An excerpt from Let the Lion Eat Straw...
The church sucked breath as Daniel pulled his head forward, opened his mouth to one side and again the blackest pure bass dropped lower and lower(couldn't hear nobody pray) until the whole Easter church slipped into the low-dark voice and cried out.
Every morning I check my Blogline Feeds, reply to emails, submit book reviews, articles, etc and prepare to write the next chapter of my novel. This morning I read an interesting article about a new trend in conflict creation-Islamic and Western Romances/Faith & Feeling. And it reminded me of Dave's entry at Faith in Fiction yesterday about creating fleshed out villains.
And then it reminded me of a book I am reviewing and recommending to my readers to read also--Let the Lion Eat Straw--whereby, the villain in this novel takes many forms. Sometimes it is Abeba's mother, Angela, a southern evangelical stoic who believes that Abeba's husband has ruined her daughter's life. Or death(not Brad Pitt's Meet Joe Black character,) but this fate that stole Abeba's father. Or Race...this unspoken demon that lurks in our faith and steals souls from God(bible verse for thought.)
Southerland's book, albeit lyrical, yet succinct creates loads of conflict through her diction, the way she makes words come together in unordinary ways, this tension, this closing off of sentences, dropping adjectives, making nouns verbs. It all creates conflict. It all creates feeling. It also shows the conflict we have with our own faith.
Imagine falling in love with an Armenian Christian, but his ethnicity obstracizes him. What conflict? Imagine falling in love with an illeducated evangelical preacher. Greater conflict? Or is it all the same?
What should matter most is that our stories get the reader to judge our characters. Root for them or against them, but feel something. And as we manipulate these cirmcumstances we take our readers on an inward journey of faith and feeling. Illumination. Christ.
What say you?
Writing to see what the end's gon' be,
Dee
