Timothy's Thoughts

S eason 3, episode 9 of Alfred Hitchcock Presents is about a man who is about to be executed for a crime he didn’t commit. As his last request he asks for a typewriter (this is 1957 remember) and he types a letter to the editor. He was with a woman at the time of the murder. It seems he wants to get back at the district attorney because and perhaps this woman. To show that the district attorney is an idiot, this convict tells of three murders that he did commit but for which other people were blamed. He seals the letter up and sends it off. Ten minutes before execution time, the warden comes in with the chaplain and tells him that the woman has come forward to admit that she lied in court. He will be a free man. But no, he has sent out his letter and it is in the hands of a prison worker who will read it before it is sent out. I talked the other day about change. The best stories show change in the protagonist, but they also cause us to change. As I considered this story, I knew it ha...

C hip MacGregor says that he is looking for a book that will change him. That’s good, because I believe most good writers write with the intent that their books will change people. Books can change people in many ways, from giving people joy for a few hours to encouraging people to look at something in a way that they haven’t looked at it before. We tend to focus our attention on the entertainment value of a novel, but the thing that makes a novel memorable is in the way it changes us. Take Bridge to Terabithia for example. If it were just a story about two children creating an imaginary kingdom, it would be forgettable. As hard as it is to read, the thing that makes it memorable is that one of the children dies and the other has to deal with that. Killing off a primary character isn’t the only way we can change people with a story and unless you are Nick Sparks, you probably don’t want to do it in every book. But what we do want to do is consider how people will see the world after t...

T his is the tale of two search phrases. When I wrote Church Website Design , I chose a title that reflected the content of the book. My goal was to match the target audience of the book with a name that they are likely to use in searching for books about a topic that interests them. This is what publishers try to do with every non-fiction book title. It creates a win-win situation because I’m more likely to sell books and the potential readers are more likely to find a book that solves a problem they have. Now consider the second book, Searching for Mom . In that case, I chose a title that I hoped would convey the premise in that Sara uses the Internet to search for a mother. What I did not anticipate is that this is also a popular search phrase for a certain segment of Internet users. I felt I had done my due diligence by running it through Google and seeing what results I got. I went several pages deep and saw nothing to convince me that I shouldn’t use that title. It wasn’t until I...

L ast week, I attended the annual meeting of the Baptist Missionary Association of America (BMA) in Fort Smith, Arkansas. If you don’t know anything about the BMA, it is an association of churches that sends missionaries to many different nations around the world, broadcasts the gospel through radio broadcasts, publishes Sunday school material, facilitates conferences and a number of other things, but this post is about none of that. This post is about what happened outside of the meeting. My parents are members of another BMA church and have attended the annual meeting for as long as I can remember. We usually end up running around together during the week of the meeting. This time, as they were crossing southern Missouri on the way to the meeting, a turkey flew up in front of them and struck their windshield while they were traveling at 65 or 70 miles per hour. Now a wild turkey isn’t as big as the kind of turkey you might eat for Thanksgiving dinner, but he’s still a big bird. This...

A uthor intrusion is when the author inserts something into the text that the point of view (POV) character wouldn’t know. For example, we might have a POV character who is a young child, but the author might mentions something about the election that year. It is something the author, who knows everything, would know about, but the child probably wouldn’t. Generally, this is considered bad form, unless you are using an omniscient POV, which is also considered to be bad form these days. But the fact is that these things slip into our writing. We sometimes see author intrusion in books published by well known authors and as well as the manuscripts produced by wannabes. While the publishing industry usually highlights author intrusion, I can’t help but wonder if the frequency of it might tell us something. What I think it might tell us is that author intrusion doesn’t bother most people. As writers, we’re conditioned to think that author intrusion is bad. It gives us one more thing we can...

W hen I said I was struggling with my latest work in progress, I wasn’t kidding. I decided I needed to change the story one more time, so I went downtown to talk to Sara. It was supper time and Ellen’s café was noise, so I asked Sara to walk down the street with me. We left the restaurant and walked north along Main Street, going past the other restaurants and shops. There were several other people out for an evening stroll. I nodded at an elderly couple and thought I would wait till we got past them before I brought up the reason I needed to talk to Sara. She had already guessed. “You’re changing the plot again, aren’t you?” “Yeah,” I said as the white hair woman hobbled past me. “I got to thinking that having you help Kelly while you’re caterer isn’t that big of a change. And I’ve been giving the beginning some more thought. I got to thinking that the thing that would just kill you at the beginning is if you were on the outside of the movie production looking in with little means of ...

