Timothy's Thoughts

S ol Stein said that “you are in a long line of storytellers whose job was to keep the listeners attention.” Our primary tasked is to keep the attention of our readers. If you’ve ever wondered why a writer who refuses to follow the rules is able to get a book published and get people to read it, it probably comes down to him having done something that keeps his readers attention. Who really cares if he uses was every other sentence or hops from one head to another? Maybe we do, but we much more willing to overlook such issues if he is holding our attention. He goes on to say that we hold a reader’s attention by getting the reader to want something to happen that isn’t happening yet. This is the essence of suspense, but don’t think of suspense as something that only occurs in the suspense genre; it occurs throughout fiction and non-fiction as well. Consider The Neverending Story . What the reader would like to happen is that we get to explore this fascinating land in which anything is...

I t’s that time of year again, when people start making new year’s resolutions. Right up at the top for many people, just below “lose weight,” is a resolution to write a book. For many people, I think writing a book is some sort of mysterious thing. Conceptually, they believe it is within their power to write a book, but three hundred pages is a daunting task. That could explain why so many authors send unedited first drafts to agents and publishers; it feels like so much of an accomplishment to complete the first draft that the author can’t imagine that there is more work to do. But that’s a topic for another day. If you’re sure you want to write a book, let’s take a look at what it is going to take. Be Inspired I’m going to assume that you intend to write a novel, since that tends to be what is on people’s bucket lists. Before you do anything else, you need an idea for a story. Some authors will suggest that the best approach is to come up with some interesting characters, throw them...

T here’s a rule in photography that we can apply to writing: focus on whatever attracted you to the shot. Or we could word it as, focus on the beauty . The idea is that if you see a beautiful sunset, or an unusual flower, or you like the way something is reflecting off of a building, that you zoom in or frame that aspect of the shot, to that when people look at the photo, their eyes are drawn to the beauty you were trying to capture. Don’t show the whole tree when what attracted you was the setting sun shining through the leaves as a butterfly rests on the blooms. When begin to write a story or anything else, there is something that attracted us to it. With each of my books, I can tell you that one thing that attracted me to the story. In the latest one, And Thy House , what attracted me to the story was a parent teaching his children to reject God and then realizing that he was wrong, after they are too old to listen. The beauty I saw in For the Love of a Devil was the unconditional ...

Cool, windy Monday in late April. Pale sun, scattered cumulus clouds. Nice day for a long, solitary drive into the country, especially when you had a partner and best friend who was getting married in a few days and who was turning everyone concerned into basket cases with his prenuptial mania... There wasn't much traffic on Highway 101 south of King City, and when I turned off at San Lucas there was no traffic at all... -- Bill Pronzini, Quarry I don’t quote this directly from Bill Pronzini, but rather from my friend Richard Mabry who wrote a recent post about the Rules of Writing . Richard identified a number of rules that Pronzini violated in this passage. He begins his book talking about weather; he writes in first person; he uses be verbs; he includes backstory and Richard also mentioned that he didn’t introduce tension early. I will respectfully disagree with that statement, because we see tension in that the narrator is out for a drive to get away from his friend. Rule v...

E ditor’s Note: Wouldn’t you know it? Fiction Friday falls on Christmas, of all days. I’m spending the day with my family and I figure most people are too. What dedication for you to come by this blog on Christmas! Rather than reward your dedication with a post that says that I won’t be posting today, I thought I would invite you to come with me and visit Sara and her family as they celebrate Christmas. Mark Jr. peered into the box—the last package—turned away from it and went back to the car he had been running across the hilly terrain of the couch. He mashed one of the buttons on top; the lights began to flash and the siren began to blare. “I guess that tells us what he thought of that,” Ellen said. She put her own gifts on the floor and stood up. “I’m going to go fix breakfast.” Her husband didn’t look up from his effort to affix a new scope to a riffle. Sara looked up briefly, but her eyes went back to the new book she had in her hand. “That is, if you guys want breakfast...

T he movie version of Holes isn't that far from the original story. I say that based on my memory of the movie and the book. I watched the movie version first. But as a storyteller, there are a number of things that stand out in the way the story was told in the movie and how Louis Sachar originally told it. The original story has a clear focus on Stanley Yelnats and the connections with the events so many decades earlier seem to be focused more on him. As I recall from the movie, a lot more emphasis was put on the events that caused the treasure to be hidden in the first place. In the book, we are told those things, but it doesn’t have quite the same poignancy to the death of the characters that the movie has. Good or bad, that’s the way it is. Given the nature of the story, we might think the story is a coming of age story or a love story of some kind. In actual fact, it is a whydunit . Throughout the story, we have more and more information revealed about why the boys ar...

