Posts

Showing posts from March, 2010

Things That Make You Say, “Oh, Brother”

A few days ago, Brandilyn Collins announced that she has signed with B&H Publishing. The first sentence of the press release announced that and then we fine the statement, “Her first book with B&H is the story Collins says she was ‘made to write’—a tense novel based on Lyme Disease and the stunning medical battles over its treatment. Brandilyn herself fought the illness seven years ago and well knows the fallout across the nation of the ‘Lyme Wars.’” First, let me say that I’m happy for Brandilyn getting this contract and I’m happy for B&H Publishing for signing another well known author. But as I sit here looking at that press release, realizing that press releases are always written with the most important information at the top, the only thing that comes to mind is “Oh, Brother, you really think people are going to read that?” And I’m a hair’s breath away from saying, “Good grief!” I’m sure that many of Brandilyn’s fans will read it, no matter what it is about, but thi...

I Hate Starting

I have a love/hate relationship with starting a new novel. I love doing the outline and writing the synopsis. That’s were all the truly memorable stuff happens. After a reader reads a book and someone asks him what the book is about, he is going to relay portions of they outline or synopsis. He won’t remember most of the details of conversations in the book. He may remember a few select scenes, but mostly he will remember the story at a high level. What I hate about starting a new novel is the low word count. When I turned off my computer and went to bed the other day, I had 1,600 words and I hadn’t yet completed chapter one. There’s a lot of words between now and the end. If you look at the outline and synopsis, what you see are some of the high points. Things like “woman doesn’t have much to say about why she is there, but Sara discovers that the girl is the daughter of someone involved with the movie.” Those twenty-six words could turn into 2,600 words by the time I flesh out the s...

Two Examples of How to Describe Beauty

A couple of years ago I wrote about How to Describe Beauty and basically said that the best thing to do is to not try to describe it. I still think there’s a lot of truth in that, but today I want to look at some examples, both from the Bible, one of not describing beauty and the other of a more direct approach. The first example comes from Genesis, the first book of the Bible. In Genesis 12:4 it says, “Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran.” Then in Genesis 12:11, 12 it says, “And it came to pass, when [Abram] had come near to enter into Egypt, that he said unto Sarai his wife, ‘Behold now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon. Therefore it shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see thee, they they shall say, “This is his wife”; and they will kill me, but they will save thee alive.’” Abraham and Sarah were ten years apart, so she was 65 at the time. I’ve seen some attractive women who are about 65, but Abraham tries this stunt again when ...

Blood and Destitute Strangers (No, that isn't the title.)

Image
L ast Friday I sat down with Sara and discussed my next book in that series. She was quit persuasive and through the magic of blogging, this week I am posting the first chapter of that book. Please feel free to leave any thoughts, good or bad, in the comment section, but keep in mind that this is the first draft and I haven’t edited it at all. The story for the novel is that Sara helps an out of work waitress find the evidence she needs to prove that David, the grandson of the owner of a movie studio, is the father of her child and to convince him to provide for his daughter. Chapter One Blood covered one side of the man’s face. No one could expect anyone with such a terrible wound to live for long if medical help didn’t arrive soon, but as Sara watched, he tore open a small packet of sweetener, dumped it in his coffee cup and stirred it with a spoon. He took a sip of his coffee and looked down at his watch. “Do you mind taking this to that man over there?” Sara heard Carla say fr...

What Would Jesus Do If His Baby Mama Left?

I occasionally check my stats to see how people are finding my blog or websites. In the case of this blog, I get several hits a month that are somehow related to the question “what would Jesus do?” I suppose I asked for it, since I posted about the question “ What would Jesus do in an unhappy marriage? ” At the time, I thought it was appropriate because it is related to the theme of For the Love of a Devil , but this month someone found this blog by typing in “what would jesus do if his baby mama left.” You know, I really appreciate what Charles M. Sheldon wrote in In His Steps and I’m glad that a few years ago people started asking “What would Jesus do?” even if they didn’t read the book, but good grief. What would Jesus do if his baby mama left? Nothing. The question doesn’t make sense. The fact is that Jesus wouldn’t be in that situation. In the little over thirty years that Jesus walked this earth, he never married. The only reference to his bride in the bible is a future referen...

