Timothy's Thoughts

A s things go in this online community, the death of Michael Jackson led to Michael Hyatt writing a post about that, with a link back to a post about Creating a Life Plan . I used to have a life plan, but I got off of it when I didn’t get married by the time I was twenty-four. That used to bother me—a lot. Now, ten years later, I don’t even remember that I’m not married most of the time. I find it much easier to say, “Whatever you will, Lord.” It isn’t that I have a problem with people making a life plan, but I would have missed out on some really good things if I had stuck to my plans. Mike also suggests identifying key accounts, ordered by priority. I’ll show you my list and then we’ll talk about it: God Family, Church and Friends Self Ministry Finances Career Hobbies (including writing) God must come first. If he doesn’t, I’m in sad shape. For the second item, I included all three because I have a real hard time keeping my family, my church and my friends separate. They all seem li...

T ritagonist —there’s a term you don’t hear much. In a Greek play, the tritagonist was the third (and least) important character. In novels, we aren’t limited in how many people we can use in a scene, so we might not think as much about the deuteragonist and the tritagonist . These characters could be anyone. When the deuteragonist is the antagonist , the tritagonist may be the sidekick to the protagonist . Or, if the tritagonist might be the antagonist or someone else. The reason we might want to think in terms of protagonist , deuteragonist and tritagonist is that it is difficult to keep tack of more than three characters at a time. Consider the work of Agatha Christie. At times, she would have several characters in a room, such as when a murder was committed or when the killer was revealed, but during the investigative process, she often used a three character setup, one investigator talking to a couple or two investigators talking to one suspect. Even when a scene involves...

A ll prophecies are true, or so we would be led to believe from reading or watching fiction. Apparently, this is one of the rules . Publishers expect prophecies to come true. Now, I don’t think they would have a problem if the story is about what happens if people have been expecting a prophecy to come true, but then it doesn’t. That could be an interesting story. I suspect that the real problem is when the protagonist chooses to ignore the prophecy and it doesn’t come true. In real life, not all prophecies come true. We know that, so it shouldn’t be a big deal if a fictional prophecy doesn’t come true. But if it isn’t a big deal, then what impact does it have on the plot? An unfulfilled prophecy that the protagonist has ignored and no one is going to get upset over when it is proven incorrect is a non-event. Things are much more interesting when the prophecy comes true. Our protagonist may still ignore it, but we keep seeing these signs that the prophesied fate is coming. A true pr...

W hat are the most important decisions you make as a leader of your organization? asks Michael Smith of ClearView Baptist Church in Franklin, Tennessee 1 . Every leader ends up making decisions that impact the whole organization. If you happen to be the President, your decision might mean the death of thousands. I, fortunately, have never been faced with such momentous decisions. In my opinion, the most important decision I have ever made involves whether I should make an executive decision about something or take it before the group. How you address that issue is fundamental to your view of leadership. The basic question is do you see your role as a leader as being the primary decision maker or as one who enables others to be the decision makers? Do you have enough confidence in your people’s abilities to allow them to make the decisions or do you believe there things that are too important to risk it? Is it the leader’s role to make the big decisions and leave the details to the w...

I had intended to post about the differences between platform and marketing on this blog, but the article grew too long (1,200+ words). When posts grow too long, I move them to my website, which has a design better suited for long articles. It is also better for people who want to print the article and read it offline. Follow the link below if you would like to read the article: The Game of Platform Development

Y esterday, I talked about how writers turn to non-christian religions or non-mainstream denominations, such as the Amish, as a voice of reason in their novels. I don’t think writers are making a conscientious effort to support false religion, though this is what happens when medicine men and Buddhist monks are shown as great men of wisdom. Rather, these people provide a convenient means of filling a role that appears in many stories. You’ve heard of the protagonist and the antagonist . There is another -agonist , the deuteragonist . As the name implies, the deuteragonist is the second most important character. At times, he may be the antagonist , but we often see a deuteragonist who is the sidekick or the voice of reason . The protagonist is facing a problem and doesn’t know how to handle it. It is often the role of the deuteragonist to offer suggestions, give warnings and advice that the protagonist needs in order to find a solution to the problem. The mystery of some of these...

