Timothy's Thoughts

T he Almost True Story of Ryan Fisher follows the path of a real estate agent who is struggling until he realizes the power of marketing himself as a Christian. One thing leads to another and he begins attending church, because that’s what Christians do. But it doesn’t stop there. The real money isn’t in selling real estate as a Christian, but in pastoring a church. It isn’t long before Ryan Fisher goes off and starts his own church, a church that doesn’t offer salvation for free, a church modeled after his own heart, because you see, Ryan Fisher isn’t saved. I was somewhat disappointed when I began reading this book. The Almost True Story of Ryan Fisher has been billed as satire, so I cracked the spine expecting a good satire. The purpose of satire is to point out what is wrong with what people do. It typically shows these actions at an extreme, so that while the story may seem unbelievable, there is no mistaking the real life reference. Rob Stennett does not give us this. In fact, ...

I n the summer of 1995, a co-worker told me of an idea he had for a pre-lit Christmas tree. He only told me of the idea after I assured him that I wouldn’t repeat it. His plan was to go invent the thing. True to my word, I kept my silence, but a few years later, practically every artificial tree on the market was pre-lit. To my knowledge, my friend wasn’t responsible for any of them. A few weeks ago, I was looking through some of the novels that are scheduled for release and I saw one that had the same premise as one I had seen earlier. The characters were different, the setting was different, but it was the same story, told by two separate authors. Great minds think alike, or so the old saying claims. We come up with these ideas and then discover that someone else has been thinking along the same lines. Some people find this very upsetting. “That was my idea! He stole my idea!” But it might not be a case of someone stealing at all. It could be that we are all exposed to the same glob...

I like happy endings, but no happy ending is ever as affective as a tragic ending. Sometimes a story just needs to come to a tragic conclusion. There’s several ways to do this. One way is to have action to the end, but the heroes just aren’t up to the task. This is somewhat common with the older nuclear weapon movies. Our hero is trying to prevent an explosion, time runs out, there is a flash of white light and we fade to black. Game over. It works, but it doesn’t give the audience time to think about what just happened. A reader puts the novel down and starts thinking about doing laundry instead. The audience needs a breather between the tragic event and the actual end. Not a long breather, a few pages or so, but enough to respect the reader’s mourning over the loss of a character. Suppose a character decides life isn’t worth it and jumps from a bridge. We know he’s dead, but the story goes on and we find something that indicates he may not be dead. Then they find his body and sure e...

F or some time now, the de facto standards for measuring a novel’s quality has been in terms of whether it is a page turner or the reader couldn’t put it down. The formula for creating such a book is simple. Never satisfy the reader’s curiosity until the final page. But I don’t want to talk about that. Instead, I want to walk about how non-page-turner, poorly written books can make it to the top of the bestseller lists. Several months ago, I visited a forum and someone asked the question, “Has anyone read The Shack ? What did you think of it?” I hadn’t heard of it at the time, so I did a little looking around and discovered that it was self-published and yet it had the appearance of a book that was going to do well. At the time, it hadn’t hit the top of any charts yet, but it was on its way up. I bought a copy, just so I would be knowledgeable enough to discuss it. I don’t mean to discuss the ills of The Shack here, other than to say that it is no great surprise that the major Christ...

S ome days ago, Richard Mabry blogged about Donald Maass' book The Fire In Fiction: Passion, Purpose, And Technique To Make Your Novel Great . I went to Amazon.com and read a portion of the book, saw a few things that made me think I would be interested in reading it and clicked the buy button. It arrived a couple of days later and I put it next to the computer, thinking I would read it later. I currently have bookmarks in two novels, The Almost True Story of Ryan Fisher and Inkdeath . Donald Maass’ book kept calling to me. My left hand kept reaching over to pick it up and I kept scolding it, until it refused to obey. I found myself reading the book. As Richard said, Donald Maass has some good things to say in the introduction. I read that and moved on to Chapter One: Protagonists vs. Heroes . He also had some good things to say there. Even though I have written about how I hate block quotes , I forced myself to read the examples he lifted from various novels. I tried to understan...

