When it comes to writing, I am an Oliver Cowdery. I’ve got a few smarts and an education. I can write my way out of a paper bag. But when compared with Joseph Smith, I’m nothing special. You remember that after acting as Joseph’s scribe for a while, Oliver wanted his own chance at translating the Book of Mormon. If he was at all like me, he likely envied Joseph’s ability to enter into the ecstatic muse of translation, and wanted his own taste. So he managed to get permission from the Lord to do some translation, but when he tried his hand at it, he failed. Why? According to Doctrine and Covenants 9, Oliver hadn’t prepared well enough. “You have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me,” reads the revelation.

This verse encapsulates my many early years of attempted writing. I would get an idea that I thought had some potential and sit down to write. I had great faith that the muse would descend upon me and push words out of my fingertips. But it never worked. Never. I would frequently find my idea dried up and dead by the end of a single page. A narrative brick wall blocking my way.

It soon became painfully clear that I was in no way a natural born storyteller. But I’m a persistent little cuss, and I decided to learn how stories work the same way a mechanic learns how an engine works, or a doctor the human body. So what follows are the observations of one who had to learn story structure from the ground up. I’m like an autistic person who learns to read the emotions of others only through mapping the human face. I find the wheels and gears, the organs and veins of stories and watch them work.

I’ve never been very good at talking about what I’ve learned. People often accuse me of pushing formulaic storytelling. But what I try to present is a set of principles. These principles, far from fettering me, have unleashed my creative abilities. They’re like launching pads, booster rockets, and navigation systems, helping me chart a course. I know that many people believe that outlining a story will neuter the creative process. That the Muse will not descend on too tidy a brain. And this may well be the case for some writers. Like Joseph Smith, some people might just have the right wiring for ecstatic storytelling. But as far as I’ve been able to tell, these people are few and far between. I think the rest of us can enhance our storytelling abilities with a bit of planning.

For me, planning is the enjoyable creative work that precedes any complex endeavor. It resides in the architect who labors to draft the plans for a magnificent building.  I enjoy crafting the mainspring of a story and arranging the gears around it to achieve maximum effect. I enjoy sculpting and articulating the bones so that when they are covered with flesh, the body can move uninhibited. And then, when writing time comes, I find myself in possession of extra creative energy that I can pour into the drawing of characters, precise word choice, and apt metaphors because part of my brain isn’t worried about what will happen next in the story. I never hit dead ends. And often, in the thick of writing, I stumble across exciting ways to improve on the story. My own little bits of ecstasy.

So, with that introduction, I’ll talk about a few elements that I use as I prepare a story or a personal essay. The fist few principles will likely strike you as elementary, but I hope my formulation of their interaction will be helpful.

The most basic thing people look for in a story, even if they are not aware of it, is character change. Take a look at great literature and, with the exception of comedies, you will find that the main character goes through a mighty change, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Think of Henry V, or Bilbo Baggins, or Frank Miller. In this way, my approach to crafting a story is very character driven. The ways of coming up with a character are numerous. You likely have a way that works for you. When I’ve deveopled a character, and maybe even a situation, I appreciate having methods of plumbing the character’s depths, of finding his or her weaknesses and strengths, and of testing his or her character.

The first principle that has allowed me to do this is called a goal.

The Goal

The goal is the basic propellant of a story. It’s like the gas you put in a car. If the character has a small goal, any potential change will also be small. A large goal will increase the potential for change and therefore the power of the story. Now when I say small goal or large goal, I’m not necessarily talking in Hollywood terms. Taking down an earth-destroying super villain verses trying to get a bicycle back doesn’t have to equal big and small. A large goal is one that demands much from a character’s emotional and relational resources.

Principle 2: Opposition.

Along with the goal comes the need for antagonism: someone, or something, that opposes your character’s reaching of the goal. Again, you don’t need to think of opposition in Hollywood terms. A good antagonist can be the indifference of a large city or the prejudices of a small town. It can be the protagonist’s own fears, or a family tradition, or a piece of music. What you need is something or someone to resist your character’s attempts at the goal. Why do you need this resistance? Because otherwise your character will not struggle and will not change.

As the story goes along, the opposition should get stronger. There’s not much need for this principle in short stories where often there is room for only a single struggle, but in longer works, I have found it to be essential. Once you’ve tested a character to an intensity of 3, the character has demonstrated that he or she can also overcome opposition of intensity 2. But an intensity of 5 has yet to be attempted. The higher intensity the opposition is, the more powerful the story.

The story of a character with a goal who encounters opposition over a period of time looks kind of like the schema below; a series of goal attempts by the protagonist that result in larger and larger conflicts with the antagonist:

But this is the realm of the Saturday morning cartoon or the superhero movie. The goal merely tests the protagonist’s strength, or cleverness, or ammunition. The only thing the character needs to succeed is more of something than the opposition. But we’re here to talk about literary writing. In my definition, literary writing goes beyond the goal, heading into the dramatic need.

The Dramatic Need

The dramatic need is something in the protagonist that needs to change. The change is often a spiritual or moral one that strikes at the core of the protagonist’s life. As with the goal, the more sacrifice it takes for the character to achieve the dramatic need, the more powerful the story is.

It is often difficult to build a full-bodied dramatic need into a short story simply because there is so little time to make the change seem real. Think of half-hour sitcoms where a character says, “Oh, I see now that I was being insensitive. I will change.” We are rarely moved by such declarations simply because we don’t believe the change really occurred. This is why so many short stories that work have as their climax a character first glimpsing the terrifying notion of change, or suffering under the weight of consequence brought on by their brokenness.

If you build this into the schema, you’ll see that the dramatic need is often in direct conflict with the goal.

This is because goals are illusory. They rarely address the soul, though they often act as a metaphor for the dramatic need. Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all these things shall be added unto you.” The Buddha said that is it our desires that bind us.

I’m in the middle of watching the HBO television series, The Sopranos, many of the episodes are excellent examples of literary writing: the characters have compelling goals that are deftly balanced by their dramatic needs. Tony Soprano, for example, learns at the beginning of the first season that his deepest fear is that his position as a mob boss will strip him of his family. In one episode, he and his daughter are touring New England colleges. On the way, she confronts him with her evidence that he has ties to the mob, and he is semi-truthful with her. In return, she is truthful with him about her recent use of speed. “We have that kind of relationship, right?” she asks. “Where we can be honest with each other?” Tony wants that relationship really bad. His family means a lot to him.

The problem is, Tony spots a man who used to be a member of his father’s gang. The man had assisted the law in setting up a sting that had killed some of Tony’s friends and sent his father to jail. He is rightly angry with the man. He also takes his oath to his mob very seriously and knows it is his duty to off the man for his crime against the organization. He also wants to avenge his dead. His goal for the episode is to make sure this man is who he thinks he is, and take him down. But his daughter keeps catching him in incriminating situations: using a pay phone when his hotel room phone works fine, leaving the room in the early morning, coming home with mud on his shoes and lacerations on his hands. Their new-found honesty becomes untenable. How is he supposed to tell her that he’s tracking down a man so he can kill him? How can he not track this man down and kill him?

Tony reaches his goal in the end. He positively identifies the traitor and kills him. But his relationship with his daughter crumbles. He can’t be honest with her and she can tell. He’s losing his family, just as he had feared.

This ending is compelling because the goal and the dramatic need are deeply at odds. This is often the case with good literature. The more tension exists between the goal and the dramatic need, the more powerful the story is.

The basic structure of a drama is that a character meets his or her dramatic need. The basic structure of a tragedy is that the character doesn’t meet his or her dramatic need, often because he or she reaches his or her goal.  The basic structure of a comedy is that the character changes only minimally, if at all.

I found it interesting to apply these principles to the recent, highly successful move Avatar. I enjoyed the movie—actually watched it twice, which I rarely do—but I was disappointed by the story. The basic idea is that a crippled Marine named Jake becomes part of a program that places him inhabit an alien body. His mission is to find a way to convince a tribe of aliens to relocate so humans can mine a vein of valuable ore located beneath their village. The story goes along fine for the first act: Jake tries to become a part of the tribe, meeting opposition along the way. Then he meets larger opposition in the humans who are willing to bring their superior technology and firepower to bear on the village. There are goals a plenty, and there is also a stab made at a dramatic need. Jake does, after all, forsake his own people for the aliens. That seems like quite a change, and the movie tries to give it weight at the end when Jake’s human nemesis says, “How does it feel to betray your own kind?” However, how much did Jake have to sacrifice in order to join the alien culture? The movie makes it very clear that there is nothing Jake wants in the human world. He has no legs there; he has no community or family. The humans that surround him are ruthless, unfeeling moneygrubbers. On the other hand, there’s this great family-oriented race of blue-skinned supermodels who fly around on cool winged reptiles. Where’s the sacrifice? Had the story provided Jake with some compelling reasons for staying with the humans, the story would have been more powerful because then Jake would have had to sacrifice. And sacrifice is the foundation of a powerful story.

It’s a question I’ve asked myself many times in the last two months. I’ve had a lot of time to ask myself questions because I am the primary caretaker of the world’s most beautiful baby girl. How does the person inside the Bear in the Big Blue House costume see? Is it time for mom to come home, yet? Have I really needed to pee for four hours now? When was my last shower?

Taking care of my baby has been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done, but there is no doubt that my work has suffered. I used to sit down at my desk at 8 a.m. when my family went out the door and work straight until they returned at 4. It was a lovely, meditative life. I had time to do extra projects on the side. I was PRODUCTIVE.

Then came the world’s most beautiful baby. Now I spend my waking hours building block towers for smashing, watching puppets sing about oral hygiene, picking raisins and cheerios off the floor, and playing with my baby. Now I start work at about 6:30 p.m. And go till 2 a.m. My brain doesn’t function as well then, and I can’t crank up my tunes. I have zero time for side projects.

At first I tried to work while baby was around, but the laptop buttons are an irresistible siren to her. It was too much of an effort to get the laptop open and start something that needs as much focused attention as editing knowing that I would be interupted. I found myself getting irritable, being caught between baby and work.