F iction, at times, is nothing but pure fiction. There is a rule in fiction that all prophecies are true . The prophecy can come in any form, whether written on a stone or the vision of a drug addict. However it comes, it will come true, though the hero may find a loophole of some kind. I’m sure there must be exceptions, but some authors who have tried using unfulfilled prophecies have reported having trouble getting their work published. It is hard to say whether this is truly due to the belief that the prophecy should be fulfilled or whether the story just wasn’t that interesting without it being fulfilled. That may be worth exploring at another time. Another purely fictional thing we notice about fiction is that the leader of religions outside the mainstream are true in every respect. I watched Annie the other day, in which there is this Indian dude who has the ability to levitate things. No normal American would be able to do that, but because this guy is an easterner and believes...

P revailing wisdom seems to be that an author should find the worst thing that could happen to a character and throw that at him or her. James Scott Bell suggests asking this on page 42 of Plot & Structure . The idea behind this is to make your characters squirm and see how they get out of the mess. Prevailing wisdom isn’t always right. What I don’t like about this approach is that it produces very dark fiction and nothing else. I have a character who owns a restaurant. It would be a terrible thing if I burned that thing to the ground. She would survive, but it would be bad. But would it be the worst thing? What if she were raped before the arsonist burned it to the ground, with her family trapped inside? That would reveal her character, but the story would be extremely dark, not to mention the fact that I don’t want to do that to her. Instead of asking what the worst thing that can happen to a character is, why don’t we first define the antagonist and ask what is the antagonist w...

E very story must begin somewhere, but how are we to decide where we should begin? To say to begin at the beginning is not enough. The beginning is that point in the protagonist’s life at which the change that takes place during the story is most needed and yet he is not motivated to change. The original Star Wars (episode IV) begins at a point when the rebels are on the verge of defeat. This is made obvious by the small rebel ship what is out gunned and swallowed by the much larger ship. What they need is a hero. Down on the planet, our protagonist is living out the life of a farmer. He longs for something more, but he will keep doing what he is doing. What if the story began sooner, say when he first arrived on that planet? We would have been bored. What about even sooner. There are three movies set before this time, so there was plenty going on, but Luke was the protagonist in none of those. Those are the story of other people. What if the story began later, when Luke discovers his...

P roverbs 29:18 could be the verse of the Bible that is taken out of contest more than any other. This is especially true of Christian businessmen. Consider the reference Mike Hyatt made to it in 6 Steps to More Courage . What he says about it is fairly typical of how businessmen reference it or how some pastors reference it. We want our people to understand the importance of having a vision and following through, so we quote this great Bible verse that seems to say just that. “Where there is no vision, the people parish.” If you want to survive, you have to have vision and the courage to follow through, right? Yes, to a point, but in the words of Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride , “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” First, most people leave off the second half of Proverbs 29:18. The whole verse says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish; but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.” When you read a verse like this, you need to re...

I found a new toy for blogging. I was looking for another piece of software when I saw Windows Live Writer . This tool is designed for editing blog posts offline and then posting them to your blog. I have only tried it with Blogger, so I don’t know how well it works with other blogs, but I’m impressed. I believe it was Michael Hyatt who recommended BlogJet. I tried it and I wasn’t impressed enough to stop writing my posts in Word and then copying the text to my blog. The main problem I had with BlogJet was that 90% of the time it wouldn’t post to the blog and I had to copy the text anyway. So far, Windows Live Writer hasn’t failed on me and I have posted to my blog several times. Windows Liver Writer also has some features that BlogJet didn’t seem to have. It pulls the template from the blog so that you can see approximately what the text will look like when you post. It handles multiple blogs. It is extensible. Is there a feature you would like to have that just isn’t there? Y...

