Timothy's Thoughts

G oing into the finale, things are not good. In the next 75 pages or so, that has to change. We’ve been going mostly downhill since the midpoint. At some point, we hit rock bottom and we’ve been there for a while. What that amounts to is that the reader is primed for something to happen. The hero has lost. The villain has the girl and there’s no hope. How do we give the reader the exciting ending he craves?   Step 1: Decide What to Do Coming into the finale, the hero is out of options. Everything he has tried has failed, so the first thing he has to do is to brainstorm a new plan. He may call upon his friends for help or he may develop this plan on his own, but he’s got to have a new plan. It has to be something different than he’s done before. Step 2: Put the New Plan into Action Our hero has something he can do now. He thought he had had exhausted all options, but there was one more and he is ready for action. It isn’t enough to have a plan. It may be dangerou...

W hen we write, it’s easy to get caught up in all this stuff about the emotions of the character and the details of the what he sees, hears, smells, tastes and feels. We don’t want flat writing. There’s a place for all of that, but we must not lose sight of the most important thing. What is the character doing? No story is about how a woman feels when she looks into her lover’s ice blue eyes or smells his cologne or feels his hardened biceps. No story is about the pain she feels when she remembers her former lover, presumed lost at sea, or whatever. I won’t say those don’t have a place in writing, but they are unimportant if we don’t do well in telling what the characters are doing. The place those things have in writing is that they explain why a character does what he does. A character places his hand on a pot and quickly pulls it away. Why? Very likely, because he is in pain. The pot may be very hot. But its his reaction to the heat that makes the story, not the pain he feel...

S ome people outline their novels before they begin. Others do not. Respectively, we can call these people plotters and pantsers . There are advantages in disadvantages to both approaches. I’ve tried both, but I’ve settled into being a plotter . I think the main reason for that is that I tend to be a big picture thinker and a top down approach guy. Some people like starting with the details and then seeing where they all fit. To each his own, I suppose. When I think of a story, I see it all as one picture, beginning, middle and end. I don’t have the details yet. I may not know much about the cast of characters, but I know how it begins, how it ends and how we get there. As I worked to a writeable story, I develop more and more details across the board. As the picture become more detailed, it becomes impossible to hold it all in my head. I have to record it in some way. That’s where the outline comes in. I start with a high level and work down to more detail. I love know where ...

T he final question from the 20 questions for leaders that Michael Smith of ClearView Baptist Church in Franklin, Tennessee asked Mike Hyatt is What are you doing to ensure you continue to grow and develop as a leader? I wish I could answer this by saying that I'm doing all of this great stuff. I wish I could say that I have this great mentor who is helping me become a better leader. I don't. I wish I had it all together as a leader. I don't. But you want to know what the really cool thing is? With all of my shortcomings and all the stuff I do that I shouldn't do or the stuff I don't do that I should, I see God molding me, shaping me to become something better. I figure that at the rate I'm going, I'll have this stuff all figured out about the time I close my eyes in death. But that's okay. I figure that's the whole point. When we get it figured out here and our faith grows strong, we move on to that home prepared for us on the other side. I don...

E ditor’s Note: For your readying pleasure, a scene from—well I’m not sure what it’s from, but I hope you enjoy it. It was dark in the cemetery as he began his work, but he had enough light to see without the aid of a flashlight. The full moon shined down on him from high in the sky. He planned it that way. He needed the light of the moon so a flashlight wouldn’t draw attention to him. The pole light over by the little church helped too. Mostly, it lit up the area around the big silver propane tank, but it helped. He heard the singing tires of a car on the highway. He crouched down and waited. The car slowed to round the curve. For an instance, the headlights swept the cemetery, making the shadows from the tombstones look like ghosts moving in the night. The car sped up and went on down the road. Ryan didn’t have time to worry about ghosts. The flowers had to go first, but that was easy. He pulled them off the small mound of dirt and set them off to one side. They had begun to wilt, b...

