A Few Remarks About "Five Golden Rings"

Greetings and Happy Sixth Day of Christmas to you:

Thank you for reading "Five Golden Rings," and think I can safely assume that the only people who will read this post are those who read the previous post (according to Google's stats, it's a tiny amount), and even then, a very small percentage of them will bother with this (so essentially, only my eldest daughter will read this).

Therefore I'm making notes to myself on the creative process. But that''s what blogs are anyway, right? Documentation of one's own warped sense of self-importance. And so I will digress and progress . . .


1) Just some rambling nonsense about why I write what I do . . .

Years ago, after writing some fairy tales for my children (fantasy and quest adventure fiction genre), I got the silly thought into my head "Why don't I write a book, make a lot of money so I can quit my lousy job (I was a word processor at an insurance company at the time, and I was teaching office procedures at a vocational-tech school at nights), and get paid to think up and write stories! There were at least three other word processors who sat near me, who were all working or trying to sell film scripts. So I guess they helped me to think that working on creating writing while wasting away as third-tier labor in corporate America for health insurance, rent, and groceries, was indeed normal.

I determined early on that nobody reads the kind of thing I write (based on not being able to find anything at the bookstore that was remotely like what I do), so I went over to the bestseller wall (the now defunct Crown Books used to put the top 10 selling books on their back wall - incidentally Gone with the Wind was nearly always on that wall) thinking that I'd see what was making money and I would just write that kind of thing. Not unreasonable eh? After all, I was spending my days writing binding letters of insurance for others, why not fiction?


2) Formulaic Fiction: Not a Bad Thing (unless poorly written)

What were selling were romance novels and action novels, by people like Barbara Cartland and Clive Cussler, mostly. So I bought a few and went home and read them. I decided didn't have military or firearms experience to write the very gear-oriented action stuff but historical romance seemed possible enough to research. I then heard Barbara Cartland being interviewed on a talk show where most of the content was about her characters, what was next, but she did manage to get in a few sentences on her writing process, which to me was most interesting--mostly that there is certain kind of format or formula that she follows.

I had also heard this same idea from a writer of stage musicals in not quite the same way. He said that there have to be romantic leads and secondaries and went on so far to say that certain types of songs are assigned to the four roles and they should be presented at certain points in the first and second  acts, otherwise the audience will get confused. I will not pull back the curtain entirely on the process, but the next time you are enjoying a musical comedy, immediately go see another and just be aware of the structure and you will see things you didn't before. (Doesn't quite work with Sondheim, but he's a genius ...)

Let me say here that formulas in writing get a bad rap. They've been around a long time; Aristotle wrote about them. If a writing or movie critic wants to say a bad thing about a work she or he will say it is formulaic--to that I will say such critics are themselves committing the same sin that they accuse their subject. All artists rely upon the work of others who have gone before in creating a framework of expectation. To the extent they use more or less of established cultural expectations they will be thought marketable or boring. The genius is the person who finds the right mix to add something new in and gives all the other subsequent artists something to work with. Those who work totally outside of expectations will get comments like: "How long is this going to go on? What does that represent? A little of that goes a long way."

I tried my hand at writing a romance novel. It was not easy and it was NOT good, despite my even going to the library and finding a book on "How to Write a Romance Novel" (wow, what dedication!) in addition to my own research. Pros like Barbara Cartland make it look easy. Just like baseball players make what they do look easy. This is also universal truth of creative process. Those who try their hand at nonrepresentational art find it is easy to copy a Mondrian painting, but it is extremely hard to come up with one that is as interesting to look at. For that matter, just TRY to replicate a De Kooning brush stroke. If you can do it, you've got a bright future in forgery you're missing out on...

Inevitably I gave up that enterprise. Now I write what other people want when I'm at my day job for a paycheck, but on my own time, I write the stories that I want to read. If others like them, great, if not, that's fine too.


3) My Long-Term Project: A Historical Comic Novel About the Roman Empire

BUT . . . I did not entirely abandon the marketability thing, at least in concept. Since I am a Christian I wondered if I could bust in to the Christian fiction market which seems to be pretty big and quite receptive to still reading and buying books. Doing a little research though, I figured out I was probably not the right kind of Christian to succeed. (For those of you who are not Christian, let me just say there are many "flavors" out there. The kind you may be familiar with ARE the kind who buy "Christian" fiction.)

However, I came up with the idea of wanting to write a story about a slave boy in the Roman Empire who gets traded from master to master all over the empire. I minored in Latin in college and spent a lot of my young adulthood learning about the Roman Empire, so I've been fascinated by it and novels about it from forever. I also liked books about classical period by Robert Graves and Mary Renault, so I aspire to something like that. But, I write comically and and humorously, and so it's going to be funny as he goes from one stupid/evil/greedy master to another in country after country. But then I thought, wouldn't it be funny if he wound up owned by Jesus? (and I could sell the last volume of the series to the Christian market). Well, anyway, that's the start of my idea. It'll be years before the whole project gets done, but this sermon assignment has forced me to get the ball rolling.