aspire to seek to attain a goal wannabe somebody who tries to be like someone else or to belong to a specific group (informal disapproving) [source: Encarta Dictionary] Wannabe is often a derogatory term. “Is he any good?” someone will ask. “No, he’s just a wannabe ,” we might respond. Notice the definitions above. A wannabe has the goal of being like someone else while to aspire allows for any kind of goal. In the context that it is often used, a wannabe is someone putting on the appearance of being something, but is not. One of the marks of a wannabe -author is that he gets his feelings hurt when someone implies that his writing isn’t that great. Why? Because his only goal is to be an author and he is willing to take shortcuts to get there. He is something of a copycat. He mimics authors. When his manuscript has all the elements that he enjoys about the books written by a favored author, he su...

S ome things are best left alone. According to Publishers Weekly, Margaret K. McElderry Books has acquired the rights to publish a book that purports to be the sequel to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess , a classic that was published in 1905. That’s more than a hundred years ago and about a year after the ice cream cone was invented. According to the article, Hilary McKay found the novel’s ending “perfect in all ways but one.” She had questions about what happened to the children Sara left behind when she drove away at the end of the book. Well, she has taken it upon herself to answer those lingering questions. Now, I have no doubt that Hilary McKay is perfectly capable of writing a story about Ermengarde, Lottie, Lavinia and all the rest. But sometimes it does harm to a story try to tie up the loose ends created by secondary characters, besides the fact that Hilary McKay is not Frances Hodgson Burnett. No matter what she might say about the characters, the question will a...

Y ou have before you, a box. What is it? One of the requirements of a story is that it must have a setting. In television, there are some very real limits. It can take thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours to build a set, so you don’t go creating totally new sets very often. Also, different locations may require additional actors. They can be expensive too. To balance out the cost of some of the more expensive shows, a television series will do an elevator show . I’m not sure if that’s the proper name, but it is essentially an episode in which two or three of the characters, usually the ones that like each other the least, are locked in a room (a stuck elevator) and they do nothing but talk. It saves the show a ton of money and it lets the actors shine. In novels, we don’t have to worry about how much it costs to put our characters into a particular box. Our box can be as large as the Universe or as small as an atom and it doesn’t cost us anything. We can write about billions ...

J uly 7, 1947, something happened near Roswell, New Mexico. Aliens? Flying Disc? Weather balloon? Cover-up for something else? It hardly matters. Whatever happened out there, the story of aliens being recovered from a crash captured the imaginations of people around the world. We tend to think that science uses facts and logic to draw conclusions, but more often then not scientists are captivated by a story and that is the basis for their research. How else can we explain SETI? Stories captivate the mind and incite people to action. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been accused of starting the Civil War and there is some truth to that. It’s high praise to say that a novel helped to end legal slavery in America, but what if they incite the wrong action? When CBS aired the radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938, many listeners panicked, thinking the news bulletins were real. Fiction has just as much power to motivate wrong action as it does right act...

A nd so, we begin. Many people believe that a novel must begin with a strong hook . Think of the hook as a question. Some people confuse the hook and the inciting incident . They are not the same. The inciting incident is an event within the story that incites the protagonist to take action. The hook causes the reader to ask a question. Where the Red Fern Grows begins with a great hook , “When I left my office that beautiful spring day, I had no idea what was in store for me.” If Wilson Rawls had stopped here, we would ask, “What was in store for you?” We are “hooked” at this point because we aren’t going to quit reading until we find out what happened to him on this “beautiful spring day.” Foreshadowing is one way of creating a hook . The narrator has already experienced the events of the story, so he can tell the reader enough about what he is going to say that the reader becomes curious and decides to stick around. An opening problem is also a way to create a hook . A novel op...

I n general, men don’t read novels. Male readers tend to read non-fiction. There plenty of people with theories about this and some have done studies in an attempt to understand it. I’ll leave that sort of thing to them. I’ll offer instead, a case study of a male reader—that of myself. I was slow to begin reading. They stuck me in remedial reading in the second grade. It wasn’t long after that I developed a love for reading. I began to read anything I could get my hands on—literally. If someone put a book down, I would probably pick it up and begin reading. Many of those books were romance novels, because that was most of what Mom had around at the time and I quickly read through my books. I read a lot of Agatha Christi. I loved reading fantasy. I read The Owlstone Crown many times. I was interested in the Oz books for a while. School work kept me from reading part of the time, but I spent my summers reading, even when I was in college. But by that time my tastes had turned to Tom Cla...