I’m the oldest of nine children: I know that babies grow up fast. So I decided to dump work and just play with baby. It was a good idea. I’ve been able to savor her babyhood, which I will never get another chance to do.

But I had no time for doing my own writing and it really started wearing on me. Would I not have a creative outlet for another four years when baby went off to school? Would I still be sane by then?

I hear generations of women heaving an exasperated sigh :women who spent 30 years in my same position without any respite on the horizon. What would they do to me if they found out that my life has been given back to me through the miracle of a cell phone?

I was going to get the free cell phone because I pride myself in staying aloof from our consumerist, toy-obsessed culture. But then I saw that some phones come with a qwerty keyboard, and the gears started to turn. I got the tough phone, the phone with a keyboard my fat thumbs could navigate, the one with the GPS I still haven’t learned how to use.

I have since become an avid Facebook user, a dedicated New York Times reader, and — yes indeed — a writer of short stories.

At first, I thought the cell phone would only be good for outlining and planning, and it worked very well in that capacity. But the boredom of watching that Bear in the Big Blue House episode one more time drove me to try my thumb at composing. And by gum, it works!

I’ve started to realize that the thumb board, which allows me to type at about a tenth of the speed I can type on a full-size keyboard, is actually well suited to my composing speed. When it comes to fiction, words don’t surface very for me quickly, and I hate it when my inner editor makes me focus more on what I should have written rather than what I am actually writing. The thumb board seems to give me permission to just keep plodding along. And the words scroll up out of the screen quickly. Out of sight, out of mind.

A week or so ago, I finished my first cell phone tome. I figure I wrote about 500 words a day, which is 500 more words a day than I used to write.  Admittedly, I still have to revise on my computer, but I’m not complaining. I’ve got my writing life back.

This post brought to you by my Nokia E71.

The easiest way to understand the function of independent Mormon publications is to consider the state of Mormon fiction.

The Church probably made an editorially sound decision when it pulled fiction completely out of its magazines. Church magazines are meant to preach right living in as straightforward a manner as possible; thus, they have little room for irony, metaphor, conflict, or many of the other tools fiction writers use.

However, the Church’s decision also reduced the number of places where Mormon fiction writers could publish, which is a shame because every up-and-coming fiction writer needs to get some practice, interact with good editors, and garner some publishing credits.

Since the Church is no longer supporting fiction, someone has to step in and give these writers a place to publish their work. Right now, national magazines and journals aren’t very interested in Mormon fiction, probably because so few Mormon writers have had the opportunity to learn to write about the unique challenges of Mormon life with nuance and creativity.

That’s where independent Mormon magazines come in.

We’re here to find Mormonism’s future Miltons and Shakespeares (the ones Orson Whitney and Spencer W. Kimball talked about) early in their careers and nurture them so that they can get enough practice and publication credits to eventually launch into the national market.

The more writers we export, the more robust and nuanced the world’s image of Mormonism becomes. And I would even argue, the more robust and nuanced Mormonism itself becomes. We’ll no longer be perceived just as the nice young men in ties that knock on your door; we’ll become fully rounded characters inhabiting a fully-rounded culture.

Of course, this all goes for other writing endeavors as well: poetry, personal essay, non-fiction, comics, etc.

So, when you see an independent Mormon publication, pick it up, read it, subscribe to it – write for it. Help us grow a bumper crop of excellent Mormon writers for export.

The deadline for the 2009 R. L. “Buzz” Capener Memorial Writing Contest in Comparative Religious Studies is May 31, 2009. First place receives $750.

For the Brookie and D. K. Brown Fiction contest, entries are due June 30, 2009. Winners receive up to $400 each.

Click here to see the official rules.

The story is about Katie, a general practitioner married with two children to David, whose only (ill-paying) job is to write a column called “The Angriest Man in Holloway.” Their marriage is falling apart and on the verge of ending when David runs into a spiritual healer named DJ GoodNews. The encounter turns David completely around, and he becomes the most philanthropic man in Holloway.

The healer moves into their home and starts to work with David on one grandiose humanitarian scheme after another. David gives away the family’s computers, makes the kids go through their toys and donate the ones they like, and convinces his neighbors to take in homeless kids.

Katie, who has always considered herself a good person (being a doctor and all), has a hard time dealing with these changes. David and GoodNews are throwing the household into the chaos, and Katie’s thoughts and beliefs along with it.

About half-way into this book, I started thinking, “This would make a great model for Mormon fiction.”

The difficulty with Mormon fiction (and anti- or critical-of-Mormon literature), in my eyes, is that someone is always right, and the purpose of the story is to show why that someone is right. Often, the author makes no bones about letting the reader know who that enlightened person is from the very beginning.

I realize that a lot of people enjoy this kind of fiction. Reading it is like riding a roller coaster where you know that, as wild as it may get, numerous engineers have tested this thing countless times, ensuring that you come out the other side as whole as you went in. I assume the same principle is at work in romance novels, where you know who needs to get together with whom; or sci-fi, where you know that the alien lord will be overcome; or literary fiction, where you know that the protagonist will end up alone, in the rain.

How To Be Good, however, is different. Though the reader is meant to side with Katie — the normal, sane, rational person — and look askance at David and GoodNews — the two who are sincerely trying to do good in the world — real goodness seems up for grabs.

For example, the reader completely agrees with Katie that housing a faith healer and a homeless boy named Monkey is a terrible idea. And, indeed, a couple of neighbors get burned by the project. But, by golly, three homeless kids find their way into a better life.

However, while saving homeless kids, Katie and David’s family is going to pot. Their son starts stealing from fellow students at school, their daughter slowly loses her humanity to sanctimony, and Katie’s brother shows the warning signs of suicide.

Though there is certainly a battle going on here, the book is not about who wins and who loses — who’s right and who’s wrong. Instead, it tracks what happens in the middle. How do the people caught in this tension change?

One of my favorite parts of the book is when Katie and her daughter, Molly, go to an Anglican church. There, they listen to  a slightly cracked pastor who sings pop and broadway songs in her sermon. At one point, St. Paul’s thoughts on charity are quoted: “charity is not puffed up and does not vaunt itself.” Katie jumps on the quote as ammunition to shoot down her husband’s inflated righteousness.

She takes her shot during a particularly tense moment, but David points out that the same scripture was quoted at their wedding ceremony, except that charity was replaced with love. Then he drags out a box of memorabilia he had assembled a few days after their honeymoon. “It was a fantastic day. I was so happy. I just didn’t want to forget it,” he says.

And, for just a moment, despite their battling worldviews, a tiny bit of warmth sparks between them.

Her own warmth, Katie reflects later, “is sick, dying, or dead … there is just enough for Molly and Tom, but it doesn’t really count, because it’s a reflex, and my occasional flashes of warmth are like my occasional desire to wee.”

In the end, David becomes less reliant on Utopian visions, and Katie a little less reliant on rationality. They both become more fluid. In other words, we don’t have the triumph of an idea or principle (neither David nor Katie are right). Instead, we have a bit of change.

Mormons like to talk about eternal progression. And it seems to me that eternal progression is exactly what How To Be Good is all about. People don’t progress because they get righter and righter. They progress because their humanity, in all its idiosyncrasy, becomes larger, and more robust and diverse in response to their circumstances.

At the end of the book, Katie compares her change to a house, which she wants to “keep extending … until it becomes a mansion, full of rooms.”

This is part of an inter-blog duo of posts on endings in fiction. The sister post, written by William Morris, can be found at A Motley Vision.

Endings are hard. Of all the time I spend writing a piece, at least 40 percent of it will be spent on getting the ending just right. I think it’s important that a great deal of sweat and blood go into the ending, because that’s when the soul starts to enter.

However, endings are in no way voodoo. There are principles to making a good ending.

You’re not going to believe me about these principles, by the way. No one ever does. Do you know why? It’s because when I talk about stories, I talk about bones. I’m not talking about organs, I’m not talking about flesh, I’m not talking about makeup or bodybuilding programs. I’m talking about bones.

Bones are not pretty. They are not poetic. No magazines or Web sites are dedicated to the eroticizing of bones. But why are George Clooney and Brad Pitt so handsome? It’s their bone structure. Why do Nicole Kidman and Catherine Zeta-Jones get all the leading roles? Talk all you want about their flesh, but the flesh takes its shape from the bones. Bones hold your posture. They dictate your walk. They provide your hip and ankle girth. They sculpt the nuances of your face and hands.

Most people are so in love with what Nicole looks like with flesh on, that they can’t imagine that something as hard and practical as bones could possibly be under there. It’s the same with writers who have read the world’s great literature. They’re so enthralled with the complete story that they assume that its writing process must have been as poetic as its reading — that it started as a small George and grew into a big one.

I’ll admit that there are probably some people in the world who can gestate perfect stories like that, but they make up about .0001 percent of the population. If you’re willing to take the chance that you’re one of them, stop reading now and go pour your genius upon the page. If you think that just maybe there’s a craft to fiction, read on.

To make a good ending, you’ll need two bones.

Bone 1: A Goal. If the character has a goal and pursues it through the story, you can resolve the story perfectly fine by having the character reach the goal. This creates an up ending. Or, the character can not reach his goal, which creates a down ending.

Do you want to strengthen that bone? Make the goal especially difficult to achieve. Require the character to sacrifice all that is dear in the pursuit of that goal. The more the character sacrifices, the more powerful the ending, whether it goes up or down.

However, it might be more interesting if you add …

Bone 2: A Dramatic Need. If you have given your character a dramatic need (something about their psyche that needs to change, for example: learning to love, or learning to stand up for one self), and the character can meet that dramatic need, while also attaining his or her goal, you have a doubly fine ending because character changes are more compelling than achieved goals. As with the goal, the more the character has to sacrifice in order to achieve his or her dramatic need, the more powerful the ending, whether it goes up or down. But if you want to play you can always …

Break bone 1 in order to make bone 2 possible. It’s simple: the character’s goal gets in the way of his or her dramatic need. So the character pursues the goal until either: 1: he or she gives up the dramatic need for the goal (a tragic ending) or, 2: he or she gives up the goal to attain the dramatic need (an bitter-sweet ending).