W e looked at what it costs for a publisher to publish a book, which turns out to be about $50,000, but what does it cost for the author to publish a book? Let’s not make this a comparison between traditional publishing and self-publishing. Let’s instead focus our attention on publishing via the traditional route. Going this route, the saying is that money should always flow toward the author and what I would like to look at is how much money should be flowing toward the author. Let’s say it takes the author four weeks to write the book and the author makes a wage of 22.5 dollars an hour. I realize that many people take longer than that, but Agatha Christie said a month was plenty of time to write a book and we don’t want to get greedy. That puts the labor cost of writing the novel at $3,600. You’re going to need an agent and we are told that to get an agent you will need to attend some conferences. Let’s send you off to a conference like ACFW. By the time you account for conference fe...

Karen opened the door of her crimson red Honda Civic GX NGV sedan and being careful not to damage her fingernails, freshly painted red with gold sparkles beneath two layers of a clear coat, she turned the key and brought the engine to life. O kay, enough of that. When you read a book, do you ever get the idea that an author is reading the description from a spec sheet as she writes? For lack of a better term, let’s call it description overkill . It happens when an author wants too much control of the scene. The result is that the book reads more like an engineering drawing than a story. It’s an easy mistake to make. We want the reader to see exactly the same seen as we see as we write. This is usually because what we see gives us some special feeling that we want the reader to have. But when you get down to it, it probably doesn’t matter if Karen drives a red Honda Civic or a blue Chevy Malibu. The reader isn’t going to remember, unless that detail is relevant to the story. Let’s suppo...

W hen I was reading a book the other day, I came to a chapter that began something like this: “Your hair looks different today,” Matt said. “No, it’s the same as it’s been for a long time,” lead said. “Maybe it’s something else,” he said. “So how’s that trouble you were telling me about the other day?” Lead and Matt spend several paragraphs discussing the main problem of the book. I’ve changed the character names and the dialog to protect the author and shorten the passage, but it was essentially what I wrote above. But before I go any farther, let me ask you a question. What is missing? It may be difficult for you to answer, since you don’t have the benefit of having read the rest of the book, but go ahead and make a guess. You don’t have to tell me if you are wrong. Having read the book, I had already met these characters. The lead I met on page one and Matt I met in a later chapter. But Matt is not a main character. I had forgotten about this guy, so when he is reintroduced into th...

W e’ve talked about the inciting incident before and you know that I say the inciting incident doesn’t happen on page one. But some people have this thing about saying that it does. So, I think what we need is another name for that thing that does happen on page one. When talking about beginnings, James Scott Bell mentioned that we begin with a “disturbance to the lead’s ordinary world.” Borrowing from his terminology, I would like to suggest that we simply call it the initial disturbance . The inciting incident is that thing that incites the lead to make a change in order to solve a problem that we’ve mentioned in the first act. The initial disturbance doesn’t incite change, it is just an irritation. In Cinderella , the inciting incident happens when she is prevented from attending the ball, but the initial disturbance is that her mother died. She doesn’t change who she is because her mother died, but after she is prevented from attending the ball she makes the transformation fr...

T he saga continues, I’m afraid. Another week has passed and I find it necessary to discuss the plot of my work in progress with my protagonist, Sara. She was with a customer when I arrived, but I told Carla why I was there and she seated me at a table in the back corner, poured me a cup of coffee and promised to tell Sara to come talk to me. I amused myself by looking at some old pictures of Ellen’s grandparents that were hanging on the wall back there. It was interesting to see how different the place looked when they first opened it. “What’s up?” Sara asked, arriving at the table as my coffee cup reached the halfway point. Let’s call it half empty—I’m in that kind of mood. “Sit down,” I said. “We need to talk about the story.” “Again? What are you planning to do to me now?” She sat across the table from me and rested her crossed arms on it. “This thing about you guys losing the contract just doesn’t seem to be working as well as I think it should. I could having story where you’...