A Wasted Effort

Image
T he picture above may not look like much, but it is my attempt at determining where each of the various elements of a three plot structure go. What I found interesting is that some of the structure elements seemed to line up and others seemed to be ofset. Plot A and C run together some at the beginning and the end. I think that is because Sara and Neal are both involved in these scenes. It makes scene that we would keep moving along our structure, as we move along. Plot B doesn't really get going until we get to about page 90. But plot C has a similar gap in comparison to Plot B. Near the middle, things seem to run together more for A and B. But keep in mind that we aren't necessarily talking about them having the same scenes here, just that the midpoints occur close together in time. Anyway, the process wasn't very helpful, so maybe the best thing to do at this point is to start writing these scenes for each plot, with priority given to the A plot and try to work the othe...

How Do We Show The B-Story?

O utlining a story is largely a problem of representation. When I outline, I begin with a generic structure and I fill in the gaps. In the end, what I have is a snapshot of the story and the beginnings of a synopsis. I focus on the A-Story because that is the most important part. That is where the primary action takes place. But in my latest outline I have a problem. Some of the subplots are rather healthy stories on their own. They tie back into the main plot, since part of what is happening in them is creating the antagonism for the A-story, but the outline for the A-story becomes very cluttered if we try to include much more than a reference to the subplots. What I have considered doing is outlining each plot separately, using the same generic structure. That isn’t hard to do, but it becomes a question of timing. In the novel , the various plots will all be taking place in and around each other, but how to tie the plot lines back together. In the ou...

Awareness is the Key

W hen it comes to selling books, the most important thing is reader awareness. We can talk about craft a lot and that is important, but the fact is that if the author has put in the effort and enjoys reading the book he has written (if he’s honest with himself) there are other people out there who will enjoy reading it as well. My books have been well received by those who have purchased them. That says nothing about the people who looked at them and decided they weren’t interested. So let’s say that every book, no matter how well or poorly written has an audience that will enjoy reading it. The question that publishers are forced to ask isn’t whether there are people who will enjoy the book but whether the cost of production plus the cost of making those people aware of the book is low enough that the income from book sales will cover the cost. But there’s no need for me to restate the obvious. One of the things I was better about doing when my first book came out was to compare what ...

Sara Doesn't Like My Story

Image
W ith me thinking more about Sara’s next book, I stopped by Ellen’s café. She wasn’t there. I found her by the river, watching a barge make its way downstream. She was sitting on the ground. I sat beside her. We sat like that for several minutes, neither of us saying a word, while the barge went past. Sara broke the silence. “I read your blog the other day—that post about what you’re going to do with the next book.” “I haven’t decided anything for sure,” I said. “I don’t like it.” “I didn’t expect you would,” I said. “If I had a better story, I would use it instead.” “It doesn’t fit with the other stories, you know.” She stared off at the distance bank on the Illinois side of the river. “How do you mean?” “You know,” she said. “All of the others were about someone trying to do something. My story was about me trying to get a mother. Then Neal was trying to become a Bible character. Then Mr. Mywell wanted to get Heather back. And all Martin wanted was for his family to be saved. No...

Review: DellArte Press

Image
E arlier I reviewed Thomas Nelson’s WestBow Press . My primary focus was on the quality of book an author using that service would get. I didn’t review either of the books for content and I don’t intend to, unless I read one of them and decide I like it. In which case, I’ll be happy to give the author a plug. Today, I want to do the same thing I did before, but I want to focus my attention on a couple of books published by Harlequin’s DellArte Press. I also want to identify differences between DellArte Press and WestBow Press. The books I purchased are Dargan’s Desire by Wendy Young and Half-Breed by Phylly Smith. You can’t tell by the picture, but these books are smaller than there WestBow Press brethren. The WestBow Press books are 6x9 and these are 5x8, but in this case I think the smaller size is a good thing. Half-Breed is only 107 pages and had 35 lines per page, with about 400 words per page. With about 42,000 words, it doesn’t even qualify as a novel. (And let me just say one...

E is For Erotic?

I ’ve paid very little attention to EPIC, but I saw that Brandilyn Collins was bragging on her friend Stuart Vaughn Stockton winning an award from them. I followed the link to their list of winners and what I saw was shocking. Out of twenty-nine books that won awards for writing, ten of them included the word erotic or erotica in the category title. It made me wonder if EPIC, which claims to support electronic publishing, believes the “e” in eBook is for erotic . 10 out of 29—that is more than a third of the categories. I thought one category was very fitting. The winner of the category Erotica—Sinful. I’ve never been real big on awards anyway. I figure organizations give awards primarily as a means to raise awareness of the organization. In this case, I didn’t see any names I recognized, which makes me question the creditability of the organization even more, but what particularly bothers me is that eBooks may become known as a haven for people who are out to peddle their pornograph...