H ere’s what I’m supposed to want. I’m supposed to want an agent. I’m supposed to want a publishing contract. That’s the only way for an author to prove that he’s worth anything. It’s about validation. I’m convinced that I’m brilliant, but only a publishing contract will tell me whether I’m right or I’m delusional. That’s the story the publishing industry is pushing anyway. Everyone from publishers to agents to authors are pushing it. But what if I don’t want to buy into that? I don’t really want to make my living as a writer. I like my day job—not all the time, but I’m not anxious to give it up. The average “successful” author makes $31,000 a year. I make more than that. Then there’s those agents and publishers you have to mess with and there’s so much stuff you have to do just to get the $31,000. I’m not sure I want that. Writing as a hobby? That’s great. Writing for a little extra spending money? Excellent. Writing as a career? I’m not so sure. Then there’s Imposter Syndrome to co...

W hat if you could be a literary agent for a day? I don’t know about you, but here’s what I would do: First, the slush pile has got to go. If it’s paper, burn it! Or if you happen to be eco-conscious, shred it and turn it into compost. These days, with the Internet from shore to shore and around the globe, there’s no reason for anyone to be sending a 300+ page manuscript as a physical document. Any author who hasn’t figured that out, I’m sorry you wasted your money on postage, but take heart in knowing that your story is doing a great job helping my daisies grow better. Now that we’ve established that I won’t be accepting paper manuscripts, lets move on to the electronic slush pile. Anyone who sent a paper manuscript is welcome to resubmit to the electronic slush pile, but don’t be too hasty. I won’t be accepting e-mail submission either. I don’t need an inbox full of manuscripts either. Instead, I need everyone to resubmit their manuscripts through my new web based Manuscript Handling...

S tories are about doing the stuff you can't do. Think about it. Children love stories about fantastic creatures that don't exist--elves, dragons, wizards--actually, I like those too. But consider some of the adult stories. Secret agents, spys, police detectives, all tracking down villians who are far worse than the average criminal. Not all books are that way. Some touch on romance. These too fit the trend. The men in this books are not like the men their readers have married, but like they wish their men were. These men do great things and talk of love, while real men only do stuff like go to work to earn a living and come home so tired they can barely find their way to the couch before they pass out. So women escape into these books and imagine that their men did the wonderful things the men in the books can do. They imagine what it would be like to have the fairytale romance of the book instead of the romance of the guy snoozing on the couch or watching the game.   Ther...

M y trade is that of a software engineer. If you don’t know what that is, you might know it by another name, computer programmer. That may not tell you much either. We occasionally show up in fiction. Tron had a computer programmer who entered a computer and was able to speak to his programs. As much as I would love to do that, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. You may recall in Jurassic Park that the villain was a computer programmer. He was a little more true to life, but trust me, a real computer programmer wouldn’t have been able to write a million lines of code by himself. In real life, hundreds or even thousands of software engineers may work on a single product. You may think of software as programs that run on you computer and that is true, but these days there is computer code in almost every electrical device you can think of. Your microwave oven, for example, may have code that controls what it does when you press the buttons. Rather than wire the microwave a specific wa...

T he question today from the 20 questions for leaders that Michael Smith of ClearView Baptist Church in Franklin, Tennessee asked Mike Hyatt is What advice would you give someone going into a leadership position for the first time? Remember your place. In particular with ministers in a church, I would remind them that the Lord's people are like his sheep and leaders are only the undershepherds watching out for them. When someone hires you to watch his sheep, he is more concerned about the sheep than he is about you. We might also remember that the church is the Lord's Bride. I don't remember Dad getting upset about much of anything when I was growing up. O, I got my fair share of spankings, put I don't remember him being angry. But I do remember one time when I was a teenager that I said something I shouldn't have to Mom. I may have called her a name, but I don't think that was it. Dad and I were going to go somewhere. I remember having a conversation on th...