I ’ll blame this on Chip MacGregor. I’m sure several people have said it before him, but someone mentioned that Chip MacGregor said that we sell fiction by talking about non-fiction themes. This works in whatever method you use to communicate, whether it is speaking at book clubs, on the radio or through a blog. Since most of the people who read this blog also have blogs, let’s focus our attention on blogging, looking at why and how it works. Why It Works By far, the book that has been the easiest for me to sell has been Church Website Design . The main reason for that is that when my target audience goes online to find the information they need they find my book. The title is one of the search phrases they might use when looking for a book on the subject. Essentially, I positioned the book in such a way that my target audience is looking for it, instead of me looking for them. We want to do something similar with fiction. With fiction, our target audience seems much more scattered. Wi...

I ’ll admit it, fantasy is one of my favorite genres. Send me off on horseback with a magic sword in my hand to fight some evil sorcerer. But one of the problems with fantasy and perhaps one of the reasons I’ve never completed a novel in this genre is that so much of it is based around pagan religion. This can really be an issue when we start talking about Christian fantasy . For the most part, the magic in fantasy isn’t real magic. Real magic involves religious practices in which a person prays to the dead or to spirits in order to enlist their help. Sadly, this practice exists in some Christian denominations. There’s often some set of magic words that are spoken in fantasy, but it isn’t made obvious that the magician is calling on some spirit to help him. In fact, if the words are in English, there usually isn’t a name mentioned at all and the rule seems to be that as long as it rhymes it will work as a magic spell. In pagan magic, the belief seems to be that as long as the person kn...

P ublishers try to dispel the myth that they books are successful because of the money they put into marketing by asking the question: If publishers had the power to make a book a bestseller, don’t you think they would do that with every book? While their point is valid, it is hardly so simple. It really comes down to one of those chicken or the egg questions. Is a book popular because the publisher convinces people they should buy it or does the publisher choose to invest in the book because they have the vision to see that people will like the book? To think that the only reason that latest book we’ve written isn’t selling like hotcakes is because a publisher hasn’t given it a chance is naïve. But it is just as naïve to think that publishers have some special vision that allows them to find the books that will sell well and the money they throw at some books is not the primary reason for their success. Just because we can’t throw money at all books and make them bestsellers doesn’t m...

W e all struggle with beginnings. Some people get better at it, but then you pick up a book by a bestselling author and the beginning just doesn’t grab you for some reason. So, we talk about hooks and throwing the reader into the middle of the action, but we also talk about setup and getting the reader to like the character. Sometimes, I think it would do us good to just practice writing beginnings. Don’t write another novel until we’ve written one hundred beginnings or something like that. How do we do all of that? How do we begin with action and still give the reader the proper setup? When we read discussions of how to begin, it is easy to get the idea that we should put the inciting incident on page one, so that something happens on page one that causes the protagonist to decide to do something. I’m going to give you a rule that we must never break. There are many writing rules out there that are just firm suggestions, but here is one that you should never break: Never put the inc...

F antasia has funny clocks. They aren’t so strange when you try to use them, but we can visit any time we wish. We can see things that haven’t happened yet and maybe never will, but it only works if you have licensed writer as your guide. With me being such a writer, I decided to move forward in time and explore a little, hoping to resolve this plotting issue I’ve been having with book five. I closed my eyes and when I opened them I found myself standing on Main Street, just outside of Ellen’s café. In front of me I saw what appeared to be a car wreck. A camera boom was positioned near it, but I saw no cameras or camera crew or anyone at all. I heard the door open behind me. It came to a stop so hard that the glass rattled. I turned around and saw Sara coming toward me. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you!” she said, pointing at me as she spoke. I could see the redness in her face. “Me?” I asked, putting my hand against my chest. Sara seemed to cool a couple of degrees. “You didn’t thi...

H ere’s an odd thing: 16,000 words into a manuscript, I decided I couldn’t do anything with the story without major changes, so I made the changes and only lost about 5,000 words. I put the manuscript aside and went back to the outline. Aside from the theme, the characters and the setting, I started from scratch. The original was about Sara helping a woman convince the father of her child to do the right thing. The revamped version is about Sara’s efforts to keep Ellen from losing a catering contract for the movie that is being filmed in the area. I then went back through the manuscript and deleted everything that didn’t fit. I still had over 10,000 words. I may still have to move some of those words around, because some of the problems to be solved in the new outline were not mentioned in the first 39 pages, but I don’t think I’ll lose many more words. Maybe no one else finds that interesting, but I find the commonality of these two stories very interesting. It seems to indicate that ...

