Timothy's Thoughts

When someone asks how to know when a novel is complete, I always say that when it is good enough that the author wants to read it just for the enjoyment of reading it then it is done. Another question we might ask is when we know we have a story idea that is worth writing. Before I even knew that someone else had written a novel even loosely based on the story of Hosea, I fell in love with the story and decided that I wanted to tell the story that has since become For the Love of a Devil . As always, the first draft was terrible and I asked myself what I was thinking, but after several edits I got the book to the point where I can enjoy the story. Now I am considering my next project. As I look at some of the ideas that pop into my head, I keep wondering if they will make a good story. I think the key to my next project will be to develop a story for which I love the concept. If I love the concept, after some hard work, I will then be able to produce a manuscript that I love. That does...

Yesterday, I talked about large and small publishers. In case you missed it, the point was that large publishers can produce a higher quality product and market it more efficiently than a small publisher. Before you conclude that small publishers have nothing going for them, let me discuss some reasons why a small publisher can be a good thing. No publishing company is very large, when compared to businesses in other industries. Random House has less than 6,000 employees and the big boy in the Christian publishing world, Thomas Nelson, has somewhere around 700. The reason I point that out is because we really can’t claim that small publishers are more personal. They are all small enough to have a personal feel to them. One of the real advantages that a small publisher has over a large publisher has to do with risk. Suppose I am a small publisher with five employees. A manuscript comes along and we fall in love with it, but it may seem offensive to our customer base. In fact, it might b...

There is a perception among some people that smaller companies are better because they have a smaller overhead. I noticed this when talking about building contractors. A friend of mine thought a large company would tack more onto the contract to cover the cost of paying office personnel. I noticed that Jeff Gerke holds that same view as it relates to publishers. Traditional Christian publishing companies have so many employees and so much overhead that they have to sell at least 5,000 units of any book in order to break even. MLP has one staff member and has such a low overhead that it needs to sell only 250 units of any title to break even. (Jeff Gerke, MLP Website ) Jeff’s assertion is that a company like Random House, the parent company of one of his former employers, with about 6,000 employees or even the much smaller Christian publisher Thomas Nelson, with about 700 employees, can’t make a profit from a book that sells only a small number of copies. That's an interesting claim...

For many years, Stargate: SG1 was a relatively popular television show. Eventually, the producers spun off Stargate: Atlantis . The two shows were very different and very much alike. On the DVD special features for one season, someone related to the shows made the comment that they viewed the shows as taking place in the same universe. Just because things are happening on Atlantis and we can’t see Stargate Command doesn’t mean that things aren’t happening back there. When we think of our stories as taking place within the same universe, it gives our backstory more depth. Even if books aren’t part of the same series, tying the story back to another book gives the reader the sense that the universe of our story is a much bigger place. We could have a story that is set in a small town and we might feel like that small town is all there is, but if one of the characters mentions a sister from Dallas that has a major role on another book, the world begins to take shape for the reader. The r...

If you have paid attention lately, you probably know that I am a fan of Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat . A big part of that is because he views writing in a similar way to how I viewed it before I read his book. If there is any book that should be recognized for its crossover potential, it his Save the Cat . I first came across the book after hearing the author of a computer book refer to it as indispensable to her work. Many novelists are using this book as a guide. The truly fascinating thing is that Save the Cat bears the subtitle The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need . That’s right, Save the Cat is a book about screenwriting. Obviously, there are many similarities in all forms of storytelling and that explains why there is so much crossover. It makes little different whether a writer puts a save the cat scene in a novel, a script or a computer manual, it will have the same affect of making someone look good. The beats Blake says are in all good screenplays are easy to fin...

Every writer has some reason for writing. That reason is rarely money, since most writers don’t make money at writing. I don’t care what the guy with big teeth told you in the How to Write a Book and Make Tons and Tons of Money seminar. The thing I enjoy most about writing is the challenge to figure out what makes a book good. Some people find a particular genre and settle into it. Me, I enjoy many different genre’s and much prefer the idea of picking the right genre for a story than molding the story to fit within a genre. I enjoy seeing if I can make several different genre’s work. Sadly, the publishing industry is not well suited for people who choose to move from genre to genre. People like to see writers write the same type of story over and over. I know of one romance author who used two plots almost exclusively throughout her career. She changed the names and gave the characters different circumstances, but her readers most certainly knew how her books would turn out, before th...

