Timothy's Thoughts

E ditor’s Note: Being a little pressed for time and having nothing else for Fiction Friday, I sat down with Sara to see where it would take me. Sara: Don’t stare at me like that. Timothy Fish: I didn’t realized I was staring. Sara: You’re just sitting over there running your finger around the top of your coffee cup, like you expect me to say something. Timothy Fish: That’s sort of the idea. Sara: Then what do you want me to say? Timothy Fish: I don’t know. I think I’m out of words. I was hoping you would say something. Sara: I can’t really say anything if you don’t say it first. Timothy Fish: True. Sara: Maybe I should start putting words in your mouth. Timothy Fish: That would never work. Sara: I bet it would. Here goes… Timothy Fish: Sara is the most wonderful person in the whole world. And she’s really pretty too. Sara: See? I told you it would work. Timothy Fish: I think that’s about enough of that. Say goodbye, Sara. Sara: Goodbye, Sara. Timothy Fish: Cute.

M aybe you haven’t noticed, but The Shack is still going strong, though its sales figures are finally beginning to drop. Yesterday, Albert Mohler posted about The Missing Art of Evangelical Discernment . His post is long, but the basic points I took from it are: The Shack was written for the purpose of promoting a particular brand of theology. That theology has long been known to be against biblical teaching. These idea have been creeping into evangelical thought for decades. The Shack has triggered the popularization of these liberal concepts even among mainstream evangelicals We need to reacquaint Christians with what the Bible really teaches. It doesn’t bother me so much that someone would write a book that includes what The Shack supporter Timothy Beal calls a “nonbiblical metaphorical model of God,” a “nonhierarchical” model of the Trinity and a “theology of universal salvation.” We’ve always had people supporting these idea in one form or another. Timothy Beal didn’t have to ...

Unfortunately the answer is not more agents. Having more agents would not increase the number of books being published or purchased by consumers. The unwelcome truth is we need more readers and fewer writers. (Rachelle Gardner, comment to her Jan 13, 2010 blog post) F ewer writers. Now there’s a thought. I still have this image in my head of Rachelle reading through her slush pile with a sniper riffle in hand. “There’s an author who shouldn’t be writing.” Bang! “That’ll take care of that.” But I know that’s not what she meant. We obscure authors would love for the publishing industry to function more like the image we have of it in our heads. We finish a manuscript, send it to a few agents and they all are anxious to represent us. One of them sends it off to a few publishers and it starts a bidding war. But that rarely happens. We finish a manuscript and we can hardly get an agent to give us the time of day. And don’t even think about sending it to a publisher. They fact is that eve...

A ny one who has been reading this blog long knows that I don’t do reviews often. You also know that I don’t like guest bloggers. And you also know that I’m trying to obey my better judgment and not write bad reviews. Today, I think I can manage that last one, but the other two go out the window. I’m going to write a review and of all things, it is going to be about a guest blog post. I don’t usually read guest posts, even when they appear on blogs that I read daily, such as Rachelle Gardner’s blog. If I do happen to read the post, I certainly don’t comment. That just encourages them. But the other day I saw a guest post on Rachelle’s blog and I read it—at least, enough to get the general idea—then I left a comment. Why? What is so special about this particular post that is different from most guest posts? The post is titled Would You Pay More For An Agent? and it is written by Chuck Sambuchino. The first thing we notice about this post is that it fits the general theme of Rachelle’s ...

I ’m writing non-fiction again. I estimate that I’m about 15% complete with the project. This project isn’t another computer book. I rather expected that I would write another one and that I would write it sooner than now, since my first book has done better than I ever expected. I haven’t been getting rich, but it has allowed me to claim a profit on my income taxes. The book I am writing is about plot devices. I suppose it is somewhat risking for me to write this book, but where there is no risk there is no reward. It’s a book that I would have liked to have read, if I had found one on the subject, but I haven’t found a book where the author covered the topic the way I have chosen to cover it. So, I’m excited about it. Much of it, I could have used it as fodder for this blog and some of it I think I have, but it would take at least six months for me to disseminate this information through blog posts and I think I would grow tired of having the blog follow that theme for so long. As th...

