Timothy's Thoughts

Is it just me or is my writing getting more incoherent lately? Don’t answer that. Please. The most important skill an author can have is the ability to evaluate his or her own writing accurately. The great writers all have this ability. The shabby writers all think they have this ability. And the thing that keeps the rest of us up nights is wondering which camp we are in. I encounter bad writing frequently. There’s something about it that makes me think we ought to be able to quantify it and describe it, but I’ve failed every time I’ve tried. I have, however, noticed a characteristic common to many bad writers. They are easily angered by people they feel don’t respect them as writers. But we can’t go around offending writers just to decide if they are good or not. Besides, I figure that writers learn to handle criticism as they are learning to become better writers. Still, there are some people for whom it is safe to say they’ll never “be ready,” to use the euphemism publishing industr...

Last week, I wrote about Seth Godin’s idea that we should tell people our super power when we meet them and how that I believe that what we ought to do is introduce others and tell their super power . Today, I want to look at his idea in another way in that I want to talk about how we introduce our characters in our writing. It may work in the comic books, but in a novel, having a character step into a scene and describe himself is down right lazy. Also, it comes across as hollow or conceited. We naturally feel a little suspicious of self descriptions. Another method is to have the narrator introduce the character. We tend to believe the narrator. If he says our character is the smartest person in town, he is. If the narrator says a character is beautiful, she is. But this method does have its problems. It doesn’t work well with first person and close third person. Some authors have tried to get around this by having the character look into a mirror so the character can see her reflec...

Seth Godin says don’t listen to your critics or your fans . Instead, delight those people who share you good works with others. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Especially for authors. “What you need to do,” a critic says, “is to hang up your quill and stop writing.” We turn from that to our fans who all ask, “What are you writing? When will your next book be out?” If that’s all there is, neither is of much help. Seth suggests we turn our attention to those people who tell friends, “this is a great book! You should read it.” (Thanks, Mom.) Many years ago, there was a king who had a brother. His bother had a wife and through some course of events, the king and his brother’s wife decided that they liked being in the same bed together. So, that’s what they did. Things may have gone well for a while, but at length a man by the name of John visited the king. “It is not lawful for thee to have they brother’s wife,” John said. The king did not want to hear this, so he threw John in to prison where h...

Michael Hyatt CEO of Thomas Nelson has announced the reorganization of their management structure. The partial org chart he describes on his blog is shown here. Apparently, Mike wants to spend more time working with authors and developing products while reducing the amount of time he spends managing the operation of the business. Essentially, the organization divides their company into three primary areas, Core Business, Overhead and Live Events. I won’t bother to say what I think of this structure. I’ll assume they know more about what they’re doing than I know what they’re doing. The real question is, do any of the rest of us care? From the standpoint that these are our friends and we want to see them accomplish good things, certainly we care, but does a writer care how the workers are Thomas Nelson are partitioned? For the most part, no. Even if you happen to have a book making it through Thomas Nelson’s publishing process (most of us do not), how Thomas Nelson structures its team ...

A couple of weeks ago, Michael Hyatt, President & CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, tweeted about a blog post by Seth Godin titled What’s your super power? in which Seth talks about the comic book introduction of a character in which the character tells people his super power. He suggests that we should introduce ourselves with something like, "Hi, I'm Don, I tell stories that spread." His thought is that people will remember us better if they know how we can help them. I understand his point, but we’re looking at this from the wrong perspective. When you saw the first sentence of this post, did you have a tinge of envy—perhaps thinking, “I wish Michael Hyatt would post a link to my blog.” If you did, that’s natural, but that isn’t the way we should look at it. Don’t you love it when someone you know introduces you to an acquaintance and says something good about you? “This is Ellen Dawson and she owns the best restaurant in town.” You aren’t alone. But notice what I...

Online, I spend a lot of time with authors—primarily unpublished Christian authors. Most have a common question. Why haven’t I received a publishing contract yet? Hidden beneath that question is another. Can’t God see how important this is to me? This second question has an easy answer, but it doesn’t make the wannabe Christian writer feel any better. I think it’s a safe assumption that nearly every Christian author has asked God to open doors for a publishing contract at some point. I God changes things when we pray, but I’ve also seen the numbers. There are a lot of people out there praying for a publishing contract who won’t get one. So what’s the problem? The problem isn’t with God. He is more than capable of giving any and all Christian writers a publishing contract. I would like to suggest that the problem is with us. Do you recall James 4:3? Ye ask and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. From experience, I know that God often blesses us wi...