I n case you haven't noticed, book titles are not unique. I generally track search results for the titles of my books. Anytime someone says something about one of my books, I want to know about it. The other day, search results showed up for <i>For the Love of a Devil</i>, but the author wasn’t me. For <i>And Thy House</i>, there’s no hope for uniqueness and I didn’t expect there to be, but what really got me thinking was when I saw two authors talking about <i>Thicker Than Blood</i>. One was new and one was old. One is a first book and one is the second book in a series. But it made me wonder if the publisher of the newer book gave it much thought when they  used the title. There are some advantages and disadvantages to using a previously used title. If there is a popular book with the same name, then your book may sell more copies, just because it happens to show up in the search results when someone types in the name. On the other hand, by...

Y ou no doubt have heard of the Snowflake Method that Randy Ingermanson recommends . For those of you who have heard of it, but haven’t taken the time to understand it, here it is in a nutshell: Write a one-sentence summary of your novel. Expand the sentence to a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters and ending of the novel. Write a summary sheet for each major character. Expand each sentence of your summary paragraph into a full paragraph. Write a one page description of each major character and a half page description of each minor character. Expand one-page synopsis into a four-page synopsis. Create full-fledged character charts. Take a hiatus and wait for the book to sell. In the meantime, make a spreadsheet showing the scenes. (optional) Take each line of the spreadsheet and expand into a multi-paragraph description of the scene. Write the first draft. The basic idea behind this method is to...

A s a general rule, I try not to post twice in one day, but this is big news that won’t wait. You can now get all of my novels for as much as 35% off the suggested retail price. And Thy House , For the Love of a Devil and How to Become a Bible Character are all priced at $9.95 on Amazon.com. You can also purchase Searching For Mom at 25% off the SRP. Buy all four and that is a savings of $22.

G enerally, I don’t read guest posts and I certainly don’t link to them, but I happened to see a guest post by Steven James on Brandilyn Collins’ blog titled Things Look Bad? Make Them Worse . You ought to read it when you get a chance. He talks about how many people think stories are a series of events, but they are not. He then makes the statement that “you do not have a story until something goes wrong,” and he talks about making things worse to increase the tension in the story. I’m sure those of you reading this blog already knew that, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat it. I do want to talk a little more about this concept of going wrong . We’ve talked before about Where a Story Should Begin , but when do things go wrong? I asserted in that article that we begin a story when the protagonist needs to change, but is unwilling to change. For our discussion here, the key phrase is needs to change . The fact that something needs to change tells us that something has already gone wrong. Le...

E ditor’s Note: Today I'm giving you another video. At four minutes, thirty-eight seconds, it is lengthy for a book video. Most of the ones I have seen come in at less than half of that. But please watch the video and then we'll talk about it. This isn't the first time I've talked about book videos and it won't be the last. The current understanding of book videos seems to be that they probably help sell some books, some of the time, but we may have been able to sell those books anyway, using a cheaper method. In other words, we don't know how much book videos help with sales and we don't know if they are worth it, but they may be. They are certainly not a silver bullet. You can't just put a video out there and get thousands of people to read the book. For that matter, it is hard enough to get thousands of people to view the video, and it is free. If you are a bestselling author, your publisher might foot the bill for a book video. For the rest...

L et’s talk about demographics and psychographics . Demographics deal with such things as sex, race, age, income, education level and location, among other things. Psychographics deal with personality, values, attitudes, interests and lifestyles. There’s a fuzzy line between the two, since things like sex, race, age and education level can indicate some things about a person’s attitude, but it is helpful to think of them as separate. If you are trying to sell a how to book, demographics are likely more important than psychographics. If the book is about how to write a device driver for a new piece of hardware, your target audience is like to be highly educated in Electrical Engineering or Computer Science. That could also be considered a firmographic (dealing with a person’s firm). But when we move over into the fiction world, demographics aren’t as important. If we write a story that takes place in New York, we can’t assume that someone in Los Angeles won’t be interested. Just becau...

B randilyn Collins recently wrote about lying to the reader and put her finger on what I don’t like about close third person or deep third person , as she calls it. If you look at the article, you will see that she makes a distinction between the author’s narrative and the narrative of close third, but the example paragraph is exactly the same. As writers, we may say that it is okay to lie to the read in one while it isn’t in the other because in one the reader is listening to the voice of a flawed character and in the other he is listening to the voice of the author, who has had the benefit of having read the book several times and knows that fifty pages away the character is going to prove the character’s assumption wrong. But how is the reader supposed to know that? If there is no difference between what the author says in his authority to what the character says in his flaws, the reader has no way of knowing whether the passage is written by the author or by the character. In fir...

