A Man of Many Good Words: Interview with Glynn Young

An award-winning speechwriter and contributing editor at The High Calling, Glynn Young is a virtual writing machine. Not only does he make his living by using words; he leaves his writer’s footprint across the Internet. In addition to posting daily at Faith, Fiction, Friends, Glynn reviews poetry for TweetSpeakPoetry and edits Twitter poetry jams. He contributes articles about poets and poetry at The Master’s Artist and participates in themed blog carnivals and online poetry memes. He guest-posts for bloggers and has an active presence on social media sites.

Though Glynn doesn’t think of it as a calling. “Writing,” he insists, “is simply what I do.”

Glynn has a lot to say that’s worth reading. So, it was a no-brainer for me to interview him again, this time about his writing life and his debut novel Dancing Priest.*


Maureen Doallas: What’s a typical day of writing like for you?

Glynn Young: I have a full-time job —8:30 AM to 5:00 PM on some days, 4:00 AM to 9:00 PM on others—so I write whenever I can find time. I do a pretty good job of blocking out the world. If I have to travel, the story comes with me. I don’t waste time at airports—I write. If I can’t sleep, I get up and write.

MD: Have you ever experienced “writer’s block?”

GY: I haven’t. And that’s an amazing thing to say, having been a writer for almost 40 years.

MD: You’ve been a professional writer your entire life: a journalist, speechwriter, PR pro, book reviewer, blogger, poet, and now published novelist. What do all these kinds of writing have in common for you?

GY: Speechwriting paved the way for poetry writing. Writing for a blog makes me focus on being succinct. Book reviewing allows me to think about what an author has done, how she or he did it, what was left out, and what could have been done differently.

One thing that’s common to everything I write: If I need to write something emotional, be it a speech, a blog post, or a scene in a novel, I write it out longhand. I can’t explain why it’s more effective for me to do it this way, but it is.

MD: How does your poetry writing facilitate your other writing?

GY: It makes me think in a different way, more emotionally, in fact. It helps me to write even prose [because poetry] provides a rhythm or cadence that makes writing flow more effectively.

MD: How has technology changed your writing?

GY: I span a lot of writing technology history. In journalism school, I used a black manual Royal typewriter with hand-carriage return. In my first job out of college, I had an IBM Selectric for years until I got my first computer at work in 1984 (I hope there’s no significance about the date). I used desktop computers until laptops arrived in the late 1990s. Recently I got an iPad, and I love it.

I don’t think Twitter and Facebook have affected my writing, [though] my blog has forced me to write regularly and to a kind of deadline.

MD: Who has most exerted an influence on your writing?

GY: My reading crosses genres but I’ve read most or all of the work of a number of writers. In literary fiction: John Gardner, Mario Vargas Llosa, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner. In popular fiction: Charles Dickens. In mystery: Colin Dexter, Ian Rankin, John Mortimer (I love Rumpole!), Arturo Perez-Reverte, and Dashiell Hammett. I love just about everything Peter Ackroyd has written. I will read any Christian novel with one of these authors’ names on it: Charles Martin, Dale Cramer, Athol Dickson. I also like Travis Thrasher; Mike Dellosso, for “Christian horror”; and T.L. Hines, for “Christian noir,” a genre he invented (he’s likely one of today’s most original Christian writers).

MD: Joan Didion said she always writes for a reader but doesn’t visualize the reader while writing. What’s your own experience?

GY: I have to admit, I don’t write for a reader. The best I can describe it is, I write to tell a story. That‘s surprising, I suppose, coming from someone in PR, where I’m always, always thinking about “audience.”

MD: Looking back, what have been your lucky writing breaks?

GY: In journalism school, I was given two beats to cover: Department of English and Department of Foreign Languages. We were graded largely on how many column inches we had in the student newspaper, so I had to scramble like crazy for stories. I volunteered for anything; I found stories between the cracks. In retrospect, it was great training for becoming a writer, to always have to scramble, look for the unnoticed and unexpected, and find the things everyone else is ignoring.

I was a young writer in corporate communications when someone said an executive needed a speech on a topic I was researching, and would I write the speech? I hadn’t done [speechwriting] before, but I said sure. That started me on the path of what was to become the most significant part of my entire career.

MD: What’s your greatest strength as a writer?

GY: I connect the dots. And I’m fast.

MD: And your greatest challenge?

GY: Finding the time to do it.

MD: What do you do to improve your writing?

GY: I read. And I read a lot: print, online, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, blogs, speeches, you-name-it. I try to pay attention to how others write.

MD: Do you favor a particular style of writing?

GY: I like poetry for the freedom it allows; fiction, for the structure it imposes; speech writing, for the skills it forces me to develop.

MD: How do you decide when you need another person’s opinion about what you’ve written?

GY: Everyone needs an editor. My wife sometimes plays that role.

MD: What’s the best critical advice you’ve applied to your writing?

GY: Pay attention to point of view. Make sure the reader knows when you’ve changed it. Avoid adjectives whenever possible.

MD: How would you characterize your writing style, and what has helped you develop it?

GY: I’d describe my writing style as “oral.” Sounds weird but I think if you read [my work] aloud, you’ll see what I mean. (One reader of Dancing Priest told me it read like “watching a movie.”)

No question, the biggest influence on my writing style has been my training as a journalist —cut all the flowery stuff and get to the point; and as a speechwriter—putting words in other people’s mouths, as with a character in a novel.

MD: What in your background best prepared you to be a novelist?

GY: Two things, I think: love of reading (I can remember buying a Trixie Belden mystery for 59 cents at a dime store when I was six or seven.) and growing up in New Orleans, which was a polyglot of French, Spanish, Italian, African-American, and other influences, more akin to the culture of the Caribbean or Latin America. Life seemed larger, in a way—politics was more corrupt, food far richer, entertainment far wilder—everything was “oversized.”

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*Glynn Young’s novel Dancing Priest is available in digital and print versions. Visit Dunrobin Publishing for links and an author bio. Preview chapters can be read here.

For more about the actual writing of Dancing Priest, read the second part of this interview.

Image of the University of Edinburgh by Boon Low. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr. Interview by Maureen Doallas.