O n Friday, June 19, 2009, Mike Hyatt post 20 Questions to Ask Other Leaders . These questions were asked of him by Michael Smith of ClearView Baptist Church in Franklin, Tennessee. I looked through these questions an I thought, It might be good to answer these myself, just to know how I as a leader would answer them. I don’t know that I will answer all of them for your benefit here, but that first question is one that I feel needs to be answered today, Father’s Day. Can you name a person who has had a tremendous impact on you as a leader? Maybe some one who has been a mentor to you? Why and how did this person impact your life? Everything I know about leadership I learned from my Dad. Everything . I’ve read books on leadership. I have spent time with many leaders. I have been in various positions of leadership. Taking all of that into account, I still look back at my successes in leadership and think I learned that from Dad . Or I look at my failures in leadership and I think I sh...

W hen have we seen the half-man in romance novels? I used to read more romance novels than I do now. They generally don’t hold my attention, but I was trying to think if I have ever seen any. I’m sure there must be a few, but I don’t recall seeing them among the books I have read. A half-man in a romance novel would likely be a woman. She would likely be the man’s old girlfriend. “Yeah, I dated him for a while,” she would say. “I thought we were going to get married and then that rich blond came along. You know were that left me.” The problem with half-men in romance novels is that they make the male character look more like a real guy. That’s not good if the women reading these things are looking for a character to get all hot and bothered over. Another thing I’ve noticed about romances, in particular Christian Historicals, many of the secondary characters are characters from the series. If in book one, the character fell in love and got married, the character won’t work well as a ...

A s we reach the last quarter of our novel, the Death Knells are ringing in our ears. We have no hope of success. We are out of options and the half-man has testified to the strength of our opponent. What are we to do? “Never give up! Never surrender!” cries Tim Allen’s character from Galaxy Quest . “It’s a good day to die!” cry the Klingons from Star Trek . When all is lost, protagonists don’t sit down and wait for the inevitable. They are cut from a different cloth than half-men . No, protagonists fight to the end with the idea that I’m going to die with my boots on . It is typical for sci-fi writers to send their protagonists on suicide missions. They will either save the day or die trying. Can we do the same with other types of stories? The answer is yes. Suppose a man is very good friends with a woman. They are just friends, or so they tell each other, but when she decides to marry another man, the first man tries to talk her out of it. This upsets her and we reach the point ...

Y esterday, I mentioned what some people call the half-man . A half-man could be a literal half-man, either missing limbs or in sci-fi he could be part man and part machine. But he doesn’t have to be. His purpose is to be a death knell . Often, the half-man is fighting the same fight as our protagonist and has already faced the enemy. Unfortunately, the half-man failed, getting away with his life, but with the knowledge that he didn’t accomplish what he had hoped. Take a look at the video below. This is one of the most emotionally charged scenes in the movie version of The Neverending Story “They look like big, good, strong hands don’t they?” Rock Biter says and they certainly do. So, if Rock Biter is powerless to defend his friends against the Nothing, what makes us think that Atreyu has any hope of defeating it? We don’t. That’s the whole point. Atreyu is down for the count. He has lost everything and he might as well sit down next to Rock Biter and wait for the Nothing to come. ...

O nce we have established what needs to be changed and the protagonist takes action toward that change, the death knells fall silent for a while. Throughout the second quarter of a book, there is almost no chance of death for the protagonist. It is during this time that he is successfully making change toward what he must become. We reach the middle of the book and he has succeeded. Things are going good, but we can’t leave it like this. That would be boring. We’ve got 45,000 more words to write. So, we listen closely and off in the distance we hear them. The death knells have returned. After crossing the mid-point, the antagonist regroups and begins pulling the protagonist back to what he was before. We’ve already established that what he was before will lead to death, so through out the third quarter of the book the death knells grow louder and louder. The protagonist fights it, but he is losing ground. We reach a point where he looks death in the face. He isn’t dead yet, but w...

I n a good novel, the death knells come early. The first place we should hear them are in the first chapter. In The Pilgrim’s Progress we hear them on page one. “…I am certainly informed that this our city will be burned with fire from Heaven; in which fearful overthrow, both myself, with thee my wife, and you my sweet babes, shall miserably come to ruin, except (the which yet I see not) some way of escape can be found…” This statement is like the death knells ringing for Christian’s death and that of his family. Stories are about change. This being the case, we begin each story with something that needs to change. But just any change is not sufficient for a novel. We could begin with a husband and wife needing to change the wall paper in a bathroom. I might make an entertaining chapter, but it isn’t big enough to carry the whole novel. The need for change must be such that the reader sees it and believes that if change doesn’t happen then death will come. We see a very obvious deat...

