Adventure classics -- Coping with unanswerable questions

The Moon by Night

By Madeleine L’Engle

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While their family was growing, Madeleine L’Engle Camp and her actor husband Hugh Franklin settled in the village of Goshen, Connecticut. But small town life couldn’t support Franklin’s career. So after the birth of a daughter and son, and the adoption of the orphaned daughter of friends, the family decided in 1959 to move to New York. But first, why not take advantage of a few weeks of free time between job changes and school sessions for a long-distance camping trip?

Along the way, L’Engle, who was famous (in her family, notorious) for using lightly disguised real life in her fictional stories, transformed her family’s trip into the adventures of the fictional Austin family.

L’Engle later said the trip gave her the inspiration for her most famous book, A Wrinkle in Time. But the Austins -- adolescent daughter Vicky, her parents and assortment of brothers and sisters -- were as much alter egos of Wrinkle’s Murry family as both were of Madeleine, Franklin, and their real life children. And although L’Engle famously proclaimed herself to be the adolescent heroine of Wrinkle, she was just as obviously the quiet, plain daughter Vicky, unpopular and uncertain whether she possesses any talent.

The first book of the Austin family saga appeared in 1960, followed in 1963 by The Moon by Night. The Austins decide to move from their home in rural Connecticut to New York to further the father’s career. In between house changes, they take a cross-country camping trip. And Vicky, “on the way” to fifteen, is as out of sorts with her family and herself as L’Engle may well have been after finding herself at a low point in her writing career.

Who is she, really, Vicky wonders, questioning and sometimes rejecting her family’s received truths on life and religion. But she’ll have months on the road, from Connecticut to Canada to California and back again, to gain experience with her all too rapidly shifting emotions. Along the way, her naïve and sheltered view of life will be stretched by interactions with more people and opinions than she has met in her whole previous nearly fifteen years of life. That psychic stretching will take place in settings more beautiful and terrible than any she has imagined, images of the hills of Psalm 121 that give the book its title, until her world is literarily torn apart.

L’Engle took advantage of a major earthquake in the Yellowstone region in November 1959, fortunately after her family had reached home, that caused massive changes in the landscape, such as the rock slide that will trap Zachary and Vicky in the book’s climax, leaving both young people wondering whether there are answers to their questions.

In the aftermath of nature’s destruction, Vicky cries, “The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. . . But the moon was smiting us. Its light, cold and impersonal, was splashing me, so that I shivered, and the Lord was doing nothing about it.”

In an interview Christianity Today reprinted after L’Engle’s death in 2007, she said the high school students she taught in Sunday school in turn taught her that “cosmic questions do not in mortal terms have mortal answers.” Leaving Vicky at last to say, “I looked up at the sky and at the stars and at the moon, and the moon was no longer smiting me. I didn’t know why. . . The point was that now I knew I didn’t matter whether or not I understood. It didn’t matter because even if I didn’t understand, there was something there to be understood.”

For more on L’Engle's life, often more complex than she was willing to let her readers see, I liked “Ironing Out the Wrinkles--The Complexities of
Madeleine L’Engle,” at
www.newrepublic.com/node/110453/print/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a December of spirited adventures with C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces.)

Adventure classics -- Tessering with strangers

A Wrinkle in Time

by Madeleine L’Engle

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It’s not true that all books with the strength to become classics faced rejection. It just seems that way. Still, learning that more than two dozen publishers rejected A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 blend of science fiction and fantasy, amazed me. Still more amazing -- some Christian schools also banned Wrinkle and other books by the overtly Christian L’Engle from their classrooms.

Why? Some of her obituaries (and the popular culture site Hollywood Jesus -- www.live.hollywoodjesus.com/ ) blame her advocacy of universal salvation, the belief, as she wrote, that “all will be redeemed in God’s fullness of time.”

I think the more likely reason for the book’s initial rejections was that publishers in the early 1960’s just found it baffling. What begins as an apparently realistic novel for children -- what publishers would characterize today as young adult -- changes shape into an exploration of time and space through the semi-scientific concept of a “tesseract” -- explained in the book as a wrinkle in the time-space continuum.