These are the bones that make up an ending. There are only two. However, their strength is completely based upon how well you have set up the goal and dramatic need, and how they have been pursued throughout the story. But that’s an article for another day.

Already have a story mostly finished? Can’t find a way to end it? Try this. Go back and say, “What is my character’s goal?” If the character doesn’t have a goal, lend him one, just to see what happens. Do you want a happy ending? Let him achieve his goal. Want a sad ending? Don’t let him achieve his goal. Now turn the power of the story up and down by making the goal less or more difficult to achieve. Play with the emotional punch of the story by insisting on greater or lesser sacrifice.

Want to kick it up another notch? Go back and say, “What is my character’s dramatic need?” If the character doesn’t have a dramatic need, lend her one, just to see what happens. Do you want a happy ending? Let the character achieve her dramatic need. Want a sad ending? Don’t let her achieve her dramatic need. Now turn the power of the story up and down by making the dramatic need less or more difficult to achieve. Play with the emotional punch of the story by insisting on greater or lesser sacrifice.

Now put it all together. Take the goal and the dramatic need and make them mutually exclusive. The character can only have one or the other. Want a bitter-sweet ending? Let her gain her dramatic need at the expense of her goal. Want a tragic ending? Let her gain her goal at the expense of her dramatic need.

Are you annoyed with me? Have I stripped the poetry out of writing? Do only hacks think about writing the way I do? Let’s take a look at the master, the godfather of all English departments, yea even the Bard himself, who will surely strike me down for my impertinence.

King Lear. Lear’s goal: To prop up his ego. Lear’s dramatic need: to learn to love. Lear does not achieve his goal. But he does achieve his dramatic need, but only after losing his riches, his power, his family, his sanity, and worst of all, the only person in the world who actually loves him.

Henry V. Henry’s Goal: To take France. Henry’s dramatic need: to grow into the mantle of kinghood. Henry attains both his goal and his dramatic need, but has to sacrifice his friends and his past along the way.

Othello. Othello’s goal: To ensure Desdemona’s faithfulness. Othello’s dramatic need: to learn to trust Desdemona. Othello reaches his goal, but only through the sacrifice of Desdemona, which leads to his dramatic need, but too late.

So what if Lear had gotten into a few tiffs with his daughters, gone to a pub with a son-in-law and revealed a past indiscretion, and eventually lost his marbles and wandered around the countryside philosophizing until the end of the play?

What if Henry had agonized over whether to take France while playing tennis, had a dalliance along the way, and eventually settled for a baronage somewhere in Normandy?

What if Othello had wondered now and again about Desdemona while out drinking with Iago, gotten into a fight with someone who slighted his wife, then came home to find the house a mess?

Even with Shakespeare’s unparalleled command of the English language, these plays without their simple but strong bones would be mere curiosities, if they had survived at all. People like pretty language, yes, they like metaphor, they like sympathetic characters. But what they like most is all the above sculpted aesthetically around a beautiful structure.

Jeanette Atwood

This is an edited version of a previous post. It will be appearing on page 3 of the Sunstone arriving in your mailbox very soon. I just wanted to show you what a good bout of editing and an illustrator can do for a piece. Note, for example, the streamlining of the prose and the unification of the controlling metaphor (as contrasted with the earlier version). And, by the way, one of the perks of publishing in Sunstone is that you get an illustration or two specifically created for your piece.

Do you believe in Santa Claus? The Easter Bunny? The Tooth Fairy? How about the Author Bunny?

I believed in the Author Bunny for many years. Amazing novels and short stories conceived themselves inside her like eggs, perfect and smooth. Then she would find a worthy worshipper upon whom to bestow those stories (usually after midnight).

Oh, sure, the writer had to work to peel those stories and expose their beauty, but the story was already in there. All the writer had to do was find the words to embody it.

How many days did I sit at my computer certain that the Author Bunny had left a little gift for me? How many drafts did I pump out? How many perfect stories did I present to how many critics who said, “Umm, yeah. Fine.”

Fine? Obviously you don’t grasp what I’m doing here. Don’t you see the nuances? Can’t you catch the symbolism? Isn’t the story’s soul blindingly apparent?

I spent many years trying to attract the Author Bunny. But it finally became depressingly evident that I had been tried and found unworthy.

No stories for you, you naughty boy.

But I’m a stubborn cuss. I wanted to be a writer anyway, so I enrolled in a creative writing MFA program where I learned something that made it possible for me to be a writer without the Author Bunny (sounds heretical, I know). That something is a single principle. I’m giving it to you free of charge—just because you’re you.

Just as there is a craft to engine design, architecture, and artificial sweetener formulation, there is a craft to storytelling.

I spent five years studying story craft, my main text being Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. Focusing on a screenwriting book when one wants to learn story craft may seem odd, but, as I have found, screenplays are story skeletons. They’re the bones that the cast and crew hang flesh upon. You don’t have to cut through flowery language, extended metaphors, or languorous passages of description. Rather, the beams and bones of the story lie exposed before you. And there are ways to know if they can stand, or if the art direction, costumes, actors, soundtrack, and cinematography are simply makeup and an evening gown applied to a corpse.

Though I was obsessed with understanding the components of story, it took a while to learn and apply them. Looking back on my MFA thesis, I cringe. Why in the world did they let me graduate?

Eventually, my work started to pay off. I could tell because the first time I submitted a screenplay to a film festival, they took my twenty-dollar entrance fee and never spoke to me again. The next time around, I revised that screenplay and won third place. I could identify the screenplay’s problems and repair them. It was like fixing a toaster.

After that, I won writing contests and was published regularly. But it wasn’t because the Author Bunny had put me on his “nice” list, it was because I learned how stories work, just like an architect learns how buildings work, or an engine designer learns how engines work.

Learning the craft of storytelling has been great for my career. I can actually make a living with words, which is something I’ve always wanted to do.

Reflecting on the Mormon fiction I have read, much of it has one thing in common. A lack of story craft. Yes, many of those stories may have lovely language,  sympathetic characters, and interesting ideas, but they don’t go anywhere.

I’ve written a lot of critiques to fiction writers focusing on their story’s structure, and with almost no exception I receive this response, “What in the world are you talking about? This is how the story goes!”

That, gentle reader, is the voice of one who is in the thrall of the Author Bunny. It’s the voice of someone who believes that stories conceive themselves ex nihilo.

As Robert McKee writes,

The novice plunges ahead, counting solely on experience, thinking that that life he’s lived and the films he’s seen give him something to say and the way to say it [. . .] What the novice mistakes for craft is simply his unconscious absorption of story elements from every novel, film, or play he’s ever encountered. As he writes, he matches his work by trial and error against a model built up from accumulated reading and watching. The unschooled writer calls this “instinct,” but it’s merely habit and it’s rigidly limiting. He either imitates his mental prototype or imagines himself in the avant-garde and rebels against it. But the haphazard groping toward or revolt against the sum of unconsciously ingrained repetitions is not, in any sense, technique, and leads to screenplays clogged with clichés of either the commercial or the art house variety.1

Lack of story craft is the bane of Mormon fiction. In fact, I believe it is the main barrier that keeps Mormon writing from gaining the strength to compete in the national and international markets. Too many potential Mormon writers still believe in the Author Bunny. They put no work into story craft, convinced that it will be delivered to them by a furry anthropomorph. They spend their lives waiting for an egg that never arrives.

NOTES

1. Robert McKee, Story, Substance, Structure, Style and the Craft of Screenwriting. (New York: Regan Books, 1996) 15-16.

I believed in the Writer Genius for many years. He was this special, misunderstood person whose waters ran very deep. He was someone who had amazing novels and short stories swimming inside him like fish, just waiting to be caught and hauled up into the light of day. All he had to do was sit at the computer, cast the fishing line into his deepest depths, and type.

Oh, sure. He had to work to get those stories out, but it was his genius that created them. That genius was every bit as much a part of him as the color of his eyes, the shape of his hands, or the sound of his voice. That genius meant that story was something he didn’t have to worry about. All he had to do was find the words to embody that story.

And the really great thing was, in all possibility, I could be that writer genius. How many were the days that I sat down at my computer with an idea that seemed so full of potential? How many were the drafts I pumped out? How many were the critics who said, “Yeah, it’s fine.”

Fine? Obviously you don’t grasp what I’m doing here. Don’t you see the nuances? Can’t you catch the symbolism? Isn’t the story’s soul blindingly apparent?

I spent quite a few years trying to be the Writer Genius. Finally, I had to give up because it was evident to me that I had no natural storytelling talent. I was about as far from being the Writer Genius as it was possible to be. But I’m a stubborn cuss. I wanted to be a writer anyway, so I enrolled in a creative writing M.F.A. program.

I learned something during that time that opened an entirely new world to me, a world that made it possible for me to be a writer. That something is a single principle. And I’m going to give it to you free of charge, just because you’re you.

It is simply this: There is a craft to storytelling, just as there is a craft to engine design, or architecture, or artificial sweetener formulation.

This idea excited me so much that I spent the next five years studying it. The main text I used was Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. It may seem odd to focus on a screenwriting book when one wants to learn story craft, but, as I found out, screenplays are story skeletons. They’re the bones that the cast and crew hang flesh upon. You don’t have to cut through flowery language or extended metaphors or languorous description. You’re just looking at the beams and bones that make sure a building or body can stand. And there are ways to know if they will hold up, or if the art direction, costumes, actors, soundtrack and cinematography are just makeup on a cadaver.

Though I was obsessed with understanding the components that made a good story, it took me a while to learn to apply them. I look back on my M.F.A. thesis and cringe. Why in the world did they let me graduate?

But eventually, my work started to pay off. I could tell because the first time I submitted a screenplay to a film festival, they took my $20 entrance fee and never spoke to me again. The next time around, I revised that screenplay and won third place. The kicker was, I could tell what the problems with my screenplay were, and I could fix them. It was like fixing a toaster.

After that I got published and won writing contests on a regular basis. But it wasn’t because the Writer Genius in me had finally woken up, it was because I knew how stories work, just like an architect knows how buildings work, or an engine designer knows how engines work.

Learning the craft of storytelling has been great for my career. I can actually make a living with words. However, sharing my knowledge has proved to be very difficult.