I f you think Christians agree, you’re only fooling yourself. It’s hard to find complete agreement in one church, much less in an interdenominational gathering of people from different churches. Let me tie this back to the writing community. A Facebook friend recently posted, “Honored to assist in serving Palm Sunday communion to 350 writers and 75 authors/editors/agents in a beautiful redwood setting.” He was referring to the Mount Hermon Writers’ Conference. I won’t go into the details of my belief right now, but suffice it to say that I have problems with this on many levels. Someone once talked about Christian doctrine as being in concentric circles. At the core we have the things most Christians agree on, such as, the trinity, the virgin birth, the deity of Jesus Christ, the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures, the death, burial and resurrection of Christ and the return of Christ. Moving outward, we have things for which there is disagreement between denominations or associations...

P antser or Plotter? Some people write by the seat of their pants and some people spend time working out the plot before they begin writing. Most of the time my attitude is that whatever other writers want to do is find with me. If it works for you, go for it. But there are other times that I can’t help but think of the pantser, “What are you thinking?” because these two methods are not created equal. Recently, Rachelle Gardner has been looking at query letters, making comments and opening the floor to her readers for comments. What gets me about that and what is relevant to this post is that I read the query letter and I think “this would be better if the story was about [insert something here],” but then realize that off in the wings is this massive manuscript that the author is hoping to send to Rachelle. The author is going to be resistant to change. Suppose the author sends a query in which we see a statement like, “This is the story of a runway model living in Paris, France.” Now...

A m I called to write? How do I know if I’m called to write? Those are a couple of questions I’m going to try to help you answer today. We hear a lot of people talking about how they are called to write, but what does that mean? And what about you? Are you called to write? First, let’s define what we mean by the phrase called to write. There are all kinds of people who talk about their calling or someone else’s calling when they don’t have any idea what a calling is. Here, what we mean by a calling to write is that God has decided that he want you to write for him. It is similar to a calling to preach, though also very different. It is not a desire to write or the fact that you enjoy writing, as some people might think. When God calls someone to a ministry, whatever that ministry might be, that person may not enjoy doing what God has asked him to do. If it is a short-term thing, he may never reach the point that he enjoys it. With long-term callings, people tend to reach a point at w...

I watched Up for the first time the other day. Wow! Okay, so parts of it could have been better, but that setup… Wow! In a novel, we would call that section the prologue. It takes place in a different time with a different set of characters than the rest of the story and if some readers are true to form, they would skip over it, but all I can say is that I aspire to write a prologue like that. With hardly a word being spoken, the filmmakers paint us a picture of a couple who love each other very much. They live a long life together, but none of their dreams are realized. They dream of taking a trip to South America. They save their pennies, but life eats into their savings. They dream of having children, but the doctor tells them it isn’t possible. They keep dreaming, but the day comes that she dies. All that is left for the old man to do is to head off to the retirement community and wait to die too. By the time we reach the end of the prologue, we understand why the old man woul...

I f Sunday is the day Jesus rose, then today, Thursday, is the day he died. Many people will be celebrating his death tomorrow. I’m really not sure why that’s the case. Maybe it’s because it comes right before the weekend and it’s easier to get people to attend weekday church services if they don’t have to go to work or school the next day. I don’t suppose it really matters when people celebrate it. I usually don’t celebrate it at all. I never knew that Easter was such a big deal until I moved to Texas. For us, Easter was usually a few colored eggs and a sermon about Jesus dying and rising again. There was one year that we blew the yokes out of the eggs instead of hard boiling them. That was fun. But I digress. Whether you celebrate it or not, what Jesus did on that Thursday so many centuries ago is important. Whether you celebrate it on the right day or not, you can be sure that Jesus died on the right day. It isn’t a coincidence that Jesus died at the time of Passover. When the Lord...

L et’s talk about monsters. You might as well know that this post is related to yesterday’s post. You will recall that I mentioned that Brandilyn Collins is writing a Lyme disease book. She’s a suspense author, so there’s a couple of plots that are likely candidates for her book. She could do a Whydunit , but she’s already revealed the why and the who, so that’s out. The most likely candidate is the Monster in the House story. The basic plot is this: someone commits a sin, the result of which is a monster that is trapped within a confined space (a house) with our protagonist. I’ve got to admit that when I saw the press release my first thought was “ Arachnophobia with Ticks.” But I’ll give Brandilyn the benefit of the doubt and assume she is going to use ticks as her monster. I really don’t expect that the man she says lost his wife is going to break into the doctor’s house and dump Lyme infested ticks on his bed. Ticks don’t work well as a monster because they are small and relativ...