Timothy's Thoughts

S ome time ago, Randy Alcorn posted a video about pornography. He likened giving a seventh grader unrestricted access to the Internet to buying a stack of pornographic magazines and storing them in his closet. In his comments he also talks about how men who have been looking at the airbrushed images they find in magazines will compare how their wives look to those images and their wives will never measure up. It got me to thinking about the books we write. Granted, a lot of romance books are mildly pornographic, but instead of thinking about that, consider the way we portray other things in our books. After reading our books, do people compare their own lives to the lives of our characters and regret that their lives don’t measure up? Consider the woman who reads a book about a couple. The man woos the woman with flowers and chocolates and by being attentive to her. The woman in the book returns the sentiment by cooking a nice meal, setting candles on the table. They talk late into the...

D isappointment comes from anticipating things that don’t happen. Events begin to take place and we anticipate what will happen next. A friend calls up, for example, saying that he’s going to be in town for a few days and would like to get together for a few hours. We look forward to that time, thinking about what we’ll do and the fun we’ll have. Then the day comes and we’re ready to go meet him, but we receive a phone call, “Sorry, I can’t make it, but something came up.” It hurts us when things like this happen. Things are rarely the way we imagine they will be. Sometimes they are worse, sometimes they are better, but if we aren’t careful disappointment will cloud our judgment of which is which. Because we are so disappointed that we didn’t get what we wanted, we fail to see that what we got is actually better. For the Christian who trusts in the Lord, we can have confidence that though disappointment may come all things will work out for our good. There are things that we want so mu...

W hat is a story? There are several different ways to look at a story. How we perceive a story helps us to set our goals when writing a story. One way to look at a story is as the actions of the villain as told by the lead . We often think of the story as being the lead’s story, but when we consider how much of the lead’s life we ignore we might question that. However, when we look at it as the villain’s story it begins to make sense. Look at the story of Cinderella for example. Her father is gone. It isn’t clear why. The storyteller may throw some reason in there, but it doesn’t really matter why he is gone and yet that would have been a very important event in Cinderella’s life. The reason we don’t put much emphasis on that event is because it has very little to do with the story we’re telling. Stories are about disturbances in the lead’s life, so that’s why it becomes the villain’s story as told by the lead. If we take all the stuff that villains do to a particular person and bind ...

J anet Reid writes concerning a query that had been sent her, “What would make me think I was wrong is if you mention you're a touring musician. The value of a writer's bio in a query letter is for just these moments. As I'm reading along, and I think, "oh this isn't how that stuff works" and then I see you're actually in that industry, I'd give you the benefit of the doubt.” ( Query 161 ) It’s usually pretty obvious when a writer has been in the industry he is writing about. One the good side, such a writer gets things right. You don’t have unbelievable things happening. On the other side, such a writer puts to much emphasis on things that aren’t important to the story. It is usually hard to read a medical story written by a medical doctor, for instance. The average reader probably doesn’t care about the details of a patient’s treatment and doesn’t care what kind of drug was used. All the reader cares to know is that the doctor either knows what he is...

W hat are the dangers of putting too much information about yourself online? I don’t mean unprotected credit card information and stuff like that; I mean stuff like what you might put on a networking site. I saw a novel the other day that dealt with this topic. Apparently, the victim had been involved with a networking site and the killer found her through that site. Now the victim’s sister is trying to bait the killer through the same site so that she can catch him. I think the risk here is in implying that by not participating in such a site people can protect themselves from would be killers and rapists. The fact is that the online community is just an extension of the public community in which we live. Unless we hide ourselves away like monks, we are putting ourselves at risk no matter what we do. There was a woman in our area who had taken her kids to the park and as she watched them playing a man came up behind her and stabbed her, paralyzing her. While he must have had a motive,...

C onsider this as a followup to my post on booksignings from the other day. I didn't do the video, but it seems realistic.

A song writer did a video to explain a song he had written. It was a product of him losing a friend to death. In the video he was talking as he looked through a notebook he used to write lyrics and he said that after seven years it was still hard to look at what he had written there. He teared up as he spoke and it was easy to see that these tears weren’t fake. It got me to thinking about art in general. He is a singer/songwriter, but there is carry over in all forms of art. The thing I thought about was that as artists, whether we be songwriters, or novelists or painters, our art should be a product of our strongest emotions. There are times when we’re just writing to be writing, maybe to pay the bills or to communicate, but our best writing comes from strong emotion. We should feel so strongly about the subject that we take it personal when someone disagrees with us. When someone asks us about it, we should be able to talk for several minutes, if not hours about the subject.