T he world is coming to an end, people are trying to kill me and my friend’s seventeen year old daughter just ran off with an older man. I have another friend whose drug addict son is in rehab, but she thinks he may have killed someone. Maybe he’s the one who killed my neighbor’s daughter. I heard about this kid who woke up strapped to a chair. Someone was going to kill him and he didn’t know how he got there. It all makes the problems another friend of mine has seem small. She has this job she likes at a women’s shelter, but her husband doesn’t want her working there. He’s threatening to leave her if she doesn’t quit. Sounds bleak, doesn’t it? Fortunately, much of this hasn’t happened yet, but it will. This is the world as seen through the eyes of Christian publishing during the next year. It has made me think about the differences between a dark story and one that isn’t. Dark fiction is short on hope and provides no escape. Mary E. DeMuth’s novel A Slow Burn (Oct. 2009) will be abou...

I magine that a novel is a roadmap that the characters must follow. Before we know anything about the journey, we must know where we’re starting (point A) and where we’re going (point B). If we were taking a trip, we would already know where A is and we would choose B, but a novelist gets to choose both. Now, on a road trip, your starting point tells you nothing about your destination and vise versa. When writing a novel, your selection of one point significantly narrows the possible selection points for the other. A and B are opposites of each other. Consider a typical romance plot. At Point A, we see an un-content, single, self-sufficient, businesswoman who sleeps with a cat on her bed. At point B, we see a woman on the verge of happily ever after with a man who has helped her with her business and the cat sleeps outside. Whatever the status quo was at the beginning of the book gets turned on its head by the end. What about Beauty and the Beast ? We begin with Beauty a member of a l...

L ast week I announced a contest in which the contestants were to modify the title of a novel to create a new title and then write a brief description of a story that goes with the title. The prize for the winner of this contest is a $25 gift certificate from Amazon.com, which the winner can use to purchase anything from books to toys to groceries. I also gave a second chance opportunity to encourage people to tell their friends, but I don't need to repeat the contest rules. So, without further ado, the winner of the contest, for her entry, The Shock , is Cindy. I will have Amazon.com send her prize to the e-mail address she has listed on her profile page.

W e all hate spam and we keep looking for ways to reduce how much reaches our inbox. I filter a lot of it out at the server, but some makes it through anyway, such as those e-mail message that appear to have been sent from my own e-mail address. For those, I have a rule set up that just deletes them, as everyone should. If everyone would delete them without looking at them, spammers would stop wasting their time sending them. One method of controlling spam that has gotten popular among people in the writing community is to list their e-mail address as something like somename [at] adomain [dot] com . The idea is that the web crawlers won’t realize that it is an e-mail address and thus protect the owner from receiving unwanted e-mails. Some people go ahead and create the mailto link, as I have done above, while others leave it out. In either case, all this method only discourages the people you want to e-mail you from doing so. Mangling the e-mail address like this will not keep the addr...

M entor - somebody, usually older and more experienced, who advises and guides a younger, less experienced person ( Encarta Dictionary ). Recently, I’ve been noticing an increase in what I would call a misuse of the work mentor . I first noticed this when I our church was going into John C. Maxwell’s Injoy program (which I now consider to be a huge waste of money). I think he may have backed away from this wording some now, but I saw wording that stated that John C. Maxwell had mentored thousands or millions or whatever it was. My first thought was, Wow! How does he have time? and then came to realize that they were talking about how many people had bought his tapes. In my book, that isn’t mentoring at all. More recently, I’ve noticed people in the publishing industry using the verb mentor as a pseudonym for edit . I was on Rachelle Gardner’s website the other day and saw a list of freelance editors. I was curious to see what they were charging for editing a manuscript. I clicked ...

C an you imagine trying to write a novel with one of these? Then again, with the predictive sentence technology, type the first letter and all you have to do is find the novel already written. And here's the kind of treatment you can expect if you ever sell so many books that people like Michael Hyatt think you're important.