S ome statistics that I have seen indicate that the most popular book category is mystery and suspense, with a 19% hold on the fiction market. I don’t know how old those statistics are, so it may be different now, but all we have to do is look around to see that mystery and suspense are popular. We can draw a distinction between these two, but we don’t need to, for our purposes. The story that is typically told in both mystery and suspense is that of the Whydunnit or Whodunnit , if  you prefer. There are nine other stories that we can tell and if we do nothing more than divide the rest of the 81% evenly between them, the average popularity of the other stories is only 9%. The Whydunnit enjoys more than twice the popularity of the other stories. In other words, mystery and suspense are hugely popular. Even romance writers are getting into the act by writing Romantic Suspense . If readers love the Whydunnit so much, it would do us good to understand it better. What It Is This ...

G reat news! My latest book is out and available on Amazon.com. They even have the Search Inside feature turned on already. I didn’t expect it so soon, but I’m thrilled. And Thy House What’s the book about? It’s about an ordinary guy who has little use for church and has raised his daughters outside of church. He has kept them away from their mother, who is the church secretary. But one day, this ordinary guy realizes that he is going to hell and his daughters are going there too, all because of him. He tries everything he can to persuade them that what he taught them was wrong, but they are even more against church than he was.

I knew there was disparity between men reading fiction and women reading fiction, but I didn’t really see the situation for what it is until I saw a statistic the other day. Publisher’s Weekly was quoted as saying that of all fiction sold, 55% was bought by woman and 45% was bought by men. I really expected the gap to be much wider. Walk into any Christian bookstore and you’ll see a sea of pink. Walk into nearly any bookstore and books for women will get preferential treatment. Look at the faces of most authors and you’ll see a lot of makeup. Talk to most men and you’ll hear them say, “I read more non-fiction than I do fiction.” Put that together and the picture you’ll get is that fiction is primarily a woman thing. We’re going all out to sell fiction to woman and still men buy 45% of the fiction sold. On top of that, many men don’t buy fiction because they read whatever their wives have around the house. Consider that there are millions of book buyers in America. Now, if we take ...

E ditor’s Note: Today for Fiction Friday, I thought I would give you a video. I know we say we prefer reading to seeing a scene in a video, but sometimes we want to see it, even if it is a little corny.

O kay, so I was over at Mike Dellosso’s blog the other day and he had this short post about possibly writing about using Fiction to Evangelize. It got me to thinking about how that can be done. If you’ve read, How to Become a Bible Character , you know that it tells the way of salvation several different times. I can’t say that I was trying to do that, but it’s just that kind of a story. And Thy House is also that kind of a story. It is a about a guy who becomes a Christian and then has to deal with daughters who don’t think he should have. But is that the way to evangelize through fiction? One thought I’ve had is that instead of focusing our attention on getting people saved, we writers should focus our attention on getting people lost. I don’t mean that we should write the most confusing prose imaginable. Some authors seem to think that is their goal in life, but if the message of salvation is going to have any meaning, people must see their need of salvation. A drowning man will l...

T erry Burns recently wrote about the calling to write . Some people talk about the calling to write. When you think about it, that sort of leaves the rest of us out in the cold. Who are we to say we even have the right to call ourselves writers if others are called by God to write, but we are not? What I like about what Terry said is that he called what the rest of us do an offering. There’s an awful lot of stuff I do that I wouldn’t consider a calling. I work with kids in our church’s Awana program. While I enjoy doing that, I don’t see that as a calling. But that isn’t to say that isn’t to say that I’m doing it for myself; it is an offering. The stuff I do with our church’s website: that is more of a calling. I won’t go into how I know the difference. The point is that there are some things we are called to do and some things that we simply offer up to God as we worship him. If you are called to write, great, but there is no sin in writing if you just have a desire to write and want...

I wasn’t going to write about this, but it keeps coming up. Actually, I wrote about it once, changed my mind and deleted what I wrote, but if you haven’t heard, Harlequin continues to get blacklisted by writers’ associations. The board of the Romance Writers Association (RWA) blacklisted them several days ago and in response Harlequin change the name of their vanity press to DellArte. I’m not sure if that appeased Michelle Monkou and company over at RWA, but it didn’t appease Lee Child and company on the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) board of directors. They voted to bar Harlequin from consideration for their Edgar award. I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around this thing. The publishers are supposed to be the publishing experts and yet, last year more books were published by POD companies than by traditional publishers. It’s no wonder that publishers are beginning to try to move into that market. But what is it that these association boards hope to gain by blacklisting publishe...

P eople in the publishing industry are a bunch of liars. I was reading a literary agent’s blog the other day and she made a comment about a perfectly good book that she didn’t feel she could represent because perfectly good books don’t sell, only great books sell. Anyone who has ever picked up a book, read some number of pages and finally decided to put it down because it was just too boring, knows that isn’t the case and would be glad to have some perfectly good books out there on the market to replace some of those not so great books. The problem is one of terminology. Imagine you are a literary agent and you have a book you are trying to sell. You can’t go to a publisher and say, “This is an okay book that I think you should consider. It probably won’t make you much money, but I don’t figure you’ll lose money on it either.” Instead, you have to go to the publisher and say, “This is a great book! This book is going to help you make up the money you lost on those other books you’...