I keep saying that I’m not going to review any more books unless I really like them. I’m compromising today by reviewing Rooms by James L. Rubart because I mentioned it in a previous post, saying that I intended to read it to see if there was any truth to the reviews showing up on Amazon.com as a result of people who read the free version. In a word, this book is weird . It is about the owner of a software company who inherits a house on the beach. The house is modeled after the man’s heart. We later discover that the house is demon possessed, so perhaps that means the man is also demon possessed, but that isn’t made clear in the book. In any case, the more attached the man gets to his life at the house on the beach the more he loses of his previous life. People who were once a big part of his life become as if they had never met him. He has memories of these things, but they don’t. I might as well tell you that it’s a case of deus ex machina all over the place. I found the book par...

B ook signings are on of those things that authors are supposed to do. One of the notions is that by doing book signings an author will sell more books. I’m not sure where this notion came from, but the evidence doesn’t appear to support that. Stick an unknown author behind a table at a bookstore and he might sell one or two books that he wouldn’t have otherwise sold. Follow the advice of some people for the author to go around the store begging people to buy his book and he might sell more, but he probably won’t get many repeat customers. As a reader, I’ve attended a few book signings. Dan Quayle showed up on campus one time when I was in college. I paid for his book and stood in line with hundreds of other people waiting for him to sign their books. I then went and listened to him speak. I’ve also gone to book signings to support fellow authors. What I have never done is purchase a book by an author I didn’t know because the author was having a book signing. So let’s get one thing cl...

A s I was driving to work the other day I saw a city bus. The lights were on inside so I could see all of the seats. They were all empty. But there was the driver, following the route, not knowing whether there would be someone at the next stop or not. I wondered how he feels about that. Does he feel like he is wasting his time? Sure, he gets paid, but what’s the point? It made me thing of writers. Most writers have very few readers and it make you wonder what’s the point? There’s no money in it, so the bus driver has one up on us, but we keep on writing. I suppose we do that because we hope that it will turn into something great and sell a bunch of copies, just like the bus driver hopes that someone will get on the bus at the next stop. But see, the bus driver’s job isn’t to drive people from stop to stop as much as it is to provide the opportunity for people to ride the bus. If the driver quit because no one was on the bus then people wouldn’t be able to make the choice one day to le...

I n the Washington Post , Kathleen Parker states a strong opinion about the Christian doctrine that the only way to God is through Jesus Christ. She took aim at Franklin Graham who was jilted by the Obama administration for his belief that non-Christian religions such as Islam and Hinduism are evil because they pull people away from the truth. She sites statistics saying that 47% of Protestant pastor view Islam as “a very evil and very wicked religion.” I actually find that shocking. I expected it to be higher. Have we learned nothing from 9-11? She also sites a survey that shows that nearly two-thirds of evangelicals under 35 believe non-Christians can go to heaven, vs. 39% of those over 65. She also mentions a study in which it is revealed that our brains light up the same way when we pray, no matter to whom we pray. I have a few things to say about this. That’s a scary thought if two-thirds of young evangelicals believe that non-Christians can go to heaven. Why is that scary? Becau...

R ight there at the end of Paul’s discussion of the role women are to have in church is an interesting comment. You remember what 1 Timothy 2:12-15 says: But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived; but the woman, being deceived, was in the transgression. Notwithstanding, she shall be saved in childbearing if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobermindedness. Now, most of the discussion we see about this passage deals with the first part in which Paul makes the claim that we can know that woman are not to teach or have the leadership over men in the church because God created man first and then woman. He then gives an example of what happened with the role was reversed. The woman was deceived, but Adam followed her lead anyway, resulting in sin and death being brought upon all of us. But we see this statement saying that the woman will “be saved in childb...

R ose Fox asked an important question the other day. “Have you ever noticed how many protagonists are writers? ‘Write what you know’ can be taken too far.” Rachelle Gardner also asked a question about what writers give up for writing. I don’t think the two are unrelated. Many people give up a great many things so that they can “become a writer.” Writing becomes a lifestyle. I think this is the wrong approach. If what you want to do is write about writers or librarians or bookstore owners, by all means give up what you are doing and become a “professional” writer. But there are plenty of books about writers out there. A better approach is to keep doing what you’re doing and write about what you are doing. You may not think you have time to do that, but think about it. You don’t have to do research on something you are already doing. That’s why people write so much about being writers. They know how to do that. But when a writer wants to writer about stuff that’s happening away from the...

A co-worker was telling me his theory as to why God has blessed the United States. I should mention that my co-worker doesn’t have a Christian world view and is an Indian immigrant. Referring to the invention of the world, he said that the difference between the United States and other countries is that when other countries invent something they keep it, but he United States shares their inventions with the world. He mentioned, electricity, saying that its use was developed in the United States, but the whole world has benefited. He mentioned the computer and how one man discovered that one and zero are sufficient values for all the computing power we have, but the whole world has benefited from that discovery. He spoke of food, how the United States shares food with those in need in the rest of the world. My co-worker believes in Karma and came to that conclusion from that perspective. I think there is some truth in what my co-worker says, but coming from a Baptist background, I have...