F ollowing the Presidential election of 2000 there were what seemed like endless recounts in the State of Florida as the United States tried to figure out who really had won the election. With both eventual President George W. Bush and then Vice-president Al Gore claiming victory, the news media had nothing better to do than sit around discussing how the nation would accept the man who took office. I remember someone saying that once that man put on the mantle of the presidency people would accept him because appeared presidential. There is a similar principle in writing that we might call the writer’s mantle . Every reader begins with expectations. Suppose a reader believes a writer is humorous, he laughs when the dog dies at the first of the book. He rolls in the floor when the mother dies. He is sixty pages into the book when he realizes it is a serious book. One reader opens a book, expecting it to be good and it is. Another reader opens the same book, expecting it to be bad, and ...

A manila folder in my filing cabinet has the word ideas written at the top in black ink. Into this folder I put book ideas for a time when I am between books and I don’t know what to write. Many are written on Post-It notes. Others are hand written on larger sheets of paper. Some have even been typed on the computer and printed. Some are written on the little sheets of paper from a notepad I keep in my nightstand. Some of the best ideas come from that strange land between awake and asleep. Some of these ideas are complete scenes, while other are just a single sentence. On one of the smaller white pieces of paper in that folder, blue ink spells out a story idea involving Tina’s parents reorganizing their church in an attempt to make it more appealing to the people in the community. That idea started back when I was working on How to Become a Bible Character and I was certain that I wanted to include it in the series. I might have written it next, but I had fallen in love with the ide...

W hat is the best advice you have ever been given about writing? It seems like this question shows up every time someone interviews an author. Sometimes it is reversed as, What it the worst advice you have ever been given about writing? I’ve tried to think, if someone were to ask either of those question, how would I answer? There plenty of tidbits of advice out there. Here are a few I’ve run across: Write what you know: Some writers call this good advice and others call it bad. Mostly, I think it depends on how you interpret it. If you take it to mean that all you can write about is an author sitting at a computer, pounding out a novel, then yeah, its bad advice. It becomes good advice when we talk about emotions and motives. When writing about an emotion, such as grief or anger, draw on a situation were you felt the same feelings. Write to the middle: This is a great piece of advise. Do you have a problem with sagging middles? Write to the middle. The reason middles sag is becaus...

W hen we think of a king (or queen), we usually think of a man who has the authority to do pretty much what he pleases. Historically, many kings have had the power and we tend to think that that is the only kind of king there is. Going from that assumption, we might look at the British monarchy, which has little formal authority and what it has is rarely exercised, and wonder why it still exists. We read through the Book of Daniel and see that the law of the Medes and Persians prevented the king from amending his own law. That seems to go against our concept of what a king is, but there it is. The law supersedes the power of the king. In fiction, kings are often very boring creatures. The problem is that we often ignore the authority of the law over the king. Suppose the law requires the crown prince to marry before his twenty-fifth birthday. We say, “Change the law,” but that doesn’t make for a good story. Consider the real life King Darius from the Book of Daniel. He signed a law sta...

I remember from when I was a child, sitting the car watching the corn fields fly past and imagining how much fun it would be to walk between the rows of corn. These days, they plant an extra row where I would have walked. A child could hardly make his way through and an adult certainly couldn’t. But for a moment there, weren’t you thinking about what it would be like to wonder off into a corn field? Maybe you were riding along with me in rural Missouri, watching the ten foot tall corn stalks pass outside the window. When we tell a story, the listener shares the moment. I’ve been giving Twitter a try. I’ve been following a few people. Some of these people are more prolific Tweeters than other. I mostly ignore the most prolific. I figure that if they can tweet every minute then they haven’t taken time to think about what they’re saying. But this week, one person in particular has gotten interesting. Michael Hyatt is in Ethiopia and every so often he tweets about what they are doing. On o...