E ditor’s Note: No editor’s note this week. Thus far, I’ve stayed away from true genre fiction. I have an unpublished manuscript that could be classified a mystery, but that’s at a stretch. However, if I were to write genre fiction, which I believe I might in the near future, I would write in the mystery genre. As a child, I read the typical teen detective stories and eventually moved into Agatha Christie’s books. There was also Sherlock Holmes. On television, there has been Murder She Wrote , Diagnosis Murder , Columbo , Monk and who knows how many others that have influenced me. I’ve loved them all. There just can’t be too many good detective stories. The best detectives are always eccentric. Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, Jessica Fletcher, Mr. Monk, they are all eccentric. Not in the same way, but they were all eccentric and they had to be. They don’t face ordinary criminals that the guys down at CSI can catch. These criminals are often your super villain who is sma...

F acebook is an interesting place. It's the kind of place where you can know what your friends are thinking, even before they think it. There’s one particular fellow I have followed on Facebook and Twitter who often talks about his experiences with various companies and often he does so hoping that someone from that company will see his comment on rectify the problem. I suppose I got drawn into this concept somewhat, but every time I’ve tried that, I’ve felt guilty and have wondered how this fellow has felt comfortable doing that. I don’t know why it took so long to sink in, but doing this is essentially gossip. Yeah, we might think that we are motivating the company or person to “do the right thing,” but it still amounts to gossip. If we are going to talk about a bad customer service experience online, shouldn’t we first exhaust our opportunities to resolve the issue before telling others about it? It’s one thing to warn people about a company that is consistently bad or has a...

B oy meets girl. Boy courts girls. Boy and girl live happily ever after. It’s a standard sequence of events in a typical romance novel. Of course, it is usually dressed up a little, along the lines of: Super rich oil man meets poor school teacher. Super rich oil man takes poor school teacher on whirlwind tour of the world. Super rich oil man and poor school teacher live happily ever after. The direction of this story is clear in that we want to move the characters from sad and single to happy and married, but if we were to follow this outline, we would have a boring story. No one wants a story about someone getting everything he ever wanted. Let me amend that. I can think of one bestselling novel that is written exactly that way, but it is the exception rather than the rule. What we want is a story about overcoming adversity. The thrill of victory is proportional to the struggles we faced in getting there. But consider what happens if we rewrite that story as Super rich oil man and p...

W riters seem to have this plan that after they sell their book they’ll be able to walk into the boss’ office, lay their resignation on the table and walk out. The fact is that few writers are able to do that. I’ve heard that among full-time authors, the average annual income is $31,000. You could live off that, if you had to, but I don’t think that’s what most writers have in mind as they dream of their future success. There are other things to consider as well. If you are self-employed, you have to pay your own benefits. If you want health insurance, you will have to pay for it. Your retirement plan may also take a hit. Even if all your company does is match half your contributions to a 401k, quitting your day job and taking a pay cut will hurt your plans for retirement. I hear people complain about their day jobs a lot. It is part of our culture, but the fact is that most people like what they do. They may not enjoy it all the time, but there’s something they like about it or th...

W riting is hard, or so I’ve heard. It seems easy enough. You simply put pen to paper to fingers to keyboard and let your thoughts flow. It’s great when that happens. So what’s so hard about writing? For me, writing gets hard when I’m writing along and I realize, “this is boring.” When we write, we begin with a theory for the story. When the theory works, the story flows from the fingers. We write scene after scene and it keeps on going. When the theory fails, it is difficult to write. If we’ve diligently outlined our story, we know we need the scene, but it’s boring. The characters aren’t moving the story forward. They’re just sitting around waiting for something to happen, something to respond to or they’re talking about something that they’ve already discussed or no change is taking place. The conflict is minimal. It’s boring. What’s the Theory? The theory for a story is all those decisions we make before we begin that we think will present the story in the best way. One of the bigg...