And the guides through this wrinkling are a trio of old women who look like the popular conception of witches. And then, of course, there was a psychic known as the Happy Medium who reads the future -- kind of -- with her crystal ball.

So is Wrinkle science fiction or fantasy or Satanism? In a world now aware that Harry Potter is less about wizardry than the struggle between good and evil and that even Gandalf was an angel in disguise, it’s hard to imagine anyone mistaking Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which -- the beings who guide heroine Meg Murry and her fellow time/space travelers -- for minions of evil.

But publishers, parents and schools in 1962 may well have wondered how American kids in a country still reeling from McCarthyism and the sting of losing round one of the race for space to the Soviet Union were supposed to know the difference. Even the review from Horn Book, one of the most prestigious guide’s to children’s literature, noted that the rewards offered by A Wrinkle in Time were the result of its “unusual demands on the imagination.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Somehow, L’Engle’s readers managed to sort things out. Wrinkle won a Newbery award (given by a division of the American Library Association) the year after its publication. And L’Engle went on to write a multi-part series about the family of its heroine Meg and her future husband, Calvin O’Keefe. And kids (as well as the cast of the TV series Lost) kept reading.

(Next Friday, a December of spirited adventure opens with “The Light Princess,” a tale of a heroine who lost one of womanhood’s least appreciated assets -- gravity. By L’Engle’s influence and fellow universalist, George MacDonald.)

Wordcraft -- Bones of a novel, part III

With one week left in this November’s NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month), I’m hearing cries of anguish as even writers who have kept pace with goal of writing fifty thousand words in thirty days feel the strain. The main reason, I think, is starting the race without a map.

Okay, I’m crazy about structure. But I got crazy by learning the hard way how tough it is run a race without knowing where the track is. A reminder came earlier this fall at Pyr editor Lou Anders’ writing workshop.

I’m writing a contemporary novel, but, desperate to enter the science fiction/fantasy workshop, I pulled out the first chapter of a nearly decade old fantasy novel to enter. Despite some qualms, Anders liked the premise and characters, but when he asked for a pitch-length synopsis, I was stuck. The remainder of the novel sprawled too hopelessly even to summarize.

It’s coming together now, thanks to help from Anders’ one-day novel writing workshop.

I posted about the three-act format of screenwriter Dan Decker (author of Anatomy of a Screenplay) last month. But with only a week of NaNoWriMo to go, how about fantasy author Michael Moorcock’s suggestions for writing a novel in three days? Yes, THREE DAYS!

First step -- have a lot of people after the same thing. And make it something concrete. (Sorry, world peace isn’t achieved in three days.)

At first glance, this sounds like every fantasy quest plot. But the more I thought, the more it seemed to apply to a multitude of genres -- a search for a ring of power or a wedding ring. For Princess Leia or Rapunzel. For the evidence to convict a suspect or to clear a family’s honor.

Second step -- have a protagonist ready to walk out on the whole thing when something else comes along. Notice, you don’t need to open with the heroine’s birth. Just her moment of decision, her fateful choice, her call to adventure -- whatever term appeals to you. He gets an offer he can’t refuse. The doorbell rings and an old love appears. (Just don’t make it the alarm clock sounding. It’s been done too often. Trust me.)

Third step -- the end. (Wiping the sweat from your brow!) But don’t ignore the end. According to Anders, for the ending, Moorcock suggests looking back to the beginning and picking a character from the past.

I love having the end mirror the beginning. I’ve heard suggestions elsewhere to have the final scene echo the opening one, but with a difference. Bilbo returns to his hobbit hole, only to find all his possessions being sold at auction. Or, to look forward to Friday’s adventure classic, A Wrinkle in Time, the opening sentence, “It was a dark and stormy wind,” is permuted into the final one, “But they never learned what it was that Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which had to do, for there was a gust of wind and they were gone.”

I’ll write more later about structure, and suggest you take a look at what author and former editor Kristen Lamb has to say at www.warriorwriters.wordpress.com/ But for now, watch out for the bones, and a happy ending to all!