Some people see the world as something like a big stage with us as the actors, with God as the playwright and we are acting out scenes for his pleasure, following his script, though we don’t know the script. They would have us believe that, though we may feel like we are making choices, we are just following a script. I won’t go into why, but I don’t believe this. There are plenty of biblical reasons why this concept does not hold true, but that’s a discussion for another time. The question I have is what of our characters? Do they make their own choices? Writers are not gods, though some may think they are. We do not have the power to bring our characters to life and we certainly don’t have the ability to give them autonomy, but neither do we have the foreknowledge of God. We might begin a story by just a vague idea of where we’re headed or we might outline a story to death. Whatever we do, there are things we don’t know until we reach that point in the story. In our outline, we might...

Stories are about change. A character comes in one way and goes out another. He is changed by the events of the story and we hope the reader is as well. But one does not simply decide to change and one who changes only at the will of another is nothing but a robot. In a good story, characters move the story forward by making a decision and following through, whether that decision is to battle his enemy, run and hide, or just to stand still and let another have his way. Whatever decision he makes, it is important that we show the emotions a character feels as he makes his decision. Emotions are important throughout a story, but every story has seven points that must have strong emotion. If you can get your readers to laugh or cry or shout for joy in the moments, you are a long way toward having an excellent story. When I say moments, I do mean moments. A moment may be as short as a sentence or it may be several, but it isn’t as long as a page. The longer a moment is, the less punch it h...

So I’m sitting around contemplating the finer points of tiddlywinks when a story idea comes to me. I don’t think much about it at the time, being much more interested in my previous activity, but later I start thinking about the story and I get all excited about the story. It doesn’t take me long to develop an outline and I go to work writing away. Chapter after chapter, I develop the story and soon I have before me a new manuscript. I go to the first page and I begin reading. “That can’t be right,” I say as I realize my protagonist’s mother is dead in chapter one and he calls her on the phone in chapter ten. Then there’s the problem that his half-sister plays a key role in chapter twenty-five, but he wouldn’t have a half-sister if his mother is still alive. Something has to change. So I set to work making revisions. Then I find more mistakes and I go back and edit. I go back again, just to correct a few things. Finally, I have before me a completed manuscript, ready for the eyes of an...

The Race: From Pit Row to Victory Lane by Rick Lemons is about how we can achieve victory in this spiritual race that every Christian is in. Throughout the book, Rick uses analogies from NASCAR races to illustrate his points. If you are a NASCAR enthusiast, you will recognize some of the names and races he mentions, but don’t let that scare you away if you aren’t. He writes in a very approachable manner and spends much more time on, shall we say, the important stuff than the NASCAR analogies. To give some examples, Rick compares the Word of God to the fuel a car needs for a race. Without it, we aren’t going anywhere. He compares an accountability partner to a driver’s spotter. Sure, we could race without one, but we’ll have some trouble with the blind spots. He compares prayer to talking to the Crew Chief. In each chapter, he shows us why these things are important by going to the Word of God and telling us what God has to say about it. In the past few years, I have spent time with au...

Yesterday, I posted about some of the good things about my trip to the Christian Book Expo (CBE). Today, I’m going to say some things about the not so great things. Writing like Yoda, will I be. Actually, no, but it did occur to me that it might be good to lighten things up, since I’m going to be somewhat critical. Humor usually helps. I just wish I could do humor. For a location, the CBE organizers couldn’t have picked a better place. The Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex is in the heart of the Bible belt. There are more megachurches, perhaps more churches, in the metroplex than any other city. If you can’t find people interested in Christian books here, you can’t find then anywhere. Considering that, what I saw at the convention center seems odd. There were a lot of people there, but they weren’t with the Christian Book Expo. They were on the other end of the building. Once I got away from the red coats there, the building seemed like a crypt. There were two problems. One, the venue was to...