As I think back on the majority of the fiction I have read, it all has one thing in common. It lacks story. Yes, those pieces of fiction may have lovely language, they may have sympathetic characters, they may have interesting ideas, but they don’t go anywhere.

I’ve written a lot of critiques to fiction writers focusing on their story’s structure, and with almost no exception I receive this response, “What in the world are you talking about? This is how the story GOES!”

That, gentle reader, is the voice of one who is under the thrall of the Writer Genius myth. It’s the voice of someone who believes that storytelling is an innate power they have. Like me many years ago, they don’t realize that there is a craft to storytelling.

As Robert McKee writes, “The novice plunges ahead, counting solely on experience, thinking that that life he’s lived and the films he’s seen give him something to say and the way to say it … What the novice mistakes for craft is simply his unconscious absorption of story elements from every novel, film, or plays he’s ever encountered. As he writes, he matches his work by trial and error against a model built up from accumulated reading and watching. The unschooled writer calls this “instinct,” but it’s merely habit and it’s rigidly limiting. He either imitates his mental prototype or imagines himself in the avant-garde and rebels against it. But the haphazard groping toward or revolt against the sum of unconsciously ingrained repetitions is not, in any sense, technique, and leads to screenplays clogged with clichés of either the commercial or the art house variety” (15-16).

Lack of story craft is the bane of Mormon fiction. In fact, I believe it is the main barrier that keeps Mormon writing from gaining the strength to compete in the national and international markets. Too many potential Mormon writers think that there’s a Writer Genius inside of them just waiting to get out. I figure that a Writer Genius pops up only once for every million people born. Possibly less often. But the Writer Genius myth is so powerful that a great many people who could be good writers, if only they learned the craft, spend their lives waiting for a fish that never bites.

If you have a subscription to Irreantum, you can read the story while you’re all cozied up on the couch or in the car while you’re waiting for your son to be done with basketball practice (which is why I recommend actually subscribing to magazines–they’re more portable than a computer, easier to handle, more intimate, smell better). But for those of you who haven’t subscribed (yet!) I’m posting the story here. It’s long . . . but it’s worth it. I have asked Jack if he’d be willing to answer some of your questions about the piece or about the writing process in general, and he’s happily obliged. So read the story, post your questions in the comments section, and I will get the questions to Jack this weekend. His answers will appear next Wednesday, here at the Red Brick Store. Cool, no?

Enjoy!

*

CALLING AND ELECTION
by Jack Harrell

JERRY SANGOOD STEPPED out of his car and into the darkness of the church parking lot. The sky above was black, without a moon. A thick cloud cover hid the stars from view, and Jerry felt the darkness like a hardened pit growing inside his brain. He shut the car door and stood for a moment in the far corner of the parking lot, near a row of Lombardy poplars as old as the town itself. The Mormon pioneers who had founded this part of Idaho had favored these narrow trees that grew tall and hearty in the sandy soil. They planted hundreds of them in long rows to break the relentless winds. Standing against the darkness of the trees, Jerry watched Bishop Gordon of the Third Ward switch off the lights inside the church. The bishop walked out through the darkened entryway and locked the glass doors, stopping a moment to look behind him into the stillness of the building before he turned and went toward his pickup.

As Bishop Gordon started his truck and pulled away, Jerry Sangood knew he had a choice. He could shake off this moment. He could go home and pray for the safe return of his good wife, who had flown to California to help their daughter and her new baby. He could pray for a way to tell his wife what the doctor had found that afternoon in the X-ray. But even if he did, even if he turned and went home to pray in his secret chambers, God would still be waiting, patient as the Wasatch Mountains, for Jerry to return to this moment. In a week or a month or a year, God would send someone to ask Jerry to put his hand to the plow without looking back.

As the taillights of the bishop’s pickup disappeared in the darkness, a dull pain coursed its way up the back of Jerry’s neck. At least now it made sense—the headaches, the mood swings, the memory lapses. For weeks he had thought he was losing his mind. Hiding the pain had only made him more irritable, had only made his behavior more erratic. Now he walked toward the building’s double doors, pushing back the pain by sheer will.

“Don’t be late,” the man on the phone had said.

“This shouldn’t be hard,” he told himself as he looked at his watch; he was right on time. “What shall it profit a man,” he thought, “if he shall gain the whole world?”

Waiting in the church parking lot with a tumor in his brain, Jerry knew that God had given him so much. He and Camille had paid off the house. They had money in the bank, enough for a mission and more. They had Jerry’s job as a seminary teacher. They had their daughter, Gwen, and her husband and children. They had their friends and their good reputations. Above all, they had the gospel, which had taught them to work hard and save and steer clear of the world’s counterfeit joys. And still God desired to give them more, always more. Even this knot growing in his brain was an invitation, Jerry believed.

“God dwells in eternal burnings,” the Prophet Joseph Smith had taught. The burnings were glories that mortals could not yet endure. Everything that had happened was part of God’s plan. Their daughter and her baby in the hospital—it was a test. Jerry’s headaches, and now this invitation to meet a representative of the prophet—it was all part of his own inching closer to redemption.

Jerry paused at the church doors. He had been passing through these doors for thirty years, since the day of the building’s dedication. The plainness of the dark, empty ward house impressed him anew. The structure and design were both functional and austere—brick and metal and glass and carpet. Jerry was like this building, he realized: practical, artless, a means to an end. The scripture said, “There is no beauty that we should desire him.”

He had watched Bishop Gordon lock the door a few moments ago, but with a believing heart, with the same heart that had moved him to act all his life in the face of doubt, Jerry reached out. When the tips of his fingers touched the metal door handle, the hallway lights came on. An elderly man appeared in the hall, next to the stake president’s office, his hand on the light switch. He wore a black, three-piece suit and carried a small silver briefcase. When he waved Jerry inside, Jerry pulled on the door handle. It opened with ease.

Jerry stepped inside, and the man approached him. He had wire-rimmed glasses and a stony smile that showed a row of crooked teeth. He was bald and his eyebrows were bare. “I’m Brother Lucy,” he said, shaking Jerry’s hand. His grip was bony and firm. “Thank you for coming.”

Jerry sensed that they were the only two in the building.

“I apologize for making an appointment so late,” Brother Lucy said, leading him toward the stake president’s office. “This will only take a few minutes.”

Jerry didn’t recognize Brother Lucy from the pictures in the church magazines. “Did you travel alone?” he asked. “I thought the Brethren always traveled in pairs.”

“The Brethren often do,” Brother Lucy said. “Please,” he added, offering Jerry a seat. They both sat down at the desk, opposite the stake president’s empty chair. Brother Lucy opened his briefcase. “I’m not one of the Brethren.” He looked at Jerry with bright eyes that appeared younger than the rest of his face. “I’m just a messenger. I do a lot of traveling for the Brethren, though. ‘Going to and fro in the earth,’ as the saying goes. Shall we begin?” he asked.

Jerry nodded, shuddering a bit at the pain in his neck.

“Are you all right?” Brother Lucy asked.

“Just a headache,” Jerry said. “I’ll be fine.”

Brother Lucy considered him for a moment. “Well, let’s get right to business,” he said. “Get you home so you can rest.” He took two sheets of paper from his briefcase. Then, speaking in a scripted voice, he said. “Brother Jerry Sangood, we are here at the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Our Heavenly Father knows your faithfulness. He has heard your secret prayers and whispered counsel to you in your extremities. You have magnified yourself according to the oath and covenant of the priesthood. Your life has been one of exemplary service, and your brethren in the priesthood have confirmed your worthiness.”

The man stopped for a moment, adjusting his glasses. “Brother Sangood, I have here two letters. One is from the prophet, electing you to the higher blessings of the priesthood. The second letter is addressed to the prophet. In order to receive this election, you must sign the second letter, which states that you accept the weighty charge that comes with this high and holy calling. If you sign the second letter, I will then deliver it to the prophet. Brother Sangood, do you understand the calling and election I am extending to you?

“It’s the Second Anointing,” Jerry said.

“That’s right,” Brother Lucy said. “This is the Second Comforter.” Then he paused for a moment, leveling his gaze on Jerry. “Brother Sangood,” he said, “a new dispensation awaits you, if you are willing to receive it.”

“A new dispensation,” Jerry repeated, thinking about the tumor growing in his brain.

“A literal pouring out upon your head,” the man said.

Jerry winced as a sharp pain erupted and subsided in the back of his neck.

The man put the letters on the desk before Jerry. “Read them carefully,” he said, “before you sign.”

Jerry recognized the letterhead, the prophet’s signature, the familiar and reserved tone of church correspondence. “Dear Brother Sangood,” the first letter read, “The Lord has looked upon your heart and desires now to magnify your inheritance.”

The pain in Jerry’s head reasserted itself. Earlier that day, Jerry had gone to see Dr. Slater, complaining of headaches and mood swings, loss of memory. When the doctor came into the examination room with the X-ray, he put it on the screen and said, “There’s the culprit.” He circled the air above the image with a silver pen. In the black and gray figure of Jerry’s skull was a small white stone the size of a quarter. Jerry stared at it for a long time, like a man having a revelation. Dr. Slater scheduled a biopsy for Monday, in Pocatello. He said they wouldn’t know anything until then.

A few minutes after leaving the doctor’s office, Jerry came home to an empty house. He picked up the cordless phone and sat on the couch. Camille had been in California for nearly a week, having left the day before their daughter Gwen was scheduled to deliver. Camille had been on the plane when Gwen’s uterine wall broke. When she called Gwen’s cell phone from the airport, Neal, their son-in-law, answered: Gwen and the baby were in intensive care. The doctors had performed an emergency C-section. They found the baby’s leg outside the womb, pressing against Gwen’s internal organs.

Jerry didn’t know when Camille would be coming back, and Dr. Slater had said they wouldn’t know anything until after the biopsy on Monday. Jerry put the cordless back on its cradle. He wouldn’t worry her until he knew more, until after the biopsy. A moment later, Brother Lucy had called. Now Jerry was looking at two letters—and a new dispensation.