O n an author blog the other day, the issue of low starred reviews for free Kindle books was mentioned. The idea behind free Kindle books is that readers will download the book, push the Amazon rank up and thus increase sales of the book by making it appear more popular. But the blog post mentions a problem with these people who have been reading these books writing flaming reviews when they discover that the book they are reading is a Christian book. Of particular interest its Jim Rubart’s Rooms which has received nearly as many one star reviews as it has five star reviews and significant discussion from readers who didn’t realize it was a Christian book until about 40% of the way through the book. There’s more than one way to look at this. One is that these people have no right to complain about something they received for free. In other words, Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. The problem I see with that is that we may be talking about a White Elephant rather than a gift hor...

I once heard of four old men living in a retirement community. They were all former police detectives and they spent their days reminiscing about how things used to be and discussing how the detectives of today didn’t know what they were doing. One day, they were discussing such things and they began to discuss how that it would be nice if they could pit themselves against the younger generation of detectives and prove that they were better. They discussed this for a while and decided that they would be quite the sight if they were to show up at a crime scene, one of them needing a walker. They were sure the police wouldn’t let them in and it would be hard to investigate from outside. They let it rest for a while, but then one of them suggested that the thing to do would be to bring the crime scene to them. They discussed how they could do this and decided that they only way it would work would be if one of them committed the crime. It took them a good deal of time to discuss the risk...

I saw a Facebook post the other day that struck me funny and I don’t mean laugh out loud funny (though most people who claim to laugh out loud really don’t) but funny in an odd sort of way. It wasn’t particularly interesting, but an author mentioned something she was doing to prepare for a class she was teaching on blogging. The thing that struck me funny was that here we are and pretty much all of us are blogging. If we aren’t it is because we don’t want to. There have been many people who have taught classes on blogging and there is a ton of information on the Internet about blogging. Do we really need another class on blogging? As I thought about it, I thought about all of the stuff that is out there, not just classes about blogging. Look at the classes they teach at writer’s conferences and I get the same feeling that I’ve seen this all before. Visit agents’ blogs and so much of what they say is the same stuff over and over. One agent may say it slightly different than another, bu...

P op quiz: Who was named best actor last year? Which coach won the Super Bowl two years ago? Who wrote the best selling novel five years ago? What is the name of your favorite teacher from high school? What is the name of your favorite author? What is the name of the person who led you to the Lord? Don’t bother giving me your answers. I asked the questions to make a point. So many of the things that we think are so important are so easily forgotten, but there are other things that we never forget. Recently, Rachelle Gardner wrote about making writing a lifestyle . The argument seems to be that if we expect to be successful at writing then we’re going to have to take this thing seriously. We might have to make some sacrifices that take us away from our families and out other obligations. What no one has been able to show me is that doing that is worth it. The saying goes that the wish of a dying man is never I wish I had spent more time at the office. I think you will find that dying a...

H ere’s one of the things that bothers me about Christianity today. Many people are preaching a doctrine of tolerance. Maybe we don’t agree with what others believe, but we’re told that the Christian thing to do is to tolerate their beliefs in the interest of fellowship. The saying is hate the sin but love the sinner and I agree with that, but so often it seems like people expect us to love the sinner by ignoring the sin. I recently read that Christian artist Jennifer Knapp has revealed that she is a lesbian in a relationship. What do we call that? A practicing lesbian? I’m not sure that’s the word we’re looking for. A few years ago Ray Bolz announced that he is gay, though he said he was not sexually active, in which case I wouldn’t consider him gay. But these announcements change Christianity. We look at some of the great songs that Ray Boltz is known for and we don’t want to think badly of Ray Boltz, no matter what he might do. How can a person who sang I Pledge Allegiance to the ...

E ver so often in writing circles, the question of foul language comes up. The argument for its use is usually something along the lines of truth in dialog. A former military man who has planted a bomb in a building and finds out it didn’t go off is going to have a few choice words to say. I understand that point of view, but I would like to argue that foul language is not only unnecessary in fiction but the removal of that crud language creates better stories. I’ve been watching the old Alfred Hitchcock Presents show from the 1950s. One of the things I’ve noticed is the excellent quality of many of the villains. Many of these villains are not unrefined people who would throw cuss words our carelessly, but they are people who give much thought to their choice of words as well as how they commit their crime. Like the politicians who sometimes get caught with an open mike, we know that these characters may not always speak so well, but they must keep the tongue in check. As the Bible te...