S ocial networking, is the topic from the 20 questions for leaders that Michael Smith of ClearView Baptist Church in Franklin, Tennessee asked Mike Hyatt Can you explain the impact, if any, that social networking and Web 2.0 has made on your organization or you personally? I hear that Web 2.0 is dying as a term. It is probably just as well, but the stuff it is will remain for a long time. A few weeks ago, we had a student in our Sunday school class who was absent. When I got home, I sent her a simple little message on Facebook saying something like "Missed you in class." I encounter people on a daily basis on various blogs that I will probably never meet in person. I spend far more time with social networking than I probably should, but I have yet to see any significant change in our church because of it. E-mail has finally caught on. It seems like our committees are doing more work through e-mail these days than we are doing when we meet face to face. I know Robert'...

E ditor’s Note: This week, rather than give you a behind the scenes look at my books, I thought I’d give you a look at a little of my thought process as I write by telling you a story. Before I write page one and before I draw an outline, I often begin with a story concept that looks something like the one below. This particular story is unlike any of my books, but it is one I’ve enjoyed contemplating. Deep in the blackness of space, a cargo ship is underway toward a planet on the other side of the galaxy. On this trip, the ship is also a passenger ship of sorts. Few cargo ships make a such a long journey without taking on a few paying passengers along the way, but this ship is loaded with stasis pods—hundreds of them. Most are medical patients who have picked up a deadly decease on one planet or another. They have paid a great sum of money for the hope of a cure on a distant planet. A few are travelers who prefer traveling in stasis to spending months in space. Some of the pods bear ...

F orm letters are a fact of life. I suppose some people hate them. That seems to be the opinion of some literary agents anyway. They refuse to send a response of any kind. But me, I love form letters. No one expect busy people to respond to write a personal response to every piece of correspondence they receive. For that matter, most people don’t care if the response is personal, as long as they get a response. We know that some of the mail we send never gets past the secretary and the response is either a form letter or written by someone else.So maybe there isn’t much to love about that, but what I love about form letters is that occasionally one will come that is a little different. It is a reminder that we aren’t just another face in the crowd. The other day, I received an e-mail from a particular library saying that they would like to have copies of my books in their library and asking if I had copies I would be willing to donate. I gladly sent them a copy of each of my books....

O ne of my favorite flowers is the Dogtooth Violet. You might say that I prefer it to some other flowers, such as the African Violet and yet, I have an African Violet growing in my living room window, but no Dogtooth Violet anywhere. The important thing to note here is that our preferences don’t keep us from recognizing the beauty of something else. The other day, I mentioned 5 Favorite Plot Devices . These are things that when they appear in a book, I want to read the book. In response to that post, Michelle wrote, “There’s several of those that I actually avoid.” What I prefer, she doesn’t. Music is the same way. Some people might like Country, others might like Rock, and still others might like Classical or Jazz. I pretty much like any kind of music, as long as it isn’t Country or Southern Gospel. That is my preference; you don’t have to agree with me. It’s subjective and so are our preferences where books are concerned. You’ve heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder . But w...

W here should a book begin? I don’t mean the story. I mean the book. One of my pet peeves is that so many books are numbered incorrectly. Pick up a book and look at chapter one. What page is it on? Zondervan begins Frank Peretti’s The Oath on page 3. They begin Terry Blackstock’s Line of Duty on page 11. Kregel begins Miralee Ferrel’s The Other Daughter on page 9 and Maureen Lang’s Pieces of Silver on page 7. Oddly enough, some publishers get it right on one book but not on another. It’s like that don’t care. I will say, however, that some publishers do seem to get it right, allowing for the occasional mistake. I randomly looked at some of the books published by Thomas Nelson and they each began Chapter One on the proper page. Which page is that? Page one, of course. What many publishers are doing is that they numbering from the first page in the book, rather than the first page in the story. This makes the book look sloppy because by they time we include all of the front material,...

S peaker attributes tell the reader who is speaking. Some writers believe that readers often skip over the word said , seeing it briefly only to ignore it. Others try to avoid speaker attributes as much as possible. Some writers like to use speaker attributes to indicate how a person said something. Rather than just, “he said,” such an author might write, “he whispered” or “he shouted.” Some writers will extend this and write such things as “he laughed” or “he smiled” in their place, but some writers and editors will strike out these statements, saying that laughing is not a way of talking, so it should not be included as a speaker attribute. They would prefer, “he said as he laughed,” or something like that. The writers who would strike out speaker attributes all together would likely tell us that we should replace speaker attributes with an action beat . Instead of the following: "Fascinating," he said as he walked through the door. They would have us write: "Fasc...