T his is a book review and to keep the federal government pencil pushers happy, I am writing this review of my own free will. I purchased the book with my own money and neither Tyndale nor C. J. Darlington paid me any money for my comments concerning this book. She didn't even buy me a cup of coffee. That being said, I'm going to try to keep to my previous commitment concerning book reviews and keep this review positive. Fortunately, that isn’t impossible with this book. First, let me say that this book is not what I expected. “Christy Williams never imagined that a stolen Hemingway first edition would leader her back to the sister she left fifteen years ago,” the back of the book says. “But when things begin to unravel, she finds herself on May’s doorstep, fearing for her life. After a bittersweet reunion, will the two discover that some hurts can’t be healed or is there a tie that’s thicker than blood?” After reading that, I expected that the story would begin with Chris...

T his is supposed to be Fiction Friday, but today we’ll call it Fat Friday instead, and there’s nothing fiction about it. Besides, I can’t afford to head off down to Ellen’s and smell all that good food. Fictional or not, I’m sure those visits are adding inches to my waistline. Why Fat Friday? You guessed it; I’m fat. Yeah, I know you can’t tell it from the picture, but as Richard Mabry noticed when I went to one of his book signings last year, I’ve put on a few pounds since the picture was taken. I haven’t changed the picture because I keep telling myself that I’ll get back down to that weight again. And I intend to, but the last couple of years haven’t been conducive to that and here I am trying to be a writer. That doesn’t help either. I spend my days sitting in front of a computer screen and I hardly get up. These days, I may be sitting there for twelve hours each day. Then I get up and go home, where I sit in front of another computer, trying to complete a book. The result, I’m ov...

L et consider personal reality , but before we consider that specifically, let me say that I believe in absolute truth . I believe in the God who created the Universe and I believe that he knows exactly how things really are, even though we may not see them the same way. So, please don’t construe what I have to say about personal reality to mean otherwise. Every character in a story has a unique personal reality . Take the recent earthquake in Haiti, for example. As I write this, I am looking at an Associated Press report online that says there estimates that 200,000 people have died, 1.5 million people are homeless and the U.S. military has begun dropping prepared meals and bottled water, though they were previously reluctant to make airdrops for fear that it would create fighting on the ground. Next to the article is an ad for NFL Total Access and an ad for a personal injury attorney. People are dying by the hundreds of thousands in Haiti, but back in the comfort of our climate cont...

W hat is the most important rule in writing? We hear about the rules all the time—show, don’t just tell; don’t use be verbs; don’t include backstory—but which rule is the most important? For the most part, the rules are nothing more than general rules of thumb. There are plenty of examples where writers have successfully violated each of the ones I listed above and there are times that we will violate them as well. But there is one rule that is an absolute; we must follow it no matter what. Some writers have attempted to violate it. I suppose all of us have violated it at some point, but none have done so successfully. And yet, if we handle this one rule well, the other rules either fall into place or they don’t matter quite as much. So, what is this all important rule? Every story must have conflict. It sounds simple enough, but the thing that kills a story more quickly than anything else is lack of conflict. Do you have a sagging middle? That is caused by lack of conflict. Are yo...

E very novel begins with a section of setup. It is within this section that the author establishes the problem that must be solved. Perhaps the protagonist is down on his luck or he is lonely or whatever. In any case, we establish this in the setup section, which occurs before the inciting incident. Often, the reader knows what is going to happen after this section because we told him on the back cover, but we can’t leave it out or the story will be incomplete. The setup section is also where we establish who the characters are. Once we move into the later sections, the characters will be in flux and we won’t have the opportunity to show them as they were. But how do we show our characters in such a way that we show them as multi-dimensional people without boring our readers. Most people have three aspects of their lives that reveal most of what they are like—work, home and play (or free time). People act differently at work than they do at home and differently at home than they do at ...

W e talk about the inciting incident . That is the moment in a story when an event causes an emotional response within a protagonist whereby he decides to leap into action. He leaves the status quo behind and moves into a new stage of his life. But let’s get real. It doesn’t always happen in real life that a person will leap into action after experiencing a traumatic event. Oh, we see some cases where national campaigns have started because something bad happened to a child and her parents don’t want to see it happen to anyone else’s children, but not all people react the same way and not all events are big enough convince these people to take action. In terms of our writing, we may encounter this with our characters. Something happens, but the character is either too stubborn to leap into action or the event just isn’t big enough to call for action. What we could do is to pick a less stubborn protagonist, or we could make the inciting incident even bigger. Instead of the criminal ste...

