of the author and the book is not handy, but I believe the author's name is Jason Wright.

I have to admit the author managed the epiphany very deftly.  I read it and thought “should have seen THAT coming.”  But I didn’t, yet it seemed very natural both that I didn’t and should have.

Especially if you know any one who is in a grief situation, The Cross Gardener stands out in my rankings as 2011 pick of the year for Christian fiction.

The niches we don’t choose . . .

When I began this Blog, I decided to focus on writing as a craft as well as those areas in which I’ve both written a significant number of articles and really enjoy writing about and would like to develop more in terms of web content and copywriting niches:  with the occasional ‘tips to those who need to write in business’ post. 

I had defined seven types of services or products that represented those niches, and some sub-categories of those. 

While some of those categories implicitly touch on another topic area I enjoy writing about, and I’ve done one blog post about the craft of writing that more explicitly touches on that, it’s interesting that a topic area I didn’t identify for myself as a niche area is that of heritage.

The Spirit of Place post did explore that, and I’m sure in other ways I’ll touch on it at another time.

But, this is a topic that not only interests me but in terms of my personal and literary heritage, it’s an area I’m always redefining.  The writings of contemporary Christian authors has, for example, become a much larger element in my heritage as a writer over the last few years than it had been before that. 

In one way or another, I learn something from any author I read:  both fiction and nonfiction.  It may not involve, for the nonfiction authors, greater awareness of crafting a writing project:  although it typically does for fiction authors.

So that, in a sense, brings this post back around to the topic of this blog:  a shared heritage for writers involves that they begin as readers.  And, indeed, one of my product niche areas involves books and reading.

I find it interesting that the general concept of heritage is enjoying a kind of heyday in Christian publishing today.  Historical fiction enjoys a great deal of popularity just now.  There’s a generally wider selection of historical Christian romance than there is contemporary Christian romance.  While this may have its genesis in the preferences of the authors, certainly agents and publishers would have less interest in publishing if it didn’t sell.

Historical Christian fiction, generally, and historical Christian romance, in particular seems to break down into two overall epochs.  One epoch involves what I’ll loosely call “frontier fiction.”  That is, per Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, any region within the United States qualified as “frontier” for approximately the first generation or so after initial settlers arrived.

Many of these historical Christian romances are set in areas that qualify as true frontier areas even now that Jackson Turner’s thesis has fallen out of favor among historians. 

The other epoch that has held an interest for authors, and readers, of Christian fiction involves the days surrounding the development of the New Testament itself.

At least two sets of collaborators have written series novels set around the time of Jesus and the early Church:  Janette Oke and Davis Bunn, and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.

I find it interesting indeed that, although historical fiction because it involves considerably more research that contemporary fiction poses a greater challenge to the author to write well, for the most part I have found the historical Christian fiction . . . and particularly historical Christian romance . . . better constructed fiction than the contemporary Christian fiction published around the same time.

There are, of course, exceptions going in both directions but as a rule, that is what I have found in my reading of Christian fiction over the past few years.

I’m not so up on secular fiction [there’s only so much time in a day and one can’t read anything] and have to wonder if this is a Christian fiction specific phenomenon, or if there is a wider society-wide sense of getting back to roots, and recalling bygone ways of life?