N ow for the question from the 20 questions for leaders that Michael Smith of ClearView Baptist Church in Franklin, Tennessee asked Mike Hyatt that I should probably dread, but I shall rush in. Today's question is What is the one behavior or trait that you have seen derail more leaders’ careers? Adultery. That's not a trait, but it is certainly a behavior. I don't hold to the idea that people are born adulterers. Several (many?) years ago, just before my adolescent years, there was this pastor that I admired. He was working with a church that was small, but growing. They were meeting in a store front and working with college students. I remember us visiting their church frequently, primarily to give them support, I suppose. I was too young to know, but I thought him an elquent preacher. I remember one of his sermons, it was about David and Bathsheba. Looking back now, I can't help but wonder if it might have come from a guilty conscience, because he got involved wi...

E ditor’s Note: This week I’m interviewing a character who doesn’t exist yet. In other words, this character may change before he makes an appearance in a book. All the same, I sat down with this non-existant character at Ellen’s Café and we had a nice talk. Timothy Fish: David, it’s good to see you here. It sure beats me going out to California. David: Glad to stop by. I was going to be in town anyway. I understand that I may be spending a lot of time around her for a while. Timothy Fish: Yes, I heard that you guys are looking at filming a movie here. Is there a reason why you would pick here over some other location? David: We thought some of these old buildings would look great on camera. But the main reason is that when the boss says he wants you to film a movie in a certain location, you film a movie there. Timothy Fish: I take it you aren’t happy about filming here. David: I wouldn’t say that. I’m the one who suggested we consider it, but I didn’t expect us to just ignore the ot...

I decided to change one of my characters. I was afraid that she looked too much like a certain character on a television show and I didn’t care to mess with that, so I changed her story. But by changing her story, I changed that of her two best friends and another character. That caused me to change the plot of a book I plan to write in the future, but by changing the plot I wonder if it is worth writing. If it isn’t then I question whether I should introduce this character in my current WIP . If I take her out, then her story is all just back-story that won’t be going into the book and it doesn’t really matter if I change it or not. So here I sit, wondering which direction to take and it all seems to go around and around in circles.

W ith thousands to choose from, it’s hard to pick a plot device and call it a favorite, but today I want to talk about five plot devices that I have a hard time passing up. I won’t say that I read every story I find with these plot devices, but base your story around one of these and you’ll be a whole lot closer to convincing me to buy your book. Secret Identity You know these stories. There is Superman , Cinderella , spy stories, undercover cops and Hannah Montana . What can I say? These stories are everywhere. They even show up in the Bible. Abraham tried to pass his wife off as his sister. Tamar once played the part of a harlot to get pregnant by her father-in-law, Judah. There’s just something I find interesting about stories where people pretend to be people they are not and as popular as some of them are, I think other people must too. I figure it has something to do with the inherent conflict in the story. Premature Marriage When a couple get married before they fall in love, wh...

W hat happened to my backlog? As I write this, I have just realized that I am down to one regular blog post waiting for its scheduled time of publication. In the past, I’ve had so many that I wondered if some of the posts would ever see the light of day. It kept growing and growing, but as I look at it now, it is nearly gone.   It isn’t from a lack of ideas. Over the past several weeks, I have begun several posts that I discarded before I buttoned them up. Some I deleted, while others I saved as drafts, but they too will disappear in time. Somehow, all those post disappeared and I’m down to nothing. Check back tomorrow anyway. Yes, there will be a post. I don’t know what it will be, but there will be one and I promise it won’t be just a repost of something I already put out here. That isn’t my thing. I know a lot of people like doing that, but not me. Maybe Friday will come early this week and I’ll let one of my characters talk. I don’t know, but I’ll think of something. ...