Yesterday I talked about a bad example of Christian Fantasy. Today I want to talk about a problem that Fantasy and Science Fiction writers face. I hope to also address how to correct this problem. When writer chooses to write speculative fiction, it is because he wants to place elements in his novel that you won’t find in our concept of the world. In speculative fiction you can have elves and fairies, wizards and dragons, spaceships that move faster than light and pretty much anything you might want to dream up. As fascinating as these things are, they are just things. A novel isn’t about things. A novel is about people and how far they are willing to go to accomplish their goals. In a fantasy novel, a person may be a troll, but the troll has something he wants, even if it is eat the human princess . That is the story that we must tell, even though it is so easy to get caught up in talking about the odd characters, the scenery, the political climate and everything else except the story...

I read a Christian Fantasy novel the other day. Correction, I read half of a Christian Fantasy novel the other day. The reason I didn’t read any more of it is because near the beginning of the book the characters got on horses. Then they rode and talked, rode and talked through the middle of the book. I kept looking for something one of the characters needed to change about his life. It wasn’t until page 47 that the author revealed that the character didn’t like the level of respect he received from his bosses. I thought that was a little weak, but at least there was something. After that, they rode and talked some more. There wasn’t an inciting incident in the first 115 pages. If there was one, it was so weak I missed it. This is sad. The book has a potentially good premise and will probably sell several copies on that alone, but the writing quality just isn’t there. I haven’t seen the body of Christian Fantasy, but I would hate to think that this novel is representative of Christian ...

You arrive at the designated classroom five minutes before class time. Some of the other students have already arrived, so you take a seat near the front of the room. On the table in front of you is a binder and a cardboard placard. You use the green marker to write your name on the placard. It isn’t neat, but it will do. You place the placard on the table, doubting that anyone will read it. You begin to look through the course materials and wonder why you are required to take this class. The instructor takes his place at the front of the room. The first slide in his presentation tells you what number to put on your timesheet. The next slide shows an outline of the day’s activities. Then you hear those familiar words, “Let’s go around the room. Tell us your name, how long you have worked her and what department you are in.” Why do we have to waste time doing that? You try to think up what you need to say, so you don’t sound silly. What’s the name of our department again? Though their ...

I read the article What Agents Hate the other day. It talks about things agents hate to see in the first chapter. One of the things is a backstory or an information dump. That, I am afraid, is one of the things I struggle with. It is my nature to want people to understand where I am coming from with what I say. Even with this post, I told you about the article I read. I could have just gone into what I have to say, but I gave you the backstory first. Fictional characters should be like a carving. We begin with a simple blob that has an uninteresting shape. Slowly, we reveal details about this blob until it isn’t a blob any more, but the shape of a person, or an animal or something else. The worst thing we can do with writing about a character is to simply state what he is. Let’s look at an example. The ball flew high into the air and out over left field. The left fielder watched it and ran back toward the fence. The ball hit the glove and then the player hit the chain link fence. The ...

Which Jesus do you follow? Have you ever stopped and wondered if the Jesus you worship is the same Jesus that died for your sins? It is interesting to listen to people talk about Jesus. I don’t believe Jesus would allow anyone to go to hell, one person might say. I don’t believe Jesus causes us to suffer, he just allows us to suffer, another might say. It isn’t that big of a deal if we get a divorce, Jesus just wants us to be happy , may be someone’s statement. People make many statements about Jesus. It is popular right now to think of Jesus as a buddy who wants our worship and gets it by standing by ready to pat us on the back and say, “I know you messed up again, but that’s alright.” Maybe we will find him out in the woods cooking pancakes. But is that the same Jesus who died on the cross? What we know about Jesus is what is in the Bible. We can’t just make up a new Jesus because we don’t like the Jesus in the Bible all that much. If we do, all we have done is give someone else th...

Recently, this blog has focused on writing. Occasionally, I cover some topics that aren’t as mundane as others. Some may even offend a few people. You may recall that I took a strong stance on Thomas Nelson’s statement about the Nicene Creed, a few weeks ago. It keeps things interesting. Today, I want to cover a similar issue, so it may offend a few people, but it also has something to do with writing. Thomas Nelson has made the statement that if a writer says he or she is a Christian they aren’t going to question that. I want that to be a reminder to me that I should not make claims that specific writers are not Christians. But I believe I am safe in saying that there are many Christian authors who are not saved. You may find that easy to accept. I don’t care what church you attend, you will probably find a few church members who aren’t saved. Even among those that give evidence of salvation, there are many who don’t understand the very basic doctrines of the Bible. Let that sink in....

Here’s a rule, every Superhero needs a good sidekick. We have seen this work often enough. In the show Lois and Clark , Lois played Superman’s sidekick. Watson was sidekick to Sherlock Holmes. Jane Marple in many of Agatha Christie’s books had various sidekicks from a police officer who just wasn’t as smart as her to one of her friends to some young man who could do some running for her. But why is the sidekick so important? The superhero has trouble connecting with the world. The superhero is better than the lowly people around him and though they men wish they were as strong and the women want to have his baby, they want him to stay aloof. They don’t want to think of him as living somewhere as a common man with his own problems. They want him to always wear the cape and always be on guard. The sidekick sees things that most people don’t wan to see. The sidekick sees the superhero with his hair down. The superhero can talk to the sidekick. This is an important aspect of all sidekicks,...