N o editor’s note today. You have just me and no one else because today I want to talk about my work in progress. In particular, I want to talk about the main character, Silvia Song. Silvia Song is a television reporter. She wants to be like her older sister, Brianna, who is an investigative reporter and a real go-getter. You’ve met her before. But Silvia isn’t an investigative reporter. Instead, she is an entertainment reporter and she isn’t very good at that. She see’s a criminal mind in every celebrity she interviews and if she isn’t more careful, she is going to get herself and her television station into a lawsuit for some of the things she has accused people of. She has been investigating one celebrity and thinks she has a witness lined up, but the witness turns out to be of no value. What Silvia wants is to get away from entertainment reporting all together.

W hat is our responsibility as writers and to whom are we responsible? The other day, I fellow writer posted a letter she received from a dissatisfied reader. She also posted her response and asked for comments. Within those comments, a question was raised about an author’s responsibility to a reader. If you read the post, you know that the author attempted to be gracious in her reply, even though the reader accused her of “defiling her daughter.” As writers, we’re going to offend some people and some of them are going to write us letters. They make rack us over the coals for something we said that they dislike. What we must be prepared to address answer is what our responsibility is in these situations and why. The Basis of Responsibility Before we can determine what the writer’s responsibility is, we must first determine the basis of that responsibility. Perhaps we could say that the writer has a responsibility to the readers because they purchased the book. (At least we hope they ha...

A couple of my friends are having marital problems. I’ll call them Dick and Jane, rather than use their real names. There’s nothing unusual about a couple having marital problems. It happens. What’s unusual about this situation is that it has been playing itself out on Facebook. A few weeks ago, Jane wrote “Some people you think you know let you down.” It wasn’t immediately obvious that she was talking about Dick, but after she wrote about a child crying herself to sleep and there were comments from some of her closer friends, it became much more obvious. There were a few similar posts from Jane over the next few weeks and then there was this simply message, “Jane is now single.” In the context of the other posts, those words were so weighted, so heavy it seemed they might drop from the screen. Weeks passed and there was yet another message, “Dick is now friends with Jane.” And you wonder. Is he really? Are they going to get back together? We can only hope. It’s the kind of story I mi...

M ark this one down in the you’ve got to be kidding me category. Thomas Nelson has announced that they are rebranding Book Review Bloggers as BookSneeze. I know Mike Hyatt is a fan of Seth Godin and all of that, but this takes the cake. The name doesn’t fit the image I have of Thomas Nelson. When I think of Thomas Nelson, I think of a old respectable company. I think of Bibles. I think of quality. What I don’t think of is snot coming out of my nose—until now. I joined Book Review Bloggers and review a few books through that program. I have one book that I haven’t had time to review. I was thinking of rushing through it and writing a review, but with the name change, I might just forget it. (Thomas Nelson, you can have the book back, if you want it. I would just as soon never say that I am reviewing a book through the BookSneeze program.) 

N ovelists aren’t writing a screenplay. Perhaps we have overlooked some of the subtleties of that statement. I’ve read a few books on writing screenplays and the storyboard is king. I’ve tried storyboarding a novel and while it works to some extent, I have found it easier to use mind mapping software to generate an outline. However, if I were to write a screenplay, I could see myself going the other way. I might use the mind mapping software, but I might then want to move it over to a storyboard. While a story is a story is a story, we must conclude that there are some differences in novel writing from writing screenplays. We talk about scenes in novels, but I think this may be the heart of the differences between a novel and a screenplay. In a screenplay, you have to have a scene. The scene defines who the players will be, the shooting location, the lighting requirements and a number of other things. There are some tricks in filmmaking that may require more than one location for a sce...

B elow are four name. As you read each one, if you recognize the name and know something about them, clap your hands. Chip MacGregor Rachelle Gardner Steve Laube Terry Burns Okay, so now that you feel silly for clapping while reading a blog, raise your hand if you can answer this question: who are their clients? Yeah, that’s what I thought. And you back there, get your hand down. It’s no fair looking it up on their websites. But while you’re there, take a look at how many followers the four literary agents I mentioned have and compare that to how many their clients have. Or forget their clients and compare their blog readership to that of the well known authors. Some best selling authors have less than 200 people following their blogs. Some literary agents have over 1,500 people following their blogs. Perhaps this isn’t the problem that it appears to be, but it doesn’t seem like a good thing when the literary agent is better known than the authors he represents. To be successful write...