O ne of the most powerful plot devices we can use is a story is the moral dilemma . Suppose that you are standing in front of your mother with a gun in your hand. She had contracted a disease that will soon reach a point that it will spread to the rest of the world, killing millions, but if she dies before it begins to spread, the disease will die and no one else will die. Do you pull the trigger or not? Suppose you sit at your computer with your finger poised over the enter key. You have in your possession a computer program can actively seek out the primary spam senders and terminate their connection to the Internet. With one tap of your finger, you can eliminate all spam from user’s inboxes, but in doing so you would remove the protection on large amounts of data that companies and individuals intend to keep protected. Do you press enter or delete? The moral dilemma typically consists of a wrong action that produces a right result as compared to a right action that produces a wrong...

W in a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate. That’s right. I thought it might be fun to do a contest. I thought about offering a publishing contract to the winner, but I wanted to be as inclusive as possible. First Chance to Win Choose any Christian novel. I must be able to find it on Amazon.com . Create a new title that is different by one letter. You may change a letter, delete a letter or add a letter, but only one letter. For example, Redeeming Love might become Redeeming Cove . Next, in seventy-five (75) words or less, make me want to go out and buy it. For Redeeming Cove we might say: Shania has gone through life getting what she wants and doing as she pleases. Her grades are low. Her friends are questionable. Can a summer with her grandparents in Shadow Cove turn her away from a destructive path, or is she lost forever? – Redeeming Cove In a subjective selection process, I will select the one that I would most like to read. Second Chance to Win Tell your friends. The winner will b...

We say that publishers don’t care about platform with fiction. In theory, a great story is all that matters, but hey, if you happen to have a loyal following then even better. For a while now, I’ve been trying to think of a way to explain this. At first, I thought that we might look at fiction platform as different from non-fiction platform . You may recall that the non-fiction platform is composed of expertise , recognition and public interest . My thought was that two are these are missing from the fiction platform and then I realized, it isn’t that they are missing, they are non-issues. Look at expertise and recognition . If a novel were true, we would expect the author to be a recognized authority concerning the events. Since the novel is made up by the author, he is the recognized authority. There is nothing he can do to increase his expertise or the recognition of it (aside from telling more people about the novel). That means that any weakness in the platform is in the...

A fter writing yesterday’s post, I began to think more seriously about trying to define what kind of novels I write. Some people refer to this as an author’s brand . I’m not unlike most authors. I looked at various genres and said, “I could write that, if I tried.” While that may be true, I went back and looked at all of my previous novels, the manuscript that’s still buried in a slush pile somewhere, the tale I pulled the pug on because I felt it was too far removed from what I write and my current work in progress (WIP). I asked myself how these are similar to each other and how they are different from what I see from other authors. The common thread in all of my novel length fiction is that they are all about families. It goes a little farther than that. All have a healthy church family that provides a moral center and a support structure, though some of the characters are hostile toward that. So, if you’re wondering what I write about, I write about families . Let’s look at the spe...

L ast time, I briefly mentioned the idea of building success rather than having a defining event to catapult us to success. The story is told of a man and his wife entering a hotel on a story night, looking for a room. The night clerk told them that all the rooms were booked, but they could have his room. When the couple departed the next day, the man thanked the clerk, saying he was the kind of person who should be managing a hotel. Months later, the clerk received a letter from the man, inviting him to come manage a hotel the man had built, the Waldorf-Astoria. I tell that story because that is essentially the model for the publishing industry. Writers tell their success stories. “I received fifty [insert whatever number you like] rejection letters and then I received a call from an agent and the rest is history.” Some bristle when someone calls them an overnight success. “But I spent years perfecting my craft.” Every aspiring and wannabe author is looking for an agent or editor to ...

Y esterday, Rachelle Gardner had a post about what writers can learn from the Susan Boyle phenomenon . She offered two lessons. One, the impression we make early on is the most important. I remember taking a career development class in junior high. One of the things I remember is something about the first twelve being the most important in an interview. We walk in the door and the first twelve seconds forms the first impression. A decision will likely be made in the first twelve minutes, though the interview may go on longer. The point is that we never get a second chance to make a good first impression. The second lesson Rachelle mentioned was that it is the work that matters most . That one’s a little bit of a stretch, I think, as you will see in a moment. Yes, Susan Boyle can sing. She can sing very well. The problem is that looking to Susan Boyle for advice on how to succeed is a little like asking financial advice from a lottery winner. There was once a man who had done quite well...