On the second letter, which was addressed to the prophet, there was a space at the bottom for Jerry’s signature. Jerry read the words “Second Comforter” and “serve with all my heart, might, mind, and strength.” He looked at Brother Lucy. “What happens if I sign?”

“Each case is different,” Brother Lucy answered, taking a pen from his coat pocket and handing it to Jerry.

Jerry took the pen. He would hold back nothing from the Lord. When he taught his students in seminary, he often quoted the Primary song: “Keep the commandments! In this there is safety; in this there is peace.” He signed the letter and handed it back to Brother Lucy, trusting in the hand of God.

Standing in the parking lot with the man a few minutes later, Jerry asked, “Will there be an ordination? Will my wife be called?”

“Each case is different,” Brother Lucy said once again. Then, he lowered his head for a moment, scowling, like a man arguing with himself.

“What is it?” Jerry asked.

Brother Lucy looked out at the darkness of the parking lot. “I feel impressed to tell you something, Brother Sangood,” he said. “I feel impressed to caution you.”

Jerry felt an odd tingling in the back of his head.

“A lot of people have lived on this earth.” Brother Lucy looked up in contemplation at the dark sky. “And a lot of people will yet live on this earth.”

In the black and overcast sky above them, three stars had become visible: Vega, the falling eagle; Cassiopeia, placed in the sky to learn humility; and Aldebaran, the follower.

“Not all of God’s premortal children were faithful,” Brother Lucy said.

“There was war in heaven.” Jerry said, inspired.

Brother Lucy smiled wryly. “Billions of people have lived on this earth,” he said. “Billions will yet be sent. But a third of the hosts were cast down to earth for rebellion—unembodied spirits roaming the earth, seeking their brothers’ and sisters’ destruction.”

In Jerry’s eyes, Brother Lucy suddenly looked like a small, needle-toothed mammal, like a predator. “How many of them are there?” he asked. “How many spirits roam the earth, combined against each one of us?”

Jerry felt a gloom that seemed to emerge from the hardened pit in the back of his own skull. He felt it in the air around him, in his ears, in his nose and mouth, like a living, cancerous smoke. He clenched his eyes shut, unable to resist the vision of dozens of devilish fiends encircling him, entering his thoughts, taunting and tempting, blaspheming his faith. He fell to his knees, the sound of Brother Lucy’s voice swirling amid the devilish air. Writhing on the pavement of the LDS church parking lot, Jerry struggled against the hosts that beset him. He felt the cold blacktop against his face and teeth as they tugged at his soul, as the very pavement seemed to heave a pitch beneath him, becoming a hard, black sea of evil, ready to swallow him whole.

WHEN JERRY PULLED into the parking lot of the LDS seminary the next morning, he felt tired and agitated, barely himself. He got out of his car and walked stiffly toward the building, his muscles aching. He remembered meeting with Brother Lucy the night before and signing the letter. He remembered Brother Lucy talking about the hosts who fell from heaven. Then he remembered waking up in his own backyard, soaking wet, in a morning rainstorm. Cold and confused, he had ducked through the basement door, which stood open, the knees of his suit pants shredded and soiled, one sleeve of his suit coat torn, his tie gone, his hands and shirt filthy.

He put his ruined suit in a trash bag and took it out to the garbage. Whatever had beset him the night before, he knew he must faithfully accept God’s vision of his own future. He showered and put on another suit. He had just enough time to open the seminary building for the students who would soon be coming in for their first classes.

Reaching the seminary building, his limbs stiff and aching, he remembered the predatory look on Brother Lucy’s face, like a small, menacing animal. He remembered the words, “Each case is different.” He put his key to the lock. Then he saw that the door stood open, just an inch. Perhaps Brother Severe, the director, had already arrived, he thought. But the lights were off, and no one responded when he stepped inside and called out a greeting. He walked down the hall, switching on lights and checking rooms. Everything seemed to be in order, until he got to his own classroom.

He sensed the darkness even before he switched on the light, even before he saw the pictures, hundreds of them, printed on ordinary computer printer paper. Images from the Internet—grainy, explicit, hardcore—covered the walls and cabinets of his classroom. More pictures were scattered on the floor and on the students’ desks. For an instant Jerry stood paralyzed, confounded in his acknowledgment of God’s hand in all things.

A frantic, irrational spirit burst upon him as he realized that the students would be coming in at any moment. Fearing all that he had to lose, he began tearing pictures from the walls, gathering them in a flurry. Despite the ache in his limbs, despite the sharp pains in the back of his skull, he tore images of women and men from the walls, grabbed them up from the floor, peeled them off the cabinets. Like a madman he stuffed pictures in the crook of one arm as he moved through the room. For every picture he tore at, others fell from his grasp, crumpled and torn in his wake. Dozens of other pictures still hung on the walls, untouched. He rushed to his desk, vainly believing he could stuff the obscene pictures in the drawers and hide this unreasonable, unbelievable thing that had happened. But the drawers of his desk already had pictures in them, dozens of pictures, neatly stacked—Christ at the well, knocking at the door, showing himself to the Nephites; Joseph Smith, Noah, and Isaiah; family prayer and baptism. Jerry thought then that he must be losing his mind. These pictures had been on the walls just the day before, which now seemed a lifetime away. Throwing open the last desk drawer, he saw a picture of Adam and Eve in the Garden. The image of the couple holding hands in Eden seemed more real than ever as Jerry stood in his seminary classroom, an armload of torn and crumpled pornographic images clutched to his chest.

His goodness stripped naked and mocked, Jerry saw three ninth-grade girls standing in the doorway. They stood frozen in their innocence, holding their books and backpacks, their eyes wide and their mouths agape. Jerry knew these girls. He knew their parents. He’d attended their brothers’ mission farewells and homecomings. An uncharacteristic curse fell from his lips as he lunged toward the girls, the pictures still clutched in his arms. The girls fled into the hallway, crying out in shock to the other students. Just as Jerry reached the doorway, calling incoherently to the girls, Adam Birch and Greg Hill appeared. The two boys, strong, tall seniors raised on potato farms, looked past Jerry and into the room, their faces drawn with astonishment.

Jerry tried to move beyond the boys. “Girls, girls!” he called out in a vulgar cough, his legs nearly giving way beneath him. “Please!” he cried, reaching after them. Several students had gathered in the doorway now, having heard the commotion. As Jerry fell forward, Adam Birch caught him by the arm. “Go get Brother Severe,” Adam said to someone behind him.

Jerry tried to slough off Adam Birch’s hold on his arm. He called the girls’ names: “Terra, Isabel.” But they were already out of sight, lost behind the crowd of students straining to see inside the classroom. Jerry tried to push through, but he was too weak. The boys drove him back into the room, wrestled him to the floor.

“No,” Jerry managed to say as he reached out, trying to cover the eyes of the boys holding him down.

“You frickin’ pervert,” Adam Birch said, holding down Jerry’s arms. “You’re not getting to those girls.”

The weight of five or six boys was on him now. The gathered students spun on their heels, eyes wide with dread as they saw the pictures on the wall, as they saw their teacher being held to the floor by their friends.

“Brother Lucy! God, Brother Lucy!” Jerry called out. He was trying to break free of the boys’ grasp, trying to cover their eyes. He felt so weak. He wanted to get the students out of this room. He wanted to wake up and find that he was out of his mind, that he wasn’t in this room at all.

When his seminary brethren burst into the room, they stopped short, as though they’d hit an invisible wall. Brother Severe came through the doorway first, followed by Brothers Blaine and Parker. The room fell silent as the three men took in the scene—their fellow teacher held to the floor, the classroom covered with pornography. The students looked at the three men expectantly. Resting for a moment, Jerry uttered a single pathetic moan as he let out his breath.

Brother Parker groaned, “Dear Father.” Brother Blaine turned absently, eyes down, as if he might simply walk away, until Brother Severe touched his sleeve, halting his exit.

“Okay, everybody,” Brother Severe said, “Okay.” He reached down, touching each of the boys on the shoulder or sleeve. One by one, the boys released Jerry and wordlessly moved aside. Brother Severe glanced up at the walls only once, as if to make sure it was still real. He lifted Jerry to his feet. Jerry stepped toward the wall, toward a row of pictures hanging there. He looked at the pictures, seeing the eyes and faces of women and men, the room so silent that he might have been alone. He turned, and then, as if there had been some kind of explosion, the boys were on Jerry again. Jerry hurled himself toward the wall, sobbing now, pulling down a dozen or more pictures at a handful. Imbued with indignation, the boys pinned Jerry to the wall. Coughing, sobbing, Jerry barked out an incoherent curse: “Hell if I ever!” he shouted, swinging random fists full of pornography. “Hell on you all!” he spat.

Brother Severe moved toward Jerry, but Jerry tackled him, pushing a fistful of pornography at his face. When Brother Severe fell against Blaine and Parker, the three men toppled into a wall of students as Jerry rushed past them and darted down the hall. The stunned students cowered and gave way as Jerry raced down the hall, shouting and cursing, until he finally burst from the building like a madman.

THE COUNTY JAIL was housed in a new annex of the historic, sandstone-faced courthouse building on Main Street. The interior of the new jail was hard and smooth—concrete floors and walls painted white, metal cell doors a deep blue. The cells were small concrete boxes with bunk beds, stainless steel toilet/sink units, and small, barred windows. Outside the six cells was a sky-lit enclosed area with two steel picnic tables, the legs embedded in the concrete floor. As the sheriff led Jerry into the enclosure in handcuffs, Jerry showed signs of recognition. He had been there before, as a stake officer conducting Sunday services for the prisoners. When the sheriff took off the handcuffs, Jerry held up his hands lamely, showing his palms. He bowed his head, and in a whispered chant, said “Amen, amen.”

The sheriff had found Jerry in a sheep shed on Glade Raines’s farm on the edge of town. Glade had called saying Jerry was wandering his property, chasing sheep and shouting questions about the prophets. Raines held Jerry at bay with a shovel until the sheriff got there, saying he’d only hit Jerry a couple of times, and only when he tried to get away. During the ride to the jailhouse, Jerry had sat in the back seat, handcuffed, muttering the lyrics to Elvis songs, mingled with scripture.