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul, Literally

O n a blog I read the writer was talking about giving books away. He said that when he gives books to his church he asks them to make put the value of the books into the building fund in his name, then he reduces the amount of money he puts into the building fund by that amount. By doing that, he feels like he is avoiding the money changers in the temple issue, which caused Jesus to overturn their tables. It took me a little bit to figure out what he is doing. I even had to draw it out on paper, just to get it clear in my head. It works something like this: Let’s say the church has a library or a bookstore. The author gives the library some number of books. Let’s say they are worth $50. Rather than paying the author for the books, the librarian has the church treasurer transfer $50 from the library fund to the building fund. At this point, the building fund has an extra $50 and the library has broken even. Had the author not donated the books, he would have given $100 to the building f...

Creative Thought

C reativity is a fascinating thing. There’s a theory that says that if you put enough monkeys to work pounding on keyboards that one of them would eventually produce some great creative work, like one of Shakespeare’s plays or something. I very much doubt that. I tend to think that we would just have random garbage, though we might have the random garbage duplicated by many of them. But why worry about monkeys? If we wanted, we could put a bunch of computers to work generating every possible combination of words and given enough time, they would reproduce some great literary work. Having done that, we could then say that among the stuff they produced leading up to that event there are probably some fairly decent literary works that were produced that no human has written. We know they exist. The problem is that we don’t know which ones they are. We can thrust in our hand, pull out a manuscript and we will probably find nothing but garbage, a jumbled mess of words that don’t form senten...

Just Peachy

I ’ve been struggling with a plot. This is the most I’ve struggled with any plot. This isn’t writer’s block; I’ve got plenty of other plots floating around in my head. The thing that makes this different is that there are a significant number of restrictions on this story. They are all self-imposed, but it doesn’t matter where they come from, the fact is that they are there and that is making this process difficult. The basic constraints are these: The story must involve Sara, Kelly, David, Neal, Kelly’s mother and Kelly’s father. Sara must be the protagonist. The movie studio from And Thy House must be filming a movie on or near Main Street. At the end of the story, Kelly’s mother must have accepted Christ, Kelly’s father must be back in her life, and Sara must be in love, or so Sara tells me. Add to that the fact that I want everything to turn out well. But it has to be a good story. You’re probably starting to see the problem and just writing it out like this is helping me. I thin...

Questions and Answers

Image
I t's been a while since I visited with my characters, so last Saturday I went down to Ellen's Cafe with the intent of writing a blog post that answers some questions I received from a reader. It was sometime between when the breakfast rush had slowed and the dinner rush hadn't quite started when Sara came and sat across the table from me. I had what was left of my breakfast pushed off to one side. My laptop was in front of me with a streaming cup of coffee next to it. I had printed out the e-mail from my reader and it was lying on the table to my left. "What’s this?” Sara asked, picking up the e-mail and looking at it. I told her. "That’s kind of exciting,” she said. “Someone’s reading about me. Are you going to let me help you answer it?” "I already answered it. I’m just posting the answers to my blog.” I showed her the answers. She looked at the answers carefully before she said, “These aren’t any fun. You should write somet...

Review: WestBow Press

Image
T oday, I’m writing a book review unlike any I have written before. Actually, I’m going to I’m reviewing two books and I haven’t read either one. As you may recall, some time ago, Thomas Nelson announced that they were entering the vanity press market, using the imprint WestBow Press. The first books out of that arrangement are making their way down the pipeline, two of which you can see here. The first thing I noticed when they arrived was the size of the box. I arrived home and saw the box sitting on my front step. My first thought was that they had only shipped on of them. The box is the same sized box Amazon.com uses to ship individual copies of my novels. I opened it up and found both novels stacked neatly, one on top of the other. Both books have the dimensions 6” x 9”, a fairly standard size for non-traditionally published books. Publishing a book with that dimension simplifies the process when a book will be published both as a paperback and a hardback. One of the books is p...