Here are the first three chapters of For the Love of a Devil . I am posting these hoping that they will entice you to purchase the book. If not, then maybe they will serve their purposes by helping you decide if the book is right for you. The book is about a beleaguered English teacher, Geoff Mywell, longs for the love he once thought his wife had for him, but when she leaves him for another man on their fifth anniversary, he is forced into the life of a single parent. He isn't sure whether to give in to the relief of having her out of the house or be sorry that the marriage seems broken beyond repair. He goes after her as she moves from one man to the next and eventually falls into prostitution. Geoff must enter the darkness and pull her back or lose the woman he loves forever.

There is a very unheated debate over whether to outline a novel before writing it or not. For me, it is easier if I know where I am going, so I create an outline. Also, as I noted in a previous post, if you ever need to write a synopsis, an outline can cut your workload significantly. There are different ways to do an outline. I find that I describe the current state more than I describe the action. The action will come as the manuscript begins to take shape. Below, I have included my outline for For the Love of a Devil . Some of you may recognize the high level outline as coming from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat . If you haven’t read that book, you really should. The numbers beside each heading are word count totals. Blake Snyder defines when things should happen by page count, but novelists tend to think more in terms of word count. My goal was an 80,000 word novel. I went a little above, so the work count is a little off, but the intent was that it would tell me when I f...

Last week I mentioned the writer’s platform . It is a term that is thrown around a lot, but it isn’t always used in a meaningful way. The dictionary definition of a platform is a position of authority or prominence that provides a good opportunity for doing something . Let’s consider what this means. A platform is not the same as a fan base . Many people look at celebrities. A movie star’s platform is based on his prominence. He can be as stupid as a fence post, but people will listen to him because of his prominence. People start to think that this means that how many people you can get to listen is more important than what you know. If we look at the other piece of the definition, a platform is a position of authority . Do people really listen to the political statements that movie stars make? Not really. Some of them have a lot to say, but most people just ignore them, but if a Senator gets up to speak, people listen. They may not agree, but they listen. The Senator has a positio...

I watched the new Knight Rider the other night. I suppose it was the pilot. Pilots are notoriously bad, but this show has some major problems that will keep me from watching it again. The original Knight Rider was a classic Superhero story with KITT as Michael Knight’s sidekick as well as his source of strength. Episode after episode, we knew what to expect; Michael and KITT would swoop in and help the underdog. Then Michael would have to leave because the life of a Superhero is a lonely life. The new Knight Rider has an updated KITT, which can transform in to any FORD product. The special effects are better, but the writing is terrible. Instead of being one man against the evil in the world, the new show appears to be a large company against the evil in the world and part of that evil is in the company. More realistic, perhaps, but who wants to see that? We want to believe that we could be Michael Knight with a fancy car and we could right the wrongs that we see around us. If that wa...

An author writes a non-fiction book and sends it to an agent. The agent sends back a reply, You have made the subject easy to understand, but I am unable to offer representation at this time because your platform is weak. The author looks at this response and asks, what is a platform and how do I get one? Many authors go at this process backwards. A platform is not something you need to build if you hope to sell a book you have already written. The platform is what gives you the authority to write the book in the first place. It also makes it a whole lot easier to write the book. Let’s look at an extreme example. Suppose a fourteen-year-old student writes a book about how to drive a car. True, the student may have some very good thoughts on the subject, but without having ever driven a car, he isn’t going to have the experience that someone like the current NASCAR points leader has. The guy from NASCAR has a platform. The student has opinions. We develop platforms in many ways. Someti...

As I was going home the other day, I saw a Porsche traveling very fast down the freeway, passing the rest of the traffic. It wasn’t long and a Jeep pulled in behind the Porsche and began to chase it through traffic. “That isn’t very wise,” I thought. The Porsche may be the one that a friend of mine owns. If it is, I can tell you that she has the speeding tickets to prove that she owns a Porsche. And if that isn’t enough, even though it is never safe to drive fast in a lot of slower traffic, a Porsche is designed for high speed while an SUV is not. My advice to the guy in the Jeep, “don’t chase the Porsche.” We can apply that to writing also. Writers know about the rules . If you have listened to anything I have said on the topic, you know that I prefer the idea of understanding the reason for each of the rules and applying that understanding to writing rather than either following the rules blindly or simply throwing them out. I have seen in the comments of some unpublished and rare b...