E ditor’s Note: With it being time for another Fiction Friday and since my latest book will be coming out soon, I am posting the first chapter for your reading pleasure. To give you and idea of where this is headed, this is a story about a man who divorced his wife and raised his children out of church, but comes to discover that he was wrong after the girls have reached an age when he has begun to lose influence with them. Chapter One A t the top of the steps, going up to the church building, the greeter pushed the glass door open. Martin shoved the door open even farther. The greeter stumbled and regained his footing as Martin brushed past him. Another man held out a church bulletin. “Welcome to…” Martin brushed aside the bulletin and made a beeline for the doors of the auditorium. Other greeters milled about the otherwise deserted foyer. A man and a woman stood at the double doors of the auditorium watching the pe...

N o backstory, is the mantra. It kills the story. But it keeps showing up, time and time again. Is it because we’re just all a bunch of bad writers? Maybe we just don’t see backstory as being the problem that people keep telling us it is. Maybe we just don’t understand. Whatever the case, backstory creeps in and when we consider how closely backstory is related to flashbacks, there’s an obvious reason. The big difference between the two is that backstory comes from a different story while flashback comes from our current story. It isn’t always easy to keep them apart. Instead of arguing against backstory, I’d like to talk about the underlying problem. I see the problem as one of rationalizing. Suppose a character is a rich garbage man. Because we don’t typically think garbage men will be rich, our natural tendency is to try to explain how he became rich and why he continues to collect garbage, but that’s part of a different story, making it backstory. It would be better to just say tha...

A nyone who has read this blog very long knows that page numbering is a pet peeve of mine. Admittedly, I almost numbered a book wrong the other day, so I understand that mistakes can be made. My real issue is with people who number a book incorrectly with no intention of trying to do it correctly. There are several publishers out there who make no distinction between the front matter and the text other than that they may leave off the numbers for the front matter or use lowercase roman numerals, but the result is that the text of the book could end up beginning on page 7 or 11 or some strange number that seems out of place. I found one publisher, NESFA Press, that even says in their style guide that they do not start renumbering with the first page of the text. Their actual statement says, “We do not re-start numbering with the first story page. (If it really bothers the editor not to use Roman numerals on the front matter, OK, but the pages are still numbered consecutively in one s...

W hen we consider book sales, the thing that separates the successful good book and the unsuccessful good book is the number of people who know about it. There are a number of books out there that are well written but don’t sell well because people haven’t picked them out of the noise. I say that at the risk of sounding like I’m trying to tell you that I think my own books fall within that category. For this discussion, let’s forget I’ve ever written a book and look at book sales from a broader perspective. Some people are concerned that with the influx of self-published books, customers will be overwhelmed by the options. I have news for them Customers are already overwhelmed by the options. That is part of the reason why bestselling novels do so much better than other books. If customers could go out and find the book they will enjoy the most at any moment in time, book sales would be more evenly distributed, but customers aren’t making a decision about which books they will like the...

I ’ve talked about theme before on this blog, but as I look back, it was a year ago when I talked about it. To summarize what I said then, every story has a theme. The theme is what the story is about. The theme is like the statement you wish to prove through your story. For example, our theme could be that marriages would be happier if couples would forgive each other . I said that we should delete anything that doesn’t support the theme. I said that writing to a theme helps eliminate the problem of preachy writing. I also listed 101 Christian Themes. I stand behind what I said last year and I encourage you to go back and read it if you haven’t already, but I want to add to what I said by talking about the how of writing to a theme. Know Thy Theme To begin with, you may not know what your theme is. Sometimes we begin with the theme, but there are many ways to begin a story. We can begin with some characters, throw them in a situation and see how they handle it. In that case, we proba...

E ditor’s Note: This being the day after Thanksgiving and Black Friday, I decided that today would be a good day to sit down with the three protagonists again. We’re sitting in Ellen’s café. It is all decked out in Christmas colors, there are strings of light and greenery that they don’t normally have and next to the staircase there is a tall Christmas tree. Shoppers are coming in carrying packages and the noise level is quite high, but we’ll see how we do. Timothy Fish: I want to thank you guys for talking to me again—especially you Sara. I can see how busy you are. Sara: I’m glad to get a break. I’ve been here since before five o’clock this morning. Neal: And you were here yesterday too, weren’t you? Sara: Yeah, but not all day. We had Thanksgiving dinner at Grandma’s house. Timothy Fish: Which one? Sara: Ellen’s mother. Yeah, I wasn’t very clear, was I? That’s the problem with having three grandmothers. Timothy Fish: Neal, I suppose you’re home visiting your parents. You’re st...