Sheriff Fisher sat Jerry down at one of the tables. He snapped his fingers in front of Jerry’s face to get his attention. Then, pointing to an open cell door, he said, “That’s your cell, Brother Sangood. There’s a bunk and a toilet. If you don’t cause any trouble, you can sit out here as long as you want.” He put his hand on Jerry’s shoulder. “Understand?”

Jerry bowed his head. “O, God, the Eternal Father,” he said, nodding.

“I’ve got a couple of deputies cleaning up your classroom,” Sheriff Fisher said. “We’re looking at property damage charges for sure, and probably a public decency violation. I’ll have you arraigned before Judge Hill in the morning.”

Jerry stared at the metal table. Something was stuck there in front of him—an old sticker from a banana.

“You know Judge Hill, don’t you?” Sheriff Fisher asked.

Jerry picked at the sticker, pulling part of it away, leaving behind an outline in dirt. “Don Hill,” Jerry said without looking up.

The sheriff squatted on one knee to catch Jerry’s eye. “There’s something else,” he said. He paused a moment. “A couple of the girls said you sexually harassed them.”

Jerry stared hard at the metal table. If he raised his eyes too long, he might see those combined against him. Like mincing shadows with claws for eyes, they’d assailed him in the parking lot with Brother Lucy, buffeted him as he wandered Glade Raines’s sheepfold.

“One of the Peterson girls says you made sexual comments,” the sheriff said.

Jerry nodded. The Peterson girl had talked to him after school and told him her boyfriend had dumped her for someone prettier. “She was crying,” Jerry said, still picking at the banana sticker. “Such a beautiful girl.” He remembered telling her how pretty she was and promising her the other boys would see that, too. “Yes,” Jerry said to the sheriff, nodding, smiling a little.

“And the Compton girl,” the sheriff said. “She claims you got out of line with her, too.”

Jerry looked up at the sheriff. He shook his head back and forth, saying, “No, no.” He started to get up, as if he might walk away. The sheriff simply sat him back down.

“The Compton girl,” the sheriff repeated.

Jerry counted on his fingers, grasping for something like logic. “The revealing tops, the short skirts, the high heels.” He’d prayed for the girl and her parents, recently divorced. He’d cautioned her about her appearance. Jerry looked at the sheriff pleadingly. “Her body’s a temple,” he said. He returned his attention to the sticker, picking at it studiously.

“Do you realize what’s happening here?” the sheriff asked. “You’re in pretty deep.”

Jerry looked up, abruptly confident. He smiled and patted the sheriff’s arm. “I was in prison and ye came unto me.”

“I’ll call your wife,” Sheriff Fisher said.

Jerry looked back at the table. The ache from the blows of Glade Raines’s shovel spoke to him like an old regret. Jerry had grown up a long time ago, it seemed, in a small house near the railroad tracks in Pocatello. An old man lived down the street when he was a boy. The man had a knife and he said he could cut off Jerry’s ear. A sunny afternoon, and Jerry’s father was there. The man showed his knife. Jerry didn’t understand that the man was teasing him. Then Jerry remembered something else. He’d been a young husband. He and Camille drove a Thunderbird convertible he’d borrowed from his friend Raymond Hayes. They’d driven to Las Vegas to see Elvis. He remembered the feeling of Camille’s beautiful, delicate hand on his arm as he drove. And he remembered standing in front of his students, the familiar sensation of his leather-bound Book of Mormon in his hand, testifying in one of those rare moments when all of the students were silent, truly listening, listening not just to him, but to the Spirit testifying. He remembered that morning, carrying his tattered, soiled suit to the garbage, like a man hiding a shameful sin.

When Sheriff Fisher came in next, leaving the door open to the office, the outside light from the small, barred window was growing dim. The sheriff sat down across from Jerry at the metal table, looking at him for a long time before he spoke. “We’ve been to your house,” he said. “The pictures you put up in the classroom were probable cause. The back door to the house was wide open. All those pictures—they were printed from your computer. All we had to do was check the computer history. It was all right there.”

Jerry remembered seeing Sheriff Fisher as a boy, riding a silver bicycle all over town. He could ride with no hands from one end of town to the other next, his arms folded over his chest. As the sheriff spoke, Jerry reached out and patted his sleeve.

“We found something else,” Sheriff Fisher said. “When we sat down at your computer, it was already on. It was open to your bank’s website. All your accounts have been zeroed out, all the funds were transferred. We talked to the bank. Did you plan on skipping town, Jerry? Is that why you empted the accounts? Is that why you did it while Camille was gone?”

“Who needs money?” Jerry said, quoting an Elvis tune.

The telephone rang, and Sheriff Fisher stood up, heading for the office. “If that little trick down at the seminary was your way of getting back at this town for something,” he said, “then it was a hell of a way to go.”

Jerry sat at the metal table, his hands before him, his fingers outstretched. Too many things were happening, too many things to think about at once. The sheriff had told him there was a room with a bunk. He realized that now. He could go to sleep. He looked up at the cell, the door standing open. The sheriff had found his house that way, with the door standing open. He could go to sleep. He had awakened in the rain that morning, in the backyard, with the door of the house standing open. He got up and went to the open door of the cell. He stepped into the cell, thinking he might shut the door behind him, but he didn’t want to disturb the evidence. He lay on the bed, facing the wall. He was glad it wasn’t raining. He didn’t know if those combined against him were in the cell with him, though he knew they were in prison. He didn’t want to turn and see. He heard the sheriff talking on the phone in the office. He heard the sheriff say the words, “That’s what it looks like.”

Then the sheriff was in the cell, tapping him on the shoulder. “It’s your wife,” he said, handing him a cordless phone. “She doesn’t sound too good.”

Jerry sat on the edge of the bed and took the phone.

“The baby isn’t breathing right,” Camille said, her voice like light.

Jerry opened his eyes, emerging from a spell. “Camille,” he said.

“I can’t talk long. They put Gwen back in Intensive Care. She’s bleeding again.”

“We can say a prayer,” Jerry said. “We can give her a blessing.”

“What’s happening to us?” Camille asked.

“Heavenly Father . . .” Jerry said, unable to finish.

A long silence stretched between them. Jerry could hear her muffled sobs. He knew the rhythm of her breathing, like the pulse of his own blood. He imagined being with her, kissing the tears on her cheek, smelling her soft skin. He closed his eyes, hoping it might simply come true.

Then he heard her voice. “Jerry,” she said.

He opened his eyes. He was still in the jail cell.

“This is my fault,” she said. “You don’t understand what’s happening. This is a test. We just have to get through it.”

“I’m in trouble,” Jerry said. “I’m in jail.” He looked up at the walls of the cell, at the metal tables outside the cells where he had given the sacrament to the prisoners when he had served here as a stake officer. The words came to his lips: “Bless and sanctify,” he whispered.

“I’ll try to come home,” Camille said. “I have to see to Gwen, too, and the baby—she’s so precious,” Camille said. “This is a test, Jerry,” she said. “Heavenly Father,” she said, her own voice trailing off.

A moment later, when she said goodbye, Jerry didn’t switch off the phone. He lay there with the receiver to his ear until the sheriff came in and held out his hand. “I need the line free,” Sheriff Fisher said.

THAT EVENING Jerry Sangood had three visitors who came to him like messengers in a dream. Brother Severe asked Jerry about his headaches.

“Dr. Slater found something in my head,” Jerry said.

“I bet he did,” Brother Severe answered, talking there in the darkness of the cell, sitting on a metal folding chair. “Maybe that thing in your head drove you crazy,” he added.

But Jerry knew it was more than that. He knew God was standing above them all, greater even than the earth upon which all their lives rested. Despite the rattle and thrash of all their ambitions for exaltation, despite the hiss of all the devils combined against them, despite the cars and the songs and the empty hearts, God moved through their lives like a giant flaming sun rolling through space, quiet and sure, like the very blood coursing through their veins.

“I contacted Salt Lake,” Brother Severe said. “You’re through teaching, of course. The sheriff said there’s no question, the evidence is all there.” He stared at his clasped hands in the darkness. “Maybe if they decide you’re crazy, no one will judge you. I don’t know,” he said, letting out a halted laughed. “I guess I was crazy there for a while, too. Do you remember that, that first year we worked together? You saved my life, Jerry.” He paused for a moment, putting his face in his hands. “I’d never had that kind of attention from a girl,” he said, looking up at Jerry,” especially one who looked like that.” He laughed a small desperate laugh, shaking his head. “I thought I was beyond temptation. I would have lost everything, Jerry, if you hadn’t been there that night. I hope they decide you’re crazy, for your own sake.”

Brent Blaine came next. “I was standing in the doorway,” he said. “I had the tithing deposit in my hand, over twenty thousand dollars. I could just borrow a little, I thought, pay it back. I knew no one was supposed to be alone with the money. You saw me, and it was like you knew. ‘Headed to the bank?’ you asked. ‘I’ll go along.’ You had to know. And now it’s you. I don’t get it.”

Then it was David Parker, who was still in his twenties, with a wife and two small children. He sat in the folding chair, just as others had, talking into the darkness. “Except for my bishop back home,” he said, “and that therapist in Utah, you’re the only one who knows. What am I supposed to do, tell Brother Severe? Mr. Righteous? ‘Oh, by the way, I used to have an eating disorder. But it’s okay. I force myself to eat and I stuff my anxieties. No one suspects it because I’m a man.’” He choked a laugh. “You have to be crazy, Jerry, to do what you did. Who am I going to talk to now?”

Jerry didn’t speak. Unseen others clamored in the air, some combined against Jerry, some against Brother Parker. Jerry reached out across the darkness, taking the young man’s hand.

“I’m sorry it had to be you,” Brother Parker said.

AT DAWN, Brother Lucy came. He stood over Jerry, shaking him awake.

“It’s time to go,” he said. “Get up.” Jerry put on his shoes, his head cloudy and thick. Brother Lucy took him by the arm, standing him up. Then Brother Lucy simply walked Jerry past the only deputy on duty, who was sitting with his back to the door, watching TV. They walked out of the building like two angels stepping away from a fallen prison. Outside it was a chilly, overcast morning as they walked north on Main Street, past Heritage Mortgage and Belknap Chiropractic, past the empty storefront where JCPenney’s had once been. The stores were closed and the only cars on the road were still driving with their lights on.