A death knell is the toll of a bell announcing death or some omen that tells us that death is coming. The bright light from a nuclear explosion, for example, is a death knell because though the light will not kill, the shock wave and the radio active fallout that follow most certainly will. Death plays a significant role in storytelling. There are many views concerning death, but there is no disagreement on one thing. With death comes an end to our ability to accomplish our current goals. So in storytelling, when a character dies, the goals of the character are no longer attainable. That impacts our stories in many ways. In computer games, which is one form of storytelling, the threat of death (or the dreaded game over ) drives the player to play longer and harder. In novels, death comes in many forms, but it serves the same purpose. The toll of the death knell drives the reader to keep reading. In the classic love triangle, the death knell may come in the form of a wedding engage...

I n a recent article, Jason Cruise talks about the church’s message for men . He tells of a preacher giving sermon designed to inspire men to become more actively involved and then ruining it by creating a visual of men wearing a wedding dress. I haven’t noticed the problem he describes in the church of which I am a member, but I’ve heard enough about this problem to believe it exists. Some people believe we have a similar situation in Christian fiction. How can you possibly expect men to read Christian fiction if there’s nothing but historicals and romances? There is a difference in the novels that men enjoy and those enjoyed by women. The Guardian reported in 2006 that women favor the emotional, while men favor novels about social dislocation and solitary struggle. No surprise there. I don’t, however, agree with Charlotte Higgins’ assertion that “the novel that means most to men is about indifference, alienation and lack of emotional responses. That which means most to women is abou...

S ome people have the idea that publishers see the first person point of view (POV) as a bad thing. Literary agent Chip MacGregor says that he doesn’t believe this is the case, but he does go on to say why authors—particularly new authors—struggle with it: Many first-person novels from beginning writers suffer from an overuse of the "I-verb" syndrome ("I started... I walked... I ate... I moved... I handed... I answered..."). That endless parade of I-verbs creates a really dull novel. First-person fiction can be great, but in my view it's harder to master than third person. – Chip MacGregor’s Blog What is an author to do? Conversationally, we use first person all the time. “I went to the store and I bought milk, bread and jelly beans. I ate the jelly beans on the way home.” Three uses of the word I in two sentences. You can imagine that a reader will tire of seeing this if a whole novel is written this way. We could rewrite this as, “I went to the store and boug...

M emories of what happens in a person’s imagination can be every bit as real as the memories of real life events. This is one of the advantages telling has over showing . Here, I don’t use these terms in the sense of show, don’t just tell , but I use them to distinguish between two types of storytelling. Some stories are told by actors on a stage or screen. They show us the story. Some stories are told through nothing but words. A speaker stands in front of a crowd or a novelist puts words on paper and tells us the story. In this sense, the initial memories are of the experience of seeing the story unfold in showing . We have memories of going to a movie with friends and seeing the story on a large screen. We are drawn into the story and we jump at the right moments and cry at the right moments and laugh at the right moments, but there is still a barrier. We are outsiders, observing the story unfold before us. When the storyteller tells us the story, we don’t have the images or the...

Y ou’re sitting there watching a television show and things are getting exciting. The villain has put a bomb in the protagonist’s car. His wife has gotten in and driven away, not know that the big red numbers are ticking down, 1:06…1:05…1:04…. The protagonist has to do something soon. You look up at the clock. There isn’t enough time left in the show for the protagonist to defeat the bad guy. You hope it won’t, but you know it’s coming, “To be continued.” Don’t you just hate those words? Especially when the show is the season finale. Cliff Hangers are supposed to keep people interested, but most of us forget from week to week what the show was able and when we reach the end of the season, we aren’t going to remember the show until the beginning of the next season. Books suffer the same problem. It can be months before the next book in the series comes out. I don’t think authors should plan to write a series. It does their readers a disservice. I read a book some time ago that was the f...