Every good story has an element of escapism in it. No matter how gritty a story may be, readers don’t sit down to read a story about their current situation. Readers are looking for looking for something to free them from the boredom of their current situation. I was looking at an Amish romance the other day and I began to wonder why the fans of these novels enjoy them. The only think I could think of was that people dream of a simpler life. It is the same reason that people enjoy Historicals. While sitting in a nice air conditioned house reading these book, it is easy to imagine that life must be simple for the Amish or for the people who lived in past centuries. It is easy to forget that washing clothes was a backbreaking task and to wash the dishes after the meal required someone to carry water and heat it. The world people imagine as they read these books is far from the world as it really was or in the case of the Amish life, as it really is. Modern day novels should be much simpl...

One of the classic plots in the romance genre is that of the convenient or premature marriage . I prefer to call it a premature marriage because the couple marries before they fall in love, but since it is a romance, we know they are going to be in love and looking for a future together before the end of the book. It is a compelling plot because it is a story of self-sacrifice. The woman offers herself up on the altar of marriage to serve some greater purpose. Maybe it is so she can take care of his children, or he her children. Maybe it is a requirement for him to become king. Maybe they both have grown tired of going home to an empty house and there is no one else. We all know this plot is fanciful in modern America. I can’t think of any situation where I would walk up to some woman that I don’t know very well and say, “I don’t expect us to ever love each other, but let’s get married anyway.” For that matter, it is unbiblical. The Bible commands husbands to love their wives. It isn’...

In a painting, a photograph or a movie, the dominant colors determine how the viewer will perceive the image. Blues, for example, tend to make the image seem cold. Yellow make the image much warmer. In writing, there are symbols that do what colors do for images. Snoopy always began his novels with, “It was a dark and stormy night…” The darkness of night, mixed with a storm gives us a sense of foreboding. Something bad is sure to happen. We may stumble upon a dead body, or the house may fall down. Maybe we will find a ghostly figure at our door. Contrast the dark and stormy night with the sunny beach. Nothing bad ever happens at a beach unless it is raining or it is nighttime. Bodies do wash upon the beach during the daytime, but only because someone killed it the night before. Dead is a very important symbol in writing. Dead has finality to it, so it tells us that things can never get better. If the husband walks out of the house and the dog dies on the same day, that tells us that t...

I once knew a woman, the most beautiful woman in the world, and all the kingdom came to see her beauty. She had a large black mole on the left side of her mouth and her right eye would stray off to one side. She weighed three hundred pounds and smelled like fresh hog lard. Does that sound like a description of a beautiful woman? How about this? There was once a beautiful young woman who was white as snow, rosy as the blood, and whose hair was as black as ebony. For some reason, that doesn’t sound very beautiful to me either. I suppose you have to be a magic mirror or a prince to think that is beautiful. I am neither. So, the question of the day is, how do we describe a beautiful woman or for that matter, a handsome man? The answer is, we don’t. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For all I know, someone may think the woman I described in the first paragraph is beautiful. And who am I to say she isn’t. What I consider beautiful and what another person considers beautiful are two d...

Though writing fiction is supposed to be a creative pursuit, it is impossible for us to write an interesting story that does not have a parallel in real life. Even something as fantastic as the superhero story has a parallel. The life that Jesus Christ lived looks very much like the life of a superhero. Jesus had an unusual origin. He was wiser than the wisest. He healed the sick and raised the dead. Though he drew large crowds, he didn’t fit in the people of his day and the people in the area where he grew up rejected him. His brothers didn’t accept him until later in life. All of that looks very much like the classic superhero story and that may be part of why people reject Jesus. Their logic goes something like this. Superman is a superhero, Jesus is a superhero, Superman does not exist, superheroes do not exist, therefore Jesus cannot be a superhero. The problem there is that we cannot conclude that all superheroes do not exist because the ones we made up do not exist. Most superh...

A few days ago, I talked about the royal family. They represent the wealth and power we all think it might be fun to have, but in fiction the royal family has a problem because there must always be someone who wants to take that wealth and power away. There is a similar character in fiction that has power (though not always wealth) and does not have to fear that he will lose that power. This character is the superhero . The superhero doesn’t have to be a Superman type character. Daddy Warbucks from Annie is as much a superhero as Superman. The fairy godmother in Cinderella is another superhero, as are angels and wizards and other similar characters. The superhero outshines ordinary people. Within the characteristics of the character, the superhero can do whatever he wants without exerting a sweat. It is nothing for Superman to fly to China and bring back Chinese takeout for Lois Lane, or for Daddy Warbucks to buy another company. It isn’t hard for us to think, “If I could do that, I wo...