When the dryness in Jerry’s throat cleared enough that he could speak, Jerry simply asked, “Why did they let me go?”

“Just walk,” Brother Lucy said.

Jerry could feel the tumor in his head, could feel it growing. He could taste it like metal in his mouth. Maybe the spirits who had attacked him in the church parking lot had grown out of the pit in his head. Or maybe they were waiting to enter in through it, like a portal. “Whatever God wants,” Jerry said, “he can have.”

“Keep walking,” Brother Lucy said, taking him by the arm and walking faster.

They turned the corner and went down Heath Street, heading east. Jerry looked ahead, staring into the sun. He stared at the white-hot ball on the horizon as long as he could stand it, burning his eyes with the sight of it. Everything began to burn in on him—the life he was losing. He looked at the sun for a long while and then looked down, unable to see for a moment. “Why do I need my eyes?” he said.

When he looked away from the sun, he only saw a pink whiteness. He walked ahead, blind for a moment, until the vision returned. He saw his necktie hanging loosely from his neck. “I don’t need this,” he said, taking it off and dropping it to the ground. He took off his suit coat and absently let it fall to the sidewalk as well.

“You’re littering,” Brother Lucy said. “The sheriff will get you.”

“What’s happening to my daughter?” Jerry asked. “Why does she have to be a part of this? And the baby—why isn’t the baby breathing right? What did he do wrong?”

“He was born,” Brother Lucy said. “That’s enough.”

“It’s not right. God can have him, but it’s not right.”

They continued down Heath Street, walking out of town toward the grain fields and the purple mountains in the distance. At the edge of town, where the sidewalk ended, they took to the blacktop street, walking parallel with the railroad tracks and East Canal, headed toward the old sugar factory.

“Where are we going?” Jerry asked.

“When you drained your bank account,” Brother Lucy said, “that account number I gave you was for the Catholic Relief Fund. They’ll be very grateful, I’m sure.”

“Why did I do it?” Jerry asked.

“The thing which I greatly feared is come upon me,” Brother Lucy said, quoting scripture.

Jerry looked at the sun again, walking into it. He didn’t want to see anymore.

“We author our own hell,” Brother Lucy said.

They were walking the middle of the blacktop road, along the canal, a row of litter and gangly weeds beside them. “I’ve lost my life,” Jerry said.

“You’ve lost nothing that matters.”

“Then nothing matters,” Jerry said.

They were at the old sugar factory now, a building that hadn’t been used in years. The windows were broken out, a moat of high weeds grew up around the walls. The stories of hard-working Mormon farmers carrying in loads of sugar beets in big, horse-drawn wagons were all gone, too. East Canal, a major artery of the local irrigation system, ran between the dilapidated building and the blacktop road where Jerry and Brother Lucy stood. In the distance, beyond acres of potato and grain fields, the Wasatch mountain range lay between them and the distant sunrise.

“Certain people in Salt Lake City were up all night talking about you, Jerry,” Brother Lucy said. “You’re going to be on the news this morning, all over Utah and Idaho. Someone took pictures of your classroom. They have pictures of you, too. It was good of you to leave the house unlocked. One of the General Authorities wants you excommunicated. He’ll probably get his way.”

Jerry looked up at the old abandoned building. He had played here as a boy, riding his bike around the place at night, throwing rocks into the canal. “Take me home,” he said absently. “I want to go home.”

“Your old life is gone, Jerry. You signed the letter. Besides that, you just escaped from the county jail. You’re a fugitive. Add that to the other charges against you.”

“Why are we here?” Jerry asked. The pain in the back of his head was growing warm, like something seductive and wicked.

Brother Lucy took Jerry’s arm and walked him a few feet down the road. They stood at the edge of the canal. “Look,” he said, pointing to a dirt and gravel parking lot behind the sugar factory. Camille was there, standing a hundred yards away, pacing in front of her car. She wore blue slacks and a white blouse, the same clothes she had on when she flew out to California. Spotting them, she began walking in their direction, head down, arms folded over her chest.

“She loves you, Jerry,” Brother Lucy said, “more than her whole life in this town. More than her grandchild, more than her daughter. More than she loves herself.”

Jerry fell to his knees. The pain in his head was blinding. It was too much to think that he had brought her to all this, their lives shattered. He tried to stand. He stumbled, moving toward Camille, toward the canal. Looking only at his wife as she made her way toward them, he stepped into the canal, the water deeper than he expected. His feet slipped on the muddy bottom. He went completely under the cold mountain water before coming up out of the current, coughing and splashing.

Brother Lucy eased down the incline and stepped carefully into the water. “Take my hand,” he said.

Jerry reached for Brother Lucy’s hand, and in a moment he landed on his back, prostrate in the water, thrashing and gasping in a panic as Brother Lucy held him under, his knee on Jerry’s chest, his hand shoving Jerry deeper and deeper under the current. The pain in his head, like a black cloud of devils, disoriented him. Then, just as quickly as he had pushed him under, Brother Lucy pulled Jerry to his feet and shouted, “Are you giving up? If you’re going to give up, spare us all and do it now.”

“No,” Jerry said, gasping and spitting water. “No, I’m not giving up.” He was struggling to stand on his own, grasping at Brother Lucy’s body to steady himself.

Camille stood at the edge of the canal now, reaching for her husband. “Let go of him!” she demanded. “Get away from him! Let him go!”

Jerry wiped at his eyes and looked up at her, standing on the bank. Her hair was disheveled and her clothes were wrinkled. Her face was red and her eyes were puffy from crying. She was the most beautiful person he’d ever seen.

Taking courage from the sight of his wife, Jerry pushed Brother Lucy away and stood back a pace, toward the bank where Camille stood. “I’m not giving up my life,” Jerry said. “I didn’t give it up. You took it from me, from both of us.”

“I didn’t take anything,” Brother Lucy answered. “God holds your life in his hands. He always did.”

“If he wants my life,” Jerry said, “he can have it. He’s already put a tumor in my head.”

“You don’t understand,” Camille said to Jerry. She stepped down the embankment and into the water behind Jerry. “This is all my fault,” she said. “He came to me with a paper.” She pointed to Brother Lucy. “I signed it, and that’s why Gwen and the baby are in the hospital. That’s why all these things are happening.”

Jerry looked at Brother Lucy, enraged, the pain in his head like an angry stinger. He was ready to move toward him, angry enough to kill him.

“Don’t, Jerry,” Camille begged, clutching at him. “Please don’t.”

Jerry roared at Brother Lucy, his fists hitting the water. “I didn’t want this!”

“Your life is gone,” Brother Lucy said. “Don’t you see that? You can’t have it back. Right now, someone in Salt Lake is calling your priesthood leaders in Idaho. There’s going to be a church court. You won’t even have your church membership!”

“It’s not right,” Jerry said in a low, angry voice. He swayed, chest deep in the water, ready to explode. His white shirt clung to his chest. His face twisted with pain and anger. “Nothing about this is right!” he roared as he sprung at Brother Lucy, putting his hands around the old man’s neck. “I worked all my life,” he said, shaking the man. “All my life!”

Brother Lucy gripped Jerry’s hands, attempting to pull them from his neck. Camille pulled at Jerry’s arms, crying out, calling Jerry’s name and begging him to let go.

“I’ve kept the commandments,” Jerry cried.

The three thrashed in the water, struggling to stay upright on the muddy bottom of the canal. Brother Lucy managed to get his own hands between Jerry’s grip and his neck. Camille had managed to get herself partly between the men.

“I’ve cared for my neighbors,” Jerry said in self-defense. “I put up with them, and with their children’s silliness and all of their blind obedience to this stupid, stupid world.” Then, giving up his hold on Brother Lucy’s neck, he said, “And I’ve loved them too!” He stopped fighting for a moment. “I have loved them! Doesn’t that count for anything? I’ve spent hours and hours on my knees, begging God to teach me how to love them. Good God,” he said, “I built a reputation in this town as a good man!” Jerry shouted. “And now I’ve lost everything!”

He turned away, stumbling back a pace, his energy spent. The three of them stood there in the water.
After a moment, Brother Lucy spoke. “What have you lost?” he asked.

“Everything!” Jerry said in a broken voice.

“You’ve lost your reputation?” Brother Lucy asked.

“Yes!”

“The collective opinion of fools?”

“I’ve lost my good name!” Jerry said.

“There is none good but God!”

“What about our money? The money’s gone!”

“Filthy lucre,” Brother Lucy answered.

“We could lose our daughter,” Camille said.

Brother Lucy turned to her. “Dear Mother, you know that child’s soul. In all the eternities, you’ll never lose her. How could you doubt it?”

Camille dropped her face into her hands and began to weep.

Jerry went to her, put his arms around her. Her clothes and her skin felt so cold. She cried into his chest, embracing him. He didn’t care about himself. She was the only one on this earth that mattered. He’d exhausted all his words, all his defenses. He had nothing but her, nothing but his life and hers.

Brother Lucy stood off a pace. His face softened into a smile as he looked at Jerry standing there, holding his wife. “Brother,” he said, his hands outstretched. He stepped toward them, reaching out, smiling assuredly. “Let go, Brother,” he said, touching Jerry’s sleeve. “Just let go.”

Jerry shook his head. “No,” he whispered, rocking Camille gently in his arms, moving from side to side as she wiped her tears and composed herself.

“Your Heavenly Father loves you,” Brother Lucy said. He put his hand at the base of Jerry’s neck. “Just let go of this world,” he said. “You’ll see his love, just like the scripture says: ‘Stronger than the cords of death.’”

Jerry looked into the old man’s fading blue eyes, as light and blue as a summer sky. Jerry knew his own heart. He was ready to believe, ready to accept. He couldn’t do anything else, even if it damned him. He trusted in his Father’s love. He trusted in the goodness of the earth, the goodness of his wife, the goodness of most of God’s children. He knew that God had his blessings in store. He knew his daughter Gwen would be just fine, even if there was trouble for a little season. He was ready to let go of whatever it was that he held back from God.