E ditor’s Note: I figure any day I get to spend time with Sara is a good day. This week, I sat down and talked to Sara about a subject that came to light in the recent discussion of New Year’s resolutions. Timothy Fish: Sara, I’ve started writing another book, but I’ve still got book five in your series floating around in the back of my mind. We’ll see how everything goes, but I’m thinking that I might write it sometime this year. Sara: That’s great. What’s it going to be about? Timothy Fish: You know how in And Thy House Kelly got involved in the movie industry, a little. I’m thinking that I’ll expand on that. Sara: So, I won’t be in this one? Timothy Fish: Actually, I was thinking of making you the protagonist. It would sort of bring the series full circle. Sara: That would be okay, as long as you promise a happy ending, but what would you have me doing? I’m not an actor. Timothy Fish: That’s part of what I wanted to talk to you about. This concept came up about setting resoluti...

P erhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but I typically write while sitting at the dining room table. I have an office, which I used to write my first couple of books and I have an old desk that I think I might fix up and place in there. The chair in there is much more comfortable than the chairs in the dining room, but it seems like when I’m back there that I lose a connection with the world. There is a window, but all I can see from there is my neighbor’s house. I can see the television from the dining room and sometimes I turn it on just to break up the quiet. If I could have my preferred writing environment, I would choose a big room, with a wall of windows, overlooking a valley. The windows would be to the south, so the sun would shine in all day long. There would be voices in the background, but not near enough that I would be drawn into the conversation. In a pinch, I suppose I might go down to Ellen’s café. It faces east instead of south, but with its large windows, high ceilings and ...

I magine are living in the days of kings and knights. Perhaps you are a wealthy land owner—a king, perhaps. The sun has set and you are in the great room with your family and a few guests. The room is dimly lit and warmed by a fire in the fireplace. Someone is playing a stringed instrument, but there is little else to do. You might play a game of some kind, but you are considering going off to bed. The sun will rise much sooner that way. Then there is a knock at the door. One of the servants opens the door and appears a few moments later with a man behind him. The servant announces that the man is a traveler who is looking for a place to spend the night. “By all means,” you say, “and do tell us of your journeys.” After eating the leftovers from the meal you had earlier, the traveler begins his tale. He tells of journeying through the lands of another king, twenty miles to your east. He tells you of what he saw when he was there. You are glad to hear news of this land, as you do not of...

W riting a book gets easier as you go along. The hard part is getting started. I recently finished a book and as I neared the end, I couldn't keep myself away. I recently started writing another book and I haven't gotten past the first three thousand words. Christmas and work didn't help, but neither did spending last weekend doing all kinds of stuff other than writing. There are plenty of other things on the horizon that will keep me from writing as well. I think, perhaps, that it is good to take a break from writing, from time to time. I don’t know about for everyone else, but I have to find my focus when I am writing a book. So, maybe the best thing is for a writer to give himself some time to be a normal person for a while—read a book, watch some television, spend some time with another hobby—then at a more appropriate time, take up writing again and go at it full force. Question: What do you think? Do you take a break between writing projects? What do you do to...

A mazon.com is a fascinating place to visit. To be quite honest, I spend too much money there—enough that my Prime membership has paid for itself. But its a great place, even if you don’t spend a dime. For the author, it contains a lot of useful information. The first thing we notice is that it gives us a relative index of how popular particular books are. If you are looking for the most accurate and most up to date bestseller list, Amazon.com has it and you can filter it down to pretty much any category you would want. Another thing Amazon.com is useful for is as a means to look at product descriptions. You can walk through Barnes and Noble, pull some books off the shelf and read the backs, but it is much easier to do it on Amazon.com. Besides, Amazon.com has several times the selection of Barnes and Noble. If you are writing non-fiction, Amazon.com makes it fairly easy to find similar books to the one you are writing. With that information, you can then tell any agent you quer...

E ditor’s Note: Today’s post isn’t so much of a story as it is a character sketch. I hope you enjoy it. It was one of those afternoons when there weren’t enough customers to keep the workers as Ellen’s café busy when Sara walked out the front door, made a left and walked down the street. Most of the shops were as deserted as Ellen’s café. A few customers browsed the wares, but many of the shopkeepers sat inside reading books or stood staring out the windows, hoping for any sign that someone would open the door and step inside. And it was little wonder that there were so few people shopping. On top of it being in the middle of the week, the mercury hovered just below eighteen degrees, even with the sun shining brightly and trying its hardest to push it a little higher. A gust of wind hit Sara in the face and she pulled her coat a little tighter. She came to a shop, opened the door and stepped inside. There were three other people inside. One was the owner. The other two were a ...