From the Mailbag

A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail message from someone who had ordered one of my books, but had not yet read it. From that e-mail, I learned that this person was a student learning English who had a class requirement to read an English novel . After that, I received an e-mail asking several questions, which I happily answered. I also posted the answers . Today, I am posting the latest e-mail: Dear Timothy, I enjoyed reading and studying your book. I had learnt a lot of new English words and phrases during my reading. I loved all the characters in the novel they were easy to follow and down to earth. The character I like most is Sara’s father Mark Dawson. The way he treats, teachs and raises his daugther is admirable. He listens to her and always try to do his best. My favourite episode with him is when Mark and his daughther go out to the restaurant after visiting the bookshop and meets the waitress. He teaches Sara some important lessons that may help her in the fu...

Till The End Do We Part

D o you love your characters? Personally, I would be surprised if you said no, but just the other day I was reading a blog post by Tamela Hancock Murray in which she talked about an author who used what appears to be a type of ambulance chasing decision process. When vampires were popular, he started writing about vampires, though he didn’t care anything about vampires.  I’ve got mixed feelings about that. If we seriously want to call ourselves writers and not just authors, I think there comes a time when we have suck it up and write what people want to read, not just whatever it is that we prefer to read. But I also see her point about the problems of writing about it being difficult to write well when our heart isn’t in it. In part of her argument, she mentions that the author she is referring to hasn’t made it into publication. Though that may seem to settle the issue, it may not mean anything; there are many authors who write only what they personally want to read who are a...

It Doesn't Have to be One or the Other

O ne author says, “I write character based fiction,” another says, “I write plot based fiction.” To hear some people talk, you would think that there are some major philosophical differences here, but it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Any writer worth his salt is going to end up doing both and will probably end up doing both in the same novel. Continuing to draw upon The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as our example, Dorothy is clearly quite ordinary and she experiences fascinating things, making the book a plot based story, but a novel is a conglomeration of stories that are tightly woven together. As we look at some of the other characters and the stories surrounding them, we find that they are far from ordinary. Take the Tin Woodman for example. When Dorothy and the Scarecrow find him, he is able to do nothing but grown because he has rusted. There’s something inherently interesting about a man made entirely of tin and the plot of his story is about the most ordinary things. He has b...

What is Ordinary and What is Extraordinary

W hen I talked about Character Based fiction versus Plot Based fiction, I made the distinction between the two by saying character based fiction involves extraordinary characters in ordinary circumstances and plot based fiction involves ordinary characters in extraordinary circumstances. Allow me to clarify that, if I can. Depending on how you read that, you might be thinking that an extraordinary character is someone like Superman and an ordinary character is someone like Barney Fife. If that’s what you’re thinking, you’re thinking wrong. Barney Fife is also an extraordinary character who plays out a role in a story with ordinary circumstances. A better way to look at this is to say that every story needs something that connects with the readers and something that is a new experience for the readers. When we write the story, we will either connect with the reader through the characters or through the plot. The new experience will come from either the characters or the plot. When we ha...

More Character Based versus Plot Based

L ast time I talked about Character Based vs. Plot Based stories and after a lengthy post, about all I did was define what they are. Today, I would like to revisit the topic and discuss the topic Rachelle Gardner’s reader originally asked about, are there differences in how we should address sagging middles with character based versus plot based stories. To reiterate, a character based story is one in which extraordinary characters are thrust into the ordinary stuff the rest of us do every day. A plot based story is one in which ordinary characters who are like us are thrust into extraordinary circumstances. With character based stories, the conflict exists because the character isn’t prepared for the ordinary. In plot based stories, the conflict exists because the character isn’t prepared for the unusual stuff he faces. In plot based story The Wizard of Oz , Dorothy is on a mission to get home, but between her and home is some of the strangest stuff you ever saw. In charact...

Character Based vs. Plot Based Stories

N o doubt, you’ve heard of character based stories and plot based stories , but do you know the difference between a character based story and a plot based story ? I get the impression that there is some ambiguity about the subject among writers, as is evidenced by the comment made by one reader to Rachelle Gardner’s blog, asking for a discussion of plot-driven stories versus character-driven stories. I don’t know if Rachelle will eventually address the comment on her blog. If she does, she may disagree with me, but here are my thoughts on the subject. One way to look at the difference is that Character Based stories are about how interesting characters handle ordinary situations. Conversely, Plot Based stories are about how ordinary people handle extraordinary circumstances. That may seem simplistic, but it isn’t so far off. You may be wondering about stories involving interesting characters in extraordinary circumstances and ordinary people in ordinary situations. These stories alm...