Brother Lucy stood beside them, his soft hand, his touch tender at the base of Jerry’s neck, just below the spot where a stone was growing in Jerry’s skull. Then Jerry saw a change in Brother Lucy’s face. The menacing look of a predator returned.

“Dear Brother,” the old man said in a voice, strong and hollow, “let go.”

Jerry felt himself slipping under the water, being pushed under the water as easily as a child might dip a toy in the bathtub. He still held on to Camille, too shocked to let her go. The water was murky and cold. Camille, still in his arms, didn’t struggle. She only held on to Jerry as Brother Lucy pushed them both down, one hand on Jerry’s neck, the other hand and one knee on their bodies.

Hungry for breath, for the light of day, for life itself, Jerry resisted the force of Brother Lucy’s body on theirs. He pushed at the old man’s limbs, kicked until his feet slipped on the muddy canal bottom. He thrashed until he felt his back hit the mucky bottom. He needed a breath. He needed to save Camille. He needed to save them both.

Then he felt it. Camille reached around his body, embracing him fully. She was not resisting. She was holding on to him, holding him closer, like a lover in bed, holding fast to her love. Beneath the water, in the blackness, at the end of his life, he returned his love to her. He held her close, and finding her face under the murky water, he put his lips to her. He stopped fighting.

He let go.

THEY DROVE ALL DAY and all night, unable to speak. They simply got in the car in their wet clothes and drove until the car’s engine died on the edge of a rural two-lane highway in North Dakota, near the Canadian boarder. After looking under the hood for a moment and not recognizing anything there, they walked toward the nearest town. At the city limits of Wicapiwakan, North Dakota, Pop. 8271, a sign read, “Where Hell Freezes Over.” They rented a kitchenette in a rundown motel and soon got jobs—Camille as a lunch lady at the junior high, and Jerry as a janitor in the town’s only nursing home. Jerry didn’t say anything about the pain in his head, though it rang in his skull like a hammer. For weeks they only worked and slept, barely talking, both of them fighting a profound sense of loss.

“It’s the buffetings of Satan,” Jerry said one night as they lay awake, their darkened faces red in the glow of the vacancy sign outside their window.

After cashing her first check from the school district, Camille called Gwen. She stood at a pay phone outside a convenience store, next to the ice machine at the side of the building. The noisy car and truck traffic passed on the highway just a few yards away.

Gwen said she was fine. She said the baby was fine. She wanted to know where they were, why they hadn’t called. She asked Camille if Jerry was holding her hostage.

Camille refused to tell her where they were. “Your dad and I can take care of ourselves,” she said. She watched the highway as a semi-truck pulling a load of logs passed. She heard the truck move through its gears as it slowed to enter the city limits.

“I understand about Dad,” Gwen said on the phone. “Some men can keep that sort of thing a secret for years.”

Camille stood there, her hand on the cold metal phone cord, while a short, dirty man in a cowboy hat eyed her as he got into his pickup. “You don’t understand what’s happened,” Camille said to her daughter.

“Its okay, Mom,” Gwen said. “It doesn’t mean the Church isn’t true. Some of those people Dad taught, they’re blogging about leaving the Church. I bet they never had testimonies in the first place. And half the stuff they’re saying isn’t even true,” she added.

“I need to go, Sweetie,” Camille said. She felt sick inside.

Gwen’s voice came back in a maternal tone. “Mom, if you need to leave him, you can stay with me and Neil. We’ll pay for the plane flight. I can come and get you. Whatever you need.”
Camille stood there in silence for a moment. “I’ll call in a few days,” she finally said, and hung up the phone.

A small branch of the LDS church met on the other side of town. When Jerry and Camille’s church records came in from Salt Lake, they listed Jerry as excommunicated. But with only twenty-five members in regular attendance, President Lewis gladly gave Jerry a job as the branch janitor.

EVERY MONDAY AFTERNOON, after he got off work at the nursing home, Jerry let himself into the building to clean. He vacuumed the carpet in the entryway and the four classrooms. He moved the folding chairs in the room where sacrament meeting and Sunday School were held and vacuumed the carpet there. In the offices of the branch president and the clerk, he vacuumed the carpets and dusted the desks. He washed all the windows, and he swept the floor in the little kitchen, where priesthood meeting was held on Sunday. After that, he cleaned the bathrooms.

One winter afternoon, while on his hands and knees wiping the floor around the urinal, a simple thought came to him: he was cleaning bathrooms for Jesus, wiping up urine for God’s true church. Someone had to do it. Jerry paused for a moment, wringing out his cleaning rag in a bucket of soapy water. If God’s kingdom was destined to fill the whole earth, someone would have to wipe up the piss. Kneeling there in the small bathroom in the empty building, Jerry felt as whole and happy as a child. Only then did he realize what he had lost and why it didn’t matter. Only then did he realize that the pain in his head had left him.

That weekend, the Relief Society president asked Camille and Jerry to go down to Bismarck to pick up the welfare order at the bishop’s storehouse. It was a two-hour trip down Highway 83, through a light snow and haze. After the back seat and the trunk of their car was filled with canned goods, dry cereals, and boxed dinners, they stopped at the Bismarck Temple to walk the snowy grounds in the evening light. The temple itself was small compared to the other temples they’d seen, oblong and blockish with only one level above the ground. It was beautiful, though, with the lights illuminating the walls and the Angel Moroni statue, and the plaque above the door that said THE HOUSE OF THE LORD in gold letters on white marble.

As Jerry and Camille walked the grounds, a few patrons came and went, carrying their small suitcases of temple clothes and walking briskly in the light snowfall and the chilly winds. Jerry and Camille walked until they reached the back corner of the building, past a white brick fence, and beyond that, to a driveway that led alongside the air-conditioning units and the garbage dumpster. They stopped at the edge of the driveway, seeing three aged men a dozen or so yards away, standing next to the loading dock, talking and laughing. The man standing closest to the service door was dressed in a white temple suit. The other two men were wearing dark suits, white shirts, and ties.

One of them was Brother Lucy.

Upon seeing Jerry and Camille, the men’s laughter subsided. The other man in the dark suit dropped a cigarette to the pavement and crushed it out. Then the man in the white suit handed Brother Lucy an envelope before disappearing into the temple, through the metal door. Brother Lucy nodded to his companion, who got inside a black Chrysler parked near the loading dock.

“I’ve been wondering when you’d turn up,” Brother Lucy said. “Still having those headaches?”

Jerry looked at him narrowly. “Let’s go,” he said to Camille.

“You’ll be back, you know,” Brother Lucy said, holding his attention, “inside of a year, I predict. I’ve seen it before: excommunicated from the Lord’s church, and sweeping his floors.” Then, taking the envelope in his hand and touching it dramatically to his forehead, he said, “I prophesy! In a year from now you’ll be in this temple, doing ordinances and serving potatoes in the cafeteria.”

Jerry took Camille’s arm. They turned and began to walk away.

“Just one thing,” Brother Lucy said, calling after them.

Jerry and Camille stopped, their backs to the bald man in his dark suit. Looking down at the sidewalk brushed with snow, Jerry imagined Brother Lucy staring at the back of his neck, seeing into his skull where a stone the size of a quarter slept, would continue to sleep, for at least a year. Jerry stood motionless, braced for whatever icy truth waited in Brother Lucy’s words.

“Remember this,” Brother Lucy said. “Think on this,” he said. “Even your goodness is your enemy.”

It was the truth, and Jerry knew it.

“Remember that,” Brother Lucy said, calling after them as they walked away. “And tell all your friends.”

Jerry and Camille went to the car. They got on Highway 83 and drove north through the snow. The truth of Brother Lucy’s words waited like a cancer with them in the car. It was in the snow and in the icy pavement on the road. It was in the very sky. But Jerry didn’t mind it. He could already feel himself in the temple, dressed in white, wearing a hairnet and a paper apron, dishing potatoes and feeling the Spirit of God.

• The staff of Segullah wants you to win!! By that I mean that we are pulling for the people who enter this contest.  We never forget the women behind the stories. And many of us (me, at least) are not widely published, and still consider ourselves to be novice writers.   Trust me: we are a sympathetic audience.  We are rooting for you.    Not everyone can win, this is true. But we appreciate each woman who takes the time to share her life with us through writing.
• Contest winners are held to higher standards than regular submissions.  Regular submissions go through a revision process, working with our editorial board to do at least three revisions, sometimes four, before we publish them. However, our contest winners are published as-is, with minor copyediting.   What this means for those who enter is that they need to take the time to send us the very best version possible. Publication-ready. Please, find someone who can see your writing clearly, and have them give you honest feedback.  Then revise.  Then find someone else, and get more feedback, and revise.  Then do it again, as many times as you can before the deadline.
• Do not be daunted if you have never published before! You don’t have to have published anything before to do well.  I speak from personal experience: “Finding Myself on Google,” which won an honorable mention in the 2006 essay contest, was the first essay I’d ever published.  I don’t think that’s true of our other winners, who had more writing experience than I did, but it’s true of me.  You can do this!
• If you’re wondering where to go with your next draft, and having a hard time finding a good editor, read the writing tips section of Segullah’s blog, and evaluate what you’ve got based on some of the ideas there.
• There is no theme for either contest (I’ve gotten that question a couple of times this year, so I wanted to clarify it).  Write about whatever you want that fits in our mission statement.  Read a few back issues to get some ideas of what we are looking for.
• If your essay doesn’t win, it still has a good chance of being published in Segullah after working through our editing process.  For me, one of the best things about my involvement in Segullah is finding people who will critique my writing with expertise, honesty, and kindness.  So if your essay doesn’t win, but it’s accepted for publication, that’s going to be good for your future writing.  You’ll have the chance to revise it under the guidance of one of our editors.  You’ll get published, and become a better writer.  Yeah, yeah, winning would have been better.  But this is pretty good, too.
• Follow the submissions guidelines I linked to above.  Pay attention to word count–our space is limited, and we’d hate to disqualify your essay from consideration because it was too long.

There you have it–behind the scenes at Segullah.  Now get writing!

p.s. I’m happy to answer any more questions you have about the contest in the comments section.

–Emily Milner, Assistant Editor, Segullah