A nnabelle has been writing for a long as she can remember. From the moment she could hold a pen she was always scribbling something. Aunt Edna said she would be a writer and it was Edna who soothed her when she began to receive rejection letters from all of her favorite literary agents. “Persevere,” she said. “Persevere.” Persevere . Writers hear that word often. If you want to be published, you have to persevere , we are told. It sounds a lot like faith . If you want to be published, you have to have faith . We could also say, if you want to be published you have to believe . It turns out that, as writers use them, persevere , have faith and believe mean the same thing, but they don’t necessarily mean the same to each writer and they don’t necessarily mean what they should. Laura sees Billy with a fishing pole, casting his line into a swimming pool. “Whatcha doin’?” she asks. “I’m fishing,” he says. She peers into the water, seeing no fish. “You won’t catch anything.” He gives her...

It breaks my heart when I see some of the queries people use to reach my blog or website. The other day, someone found my blog using the query wwjd unhappy marriage . I know nothing of the person who typed this query, but in my mind I see a young mother sitting at the computer with a baby in her lap. Her husband is at work now, but last night he said something that upset her. She fired something back at him and he just laughed. So, today, she’s sitting there with her baby sucking on a bottle and she types wwjd unhappy marriage into a search engine. I hurt for her. Or maybe it’s a him. Either way, I feel for this person and I wonder if he found a good answer. I’m not sure that my blog provided the best answer, but shouldn’t a Christian author be able to answer the question, what would Jesus do in an unhappy marriage ? If we look at what Jesus said, we see in Matthew 19:6 that he said concerning a husband and wife, “Therefore they are no more two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath ...

A uthorities have reported that Air France Flight 447 has crashed in the ocean with 228 on board. Certainly, our hearts and prayers go out for the families of these people, especially since officials do not expect to find survivors In nearly every disaster, there is someone who was almost killed, but wasn’t. Within the AP article I saw the story of Bernardo Ciriaco who arrived at the airport in a panic because he didn’t know which of the two flights to Paris his brother, Gustavo, was on. A couple hours later, he received a call from Gustavo, telling him that he had arrived safely, but he would have been bumped to Flight 447 if he hadn’t complained. Anyone who has flown realizes that getting moved from one flight to another is just a normal part of doing business for the airlines. There was no way for the people on either flight to know that moving to the other would either save their lives or put them in danger. So, Bernardo may be saying that God protected his brother, but then we hea...

W hen I was a kid, we used to go to these meetings. At some of these meetings someone would ask people to tell about the time when they were saved—give a testimony. “I was in a cotton patch when I felt the Lord dealing with me,” one person might say. “Before I was saved, I played guitar in a bar, but when the Lord saved me, he saved my guitar too,” I remember another man saying. “The church was in revival services all week and I was under conviction. On that last day, I was afraid I wouldn’t live through the day. I was out in the watermelon patch and I told the Lord that if he’d let me live I’d give my heart to him that night,” another testimony goes. There were many more. Some of them were truly fascinating and all I could think about is that if someone asked me to give my testimony it would sound so unimportant compared to the others. I was eight years old when I accepted Christ. I wasn’t in a cotton patch, in the cow pasture or even at church. I had my own room, a tiny space that ha...

E very novel begins with the status quo . It sounds boring, doesn’t it? It had better not be or we’ll lose our readers. Actually, the status quo is just what your protagonist’s life is like before he reaches the crisis of the inciting incident . If your protagonist happens to be James Bond, the status quo might include blowing things up and kissing a few girls. In many romances, the status quo shows a woman who has it all together, running her own business, doing well for herself, certainly not in need of a man. Or does she? She goes home to her cat and cooks a microwave dinner. There are these little hints that her life isn’t what she would like for it to be or needs it to be. This part of the novel is where we define the problems that must be solved. She is coping, but for how much longer? There’s no way around it, the status quo is not good enough. Something has to change or we won’t have a story, but for argument, let’s suppose nothing changes. The status quo keeps going. Th...