Timothy's Thoughts

E lectricity is a fascinating thing. You can cook a hotdog by plugging it into a wall socket, but a bird can sit on a high voltage line and not be harmed. Using a curling iron in the bathtub could kill you, but lightning strikes the ocean all the time with no harm to the sea life. Electricity works when there is a difference in voltage and a path that the current can follow. Okay, other than to say that some writers need to take a physics class before they kill off any more characters with electricity, I am going somewhere writing related with this. Stories, are about relationships and a means by which those relationships can be revealed. Let’s say we have two characters, A and B. For the sake of this discussion, let’s say A is like the ground and has a voltage of zero (an arbitrary value). A is a normal average citizen, but B is a high voltage guy. He is a drug dealer and a murderer. As long as A stays in his part of town and B stays in his part of town, there’s no story because they...

I heard the other day that a lot of people are dropping out of mega-churches and are attending house churches as their only place of worship. A house church is a church that meets in someone’s home and has less than twelve or so members. I’ve got no problem with churches like that. I grew up in a church about that size. The highest attendance I ever saw was twenty-five, but we had a church building to meet in. I’ve known of several mission points that were started by meeting in someone’s home. Some say they are returning to the way the early church worshiped by having house churches. Personally, I think that’s hogwash. There’s evidence in the Bible of big churches, little churches and everything in between. If you feel more comfortable in a tiny church, by all means attend a tiny church, but don’t try to say that makes you closer to God. Another justification for these house churches is that people see it as a way of shaking off the tyranny of the larger churches, requiring them to p...

M otivation is one of those things that seems to come to me naturally when I write. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the need for a character to be have motivation. When a character does something I just naturally ask why he would do it. This works for me, but I’m not beyond making mistakes. The other day I found myself in a position of having about twenty pages that I could fill with things related to the subplots of my novel. The story is told from Sara’s point of view, so I decided I would have a particular character talk to Sara. The easiest way to introduce conflict into the scene was to have the character complain about her food and that’s the way I wrote it. At this point, the reader knows who the character is, but they know little else. If they knew her, they would know she actually a better person then her husband, but I don’t want the reader to know that yet. The problem is that because she is a good person she wouldn’t complain without cause and yet she has nothing...

T he very first thing a reader wants to know is why the things that are happening are happening. Don’t tell him. In fact, anything the reader wants we shouldn’t give it to him. Make him work for it. The villain hurts our hero and the reader wants the hero to strike back, don’t do it. The reader wants to know why the door is open. Don’t tell him. The reader wants to know why the characters react the way they do. Don’t tell him. Okay, eventually you have to tell him something, but the longer you make him wait the more he will have to read to figure it out. When you do tell him what’s going on, tell him in such a way that the answer raises more questions. Why is the door open? Because the killer left it open. Who is the killer? Someone who feared the victim. Why would someone fear the victim? And it goes on.

W e often talk about stories in terms of a three act structure. We usually break the second act into two halves, divided at the midpoint of our story. If we’re trying to develop the outline of a story, whether it is before we write or afterward, one way to start is to hang the story off of the three act structure. The first act is a picture of the way things are before the lead begins to change. In this act, the lead is going through a slow death. For our example today, let’s look at the story of Hosea. The first act of this story is that Hosea is commanded by God to marry a whore. Hosea does as he is commanded and marries Gomer. Gomer stays with him for a while, but she isn’t happy with the situation. She has children but it appears that at least one of the children isn’t Hosea’s. She moves out of the house and chooses to spend her time with other men. Act two is like the act one turned on its head. The lead of the story chooses to do something that brings him out of the slow dead of ...

W hen someone does something right I like to point it out. Take a look at the book videos below. They both answer a very important question, “Why do I need this book?” The big problem I’ve seen with book videos is that most don’t answer that question. Yeah, I know it’s harder with fiction than non-fiction, but these guys are doing something right. While we’re on the subject, why is it that it is so hard to create videos for fiction while it is easier for non-fiction? If you watched the first video you can see that one of the reasons people will want to read Rework . Meetings to plan planning meetings can’t be a good thing and if these guys can say anything that will help keep this from happening then it is well worth reading. But what about fiction? How do we make fiction well worth reading? Fiction is written for entertainment, but it is similar to non-fiction in some ways. I’ve never read it, but I’ve heard that Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code reads like a documentary. More than for e...

A few days ago, Rachelle Gardner raised the topic of what writers have to pay for rather than the publisher. One of the things is permissions to use various copyrighted materials. In the comment section, the topic moved from what writers pay for to a discussion of copyright and fair use . Visit the Stanford University website if you want a well written discussion of fair use . What I want to do is to