4) Five Golden Rings: Peculiarities, anachronisms, artistic liberties . . . and some accuracy

What you have there is a first draft written in colloquial 21st-century American. The basic idea is to take two short but similar Holy Week passages in Mark (Jesus sends disciples on errands and he seems to predict their positive responses with pinpoint accuracy), collapse the two vendors into one and explore his motivations for complying with the will of God in a psychologically believable and hopefully humorous way. I don't think you have to understand the incidents in a "fortune teller/supernatural/use-the-force" kind of way, esp. since these are documents of faith written after the fact, but they do have that sensibility for the young and the weak-minded. Even so, they captured my imagination whenever I read them that way and I've always wanted to do a story workout.

It's a sketch basically where I think these several conversations need to go. I am going to have to translate them into what I call "Fairy Tale Narrative English"--that  timeless dialect you hear used in fantasy movies that are not trying to be satirical or self-conciously ironic. The movie Ever After with Drew Barrymore is a pretty good example of Fairy Tale Narrative English; The Princess Bride is NOT. I think I will also try to incorporate what is considered polite social interaction by way of speech pattern and gestures both within and between ethnic groups and social classes and all that, but that deep research will take time. So "Five Golden Rings" at this point is more fairy tale riff on the Bible than any kind of accurate social commentary of the time.

The gold toe rings of the toddler Jesus made from the gifts of the Magi will go away, so don't ever expect to see them again. That version is what I have dubbed to my resident children the "Hallmark TV Christmas Special" version. It's just so tidy and hopeful and squeaky clean. But I popped it out for my church as a present to them--I think they liked it, although it ran a bit long.

Some specific literary liberties I took:

There are no 5 gold rings for Jesus in the Bible.  The Magi did bring gold. If the star appeared in the east when Jesus was born, it took them a while to get there from probably Persia. That's why I made Jesus about a year old.

For those of you remember paintings of the Triumphal Entry in Jerusalem with Jesus riding on a donkey, that's the Matthew version, where they not only get a donkey colt, but a colt and its mother. And the writer of Matthew has specifically matched up "colt" to some earlier scripture that require the colt to be a donkey colt. The writer of Mark just uses the word for colt that generally means a young horse. I'm riffing on the earlier Mark version and going with Sunset Wind being a horse big enough to hold a full-grown man. By making Sunset Wind a three-year-old, unridden horse, I add the elements of unpredictability, danger, and being able to make Jesus look like a capable rider when he needs to be, and the possibility of flight.

Jesus had a reputation for being a glutton and a bibber (drinker), so I like to think that Jesus had a weight problem and ran a little heavy.

We don't know much about Bartholomew (aka Nathaniel). I think he has the kookiest name of the 12 and therefore was just asking for comic-relief treatment, so I made him a layabout, a twerp, a pantywaist, and a snob. The snob part is true I think--he is attributed with the prejudicial statement "What good thing comes from Nazareth?" You can sub in the name of any disrespected neighborhood in your area and you'll get the sense (Compton, Tracy, Bell, Waco, Dinuba, etc.).

I don't think it's unreasonable that Joseph would have developed a negative view of innkeepers in light of his experience of being put in a barn.

The owner of the colt and the owner of the upper room probably were not the same person, but isn't it  fun in my story when they turn out to be the same guy? Doing so give the extra chance to have to make slave boy Milk get one up Bartholomew there. He actually got 2 or 3 up on him. Putting Bass into both spots gives his situation a greater poignancy. His marriage was likely arranged. The only power his wife would have in her situation is the power of complaint. It think the literary trope of the nagging wife (in nearly all cultures) is an expression of the one-down situation wives historically found themselves in. Men who did not by personality have strong wills probably appreciated their wives' aggressiveness. I see Bass as a guy who chose to settle when it was forced upon him, and once settled, cast about for all the ways to make it work harmoniously.

Were there red-haired Galatians? I'm pretty sure the Galatians were Celts; the same folks as on the coast of France as well as who made it over to Scotland and Ireland where they prevailed. (The Celts made it all over the world. You should read about them sometime.) Galatia and Gaul have the same verbal root, so I'm sure they were Gallic people. Whenever I read the Letter to the Galatians, I substitute in my head the Irish and it makes a whole lot of sense.

When Milk is called out by Mir on what he has learned from being in so close proximity to an educator for so long, I think it's pretty typical that those who have access to a boon, almost as a given, don't take full advantage of their situation. The two parables I have him recall are purposely cherry-picked. The mustard seed is one of the most famous lessons of Christ, but try calling out an everyday Christian on the spot on it and I think you'll find their interpretations amusing. The fig tree is one of the most problematic parables. I would also think it's pretty funny that you would be living with the guy who came up with it and could just ask him "Wait, could you explain that again? I think I heard you wrong." But you don't because, well, because you think you can get the answer anytime.

OK, the slightly pentagonal, proto Holy Grail with five sides, a la the five books of Moses, is my "Hallmark" plot device. In the movie of your head, when you roll the credits, you should see the five toe rings of Christ now embedded on the grail--Christmas, Epiphany, the Last Supper, and Easter, all melded into one super holy object (I wonder if it shoots laser-beam-like death rays to vanquish evil?).

I had a lot of fun with this topic, it needs work, but even so, I think it's a pleasant read in its current form. Hope you enjoyed it and got a few of the jokes.

Love,
Pops