I normally only post Monday through Friday, but today I left the relative peace and calm of Cowtown and made my way over to Dallas for the Christian Book Expo (CBE). I’ll start with the good. I went primarily to meet a few people I hadn’t meet before, but I knew I didn’t want to take in all of it, so I looked through the schedule and picked a timeslot with something worth doing. I took my copy of The Tender Scar and had Richard Mabry sign it. Then I wandered around the display area for a while. I met Mike Hyatt for the first time, though I wouldn’t ask him to verify that. He was talking to someone else at the time—a white haired man with a gray beard. I didn’t recognize the man and Mike didn’t introduce him. We’ll just call him Santa Claus. And then I went to listen to Rick Lemons talk about his book The Race: From Pit Row to Victory Lane . Let me say something about that. I hadn’t met Rick before today, though we have attended some of the same meetings. I hadn’t heard him speak, but ...

Block quotes in novels are problematic. You know how it goes; you have a character who has received a letter. You want the reader to know what is in the letter and it is too long to put between quote marks, so you drop down, adjust the margins of the paragraph and include the text of the letter. Or maybe the character has written something and you think the reader needs to see it. Now, here’s the problem. While you have thought out the content of the block quote with much care, the reader skims through it. Even with adequate introduction, readers tend to see block quotes as reference material. We will only read it in detail if we determine we need it. We might have a tendency to think that by including the full text of a letter or some other type of writing we are showing the reader the contents. This is inaccurate. Essentially, a block quote is an info dump. Info dumps are always a problem when they are not handled well. The longer the quote, the worse it becomes. To be of value, a b...

We’ve all heard the advice, write what you know at one time or another. I remember hearing it in an English class. Write what you know takes a lot of heat from writers. Some have said it is the worst piece of advise they have ever received. We can point to writers who wrote about things they didn’t know and yet pulled it off. Take Jurassic Park for example. It is obvious to any computer geek that the writers didn’t know enough about computers, but that didn’t keep them from writing a good movie. Still, of all the rules of writing, write what you know might ought to be the one that goes right up there at the top of the list. It’s true that many writers have developed stories around characters who look remarkably like the writer prior to the time he chose to sit down at the keyboard and pound at the keys, but we can’t make every character look like us, act like us, have the same job as us. That would be very boring. And we don’t have time to go try our hand at every job that we might...

Give me a reason to say, yes. Anyone who has ever received a query letter has fodder to tell horror stories about just how bad a query letter can be. One author believes God guided his hand as he wrote. Another believes that if the agent or publisher says not it is because he is demon possessed. The stories go on. But then we find authors like Tosca Lee who do well with their books, but publicly accredit some bad things that have happened to Satan trying to keep the book from reaching publication. How is that different from some of the stuff we see in bad queries? It isn’t. Though I don’t wish to make light of Satan, the real difference between Tosca Lee and the unknown author who makes a similar statement in a query letter is that she provided sufficient reason for the publisher to say, yes. The things that will make a publisher say, yes, are platform and premise with some indication that the author can deliver on the promise . Platform is obvious, since we talk about it so much. I...

I love looking at web search keywords. Sometimes they make you think. I recently had a hit on my blog from someone in Mayagez, Puerto Rico with the search phrase when the protagonist is the antagonist . That gave me something to think about. Is it possible? If so, just what are we talking about? My first thought was of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . But, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are essentially two completely different characters that just happen to share the same body. I also thought of Agatha Christie’s Endless Night , but decided that it also falls short of having the protagonist as the antagonist . Where we do see it is in Romans chapter seven, near the end where Paul is talking about the war between the flesh and the inward man. The chapter ends with the statement, “So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.” This is the struggle of the Christian, but how does that translate into a story that we might write in a book? What we have is a dupl...

It often surprises me that I receive as many hits as I do for an article on my website, The Inciting Incident . Oddly enough, Google only returns 105,000 hits as I write this. It makes me wonder if there might be a lot more that’s worth saying about the subject. The interest in the subject seems to exceed the amount of information available. Definition of Inciting Incident - an event that motivates the protagonist to take action to change his current situation Just to be clear, the inciting incident never takes place on page one of a novel. This is because page one and several of the pages that follow are taken up with defining the current situation of the protagonist for our readers. The inciting incident occurs approximately one tenth of the way into the novel, but it may move slightly one direction or the other. In Where the Red Fern Grows , the inciting incident occurs on page 18 of 249. I sat down on an old sycamore log, and started thumbing through the leaves. On the back pa...

But seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you. – Matthew 6:33 The other day Rachelle Gardner blogged about preparing for success in publishing . The point of the post was that once an author signs a contract with a publisher there will be demands placed on the author’s time. Near the middle of her post she writes: Do you participate in several church or social activities (Bible study, weekly golf date, book club, whatever)? Understand you may need to curtail them for a season... or permanently. First, let me say that anyone who chooses to write is not going to be able to do that without changing one’s schedule. If nothing else, an author will end up watching less television or reading fewer books. That goes with the territory. The problem I see here is the recommendation that a Christian author remove herself from church activities, including Bible study, “for a season…or permanently.” We could say that this is a matter of prio...

Last time I showed you a very simple outline for Searching for Mom : Act 1: Beginning – Sara Wants a Mother Act 2A: Middle A – Sara Looks for a Mother and Finds a Suitable Woman Act 2B: Middle B –Woman Does not Want to Become involved with Sara’s Father. Act 3: End – Sara Brings Mother and Father Together This is a very high level outline, but you may be like many people who say, “I could never use an outline. It is too restrictive.” You’re really going to think that when I show you this next outline, partially based on Blake Snyder’s work: Act 1: Beginning Setup ( includes an opening image and theme statement ) Inciting Incident Debate Act 2A: Middle A B Story Fun and Games Act 2B: Middle B Bad Guys Close In All Is Lost Moment Dark Night of the Soul Act 3: End Finale Final Image Now I’m sure you’re saying, “You expect me to use that outline? Where’s the creativity in that?” No, I don’t expect you to use it, if you don’t want to, but here’s the thing. All good stories follow this outli...

My first attempt at writing a novel didn’t have an outline. I had several scenes in my head that I wrote with the idea that I would fill in the gaps later. The story was a fantasy about two friends, one of which had an innate ability to work magic and decided to put the people to work building a huge tower from which he intended to rule the world, or something like that. I reached 60,000 words before my hard drive crashed. I’m sure I still have bits and pieces of the story somewhere. I could put it back together again, but I think it best if I don’t. I began Searching for Mom in the same way, but I quickly realized that I was wasting too much time writing stuff that I didn’t need to write. I developed the most basic of outlines. It began like this: Beginning – Sara Wants a Mother Middle – Sara Looks for a Mother End – Sara Brings Mother and Father Together After looking around, I happened to find someone who made the suggestion, “push to the middle.” I don’t recall where I saw that ad...

I received “In the Footsteps of Paul” by Ken Duncan through Thomas Nelson’s Book Review Bloggers program. With this book I was glad that Thomas Nelson only requires a two hundred word review. The book is mostly a picture book with verses from the Bible, statements from other author and the occasional comment by the author mixed in. I am finding it difficult to know what to say. With many of the pictures, Ken Duncan reveals himself to be a talented photographer with an eye for beauty, but I also had the sense that I had seen these pictures before. As I flipped through the book, I kept noticing how similar many of the pictures were to some of the pictures I’ve seen in Bible dictionaries and Bible encyclopedias. So the pictures are a kind of mix between photos of the areas Paul visited and religious stuff. I don’t care much for religious stuff. The Bible quotes appear to be direct quotes, though I didn’t verify each one. The authors with quotes in the book are respected individuals. As fo...

Some time ago, I saw a news report about an artist who painted nothing but pictures of Alan Greenspan. I don’t know if she’s still doing it or not, but it highlights what artists are supposed to do. A painter may pick a subject and paint several variations on that theme. Even if the painter doesn’t paint the same person over and over, she will stick with the same style. She won’t follow the impressionist style one day and then do water color the next. Art lovers have the expectation that if they see a painting by an artist and fall in love with it, they may not be able to acquire that particular painting, but they may be able to purchase another similar painting that they like as well or better. Writers are expected to settle into a style also. Now those of us who write rare books can pretty much write what we please, but when you have a fan base, they expect you to give them more of what they enjoyed the last time. We tend to think of it in terms of genre, but it is more than that. Co...

One of the biggest concerns for non-fiction authors is platform. Publishers demand that authors have a platform , but most authors not only don’t have a platform , they don’t know what one is and they don’t know how to get one. In simplest terms, an author’s platform is the author’s foundation. Figuratively, the author stands on his platform , much like a speaker would a soap box or a podium, and proclaims his message to the world. As with speakers, authors prefer to have a true podium over a soap box, but we must earn that right. Many things in life are complete in three parts. The author’s platform is no different. The three things that go into a platform are expertise , recognition and subject interest . The strength of the platform depends on an author having adequate portions of all three. Expertise comes from many different things. A Bible scholar, for example, may have gained his expertise by attending a seminary or by years of Bible study on his own, but one thing is cert...

Where do story ideas come from? They come from other stories, either fact or fiction. We may see something on the news and it triggers a thought for a story or we may have read the work of other authors and decide to write something similar. But while that is the beginning point of a story, we should allow the story to take shape until it is substantially different, and hopefully better, than the story from which we began. Let’s look at the typical romance novel. The plot is simple. Boy meets girl, boy and girl don’t get along, boy and girl separate, boy and girl realize how much they need each other and try to get back together do they can live happily ever after. It’s a story that’s been told thousands of times, so we might wonder if it is worth telling again. As is, no, it isn’t. So let’s mess with it a little. What if the boy is the owner of the company where the girl works and he is going lay her off? That adds interest, but it’s been done many times. What if instead, the man want...

On a television show that I was watching they showed the outside of a radio station. On the street outside, a truck drove past pulling a tractor on a flatbed trailer. It wasn’t a large tractor, just about the size you might want for one forty acre field. Later in the show another tractor appears. This time, a man is driving the tractor down the street. Once more it is a small open cab tractor. The two tractors have no purpose in the plot, but they serve as an important symbol . Symbols are important in writing. The appearance of a tractor tells us that we are in a rural area. A fence may represent a barrier that keeps those inside in or those outside out. Death may represent the hopelessness of a situation. The symbols we use serve to say something quickly without the need for many words. In part, they are what it means to show, not just tell . In a recent manuscript, I have a scene in which two of the main characters are on a train. One character is mentally counting her money. The o...

An episode of the television show Bones reminded me of the power and danger of fiction. The A story was of little importance. The B story, however, was about a homosexual relationship between one of the main characters and her friend from college. The show’s writers pretended to show both sides of the issue by showing people who saw nothing wrong with it and showing those who do, but the homage they paid to those who see it as wrong dealt more with tradition than it did with facts. The picture they painted of the two women involved was one of apparently healthy feelings the two still have for each other. But the real kicker was when the major character said, “I am not promiscuous,” after having broken up with her boyfriend while looking for another sexual partner. This is before the scene of her kissing her lesbian girlfriend. The danger that this episode of Bones shows us is that fiction writers can make claims without providing accurate evidence to support those claims. The homosex...

A popular plot in both science fiction and historical fiction is that of the forced marriage. It is similar to the Sabine women plot, but there is an added twist in that one or both of the couple doesn’t have a choice, while the Sabine women were given the option of returning home. In historical fiction, the plot device typically centers on the cultural taboos of the day. The woman ends up pregnant and convinces some poor sap to marry her so the child won’t be born out of wedlock. In science fiction, the plot typically centers on the cultural differences between two planets. A visitor to a planet enjoys the local nightlife until some attractive woman offers him some kind of gift, like food or something else. Wanting to make a good impression, he accepts the gift, only to discover later that by doing so he has married the woman. Both science fiction and historical fiction tend to be surreal. Everyone assumes that the law of the land doesn’t prevent these strange things from happening, b...

The story of Cinderella is one of the most loved stories of all time. It has been retold many times. It has made millions of young girls say, “I want to be a princess when I grow up.” Many people have asked if this is the message we want to send to children. Others aren’t sure what kind of message the story is sending to children. When we consider the story, the first thought is that we don’t want to tell children that they can solve problems with magic. But if we peel back the layers of the story and look at what it promotes, the story isn’t really about magic. The magic in the story is just a convenient way to make the story understandable to children. It is much easier to say that the magic stops working after mid-night than it is to develop a non-magical reason why she must flee without giving anyone her name. Looking at the true theme of the story, the real message of the story is that justice will prevail, even when it appears the unrighteous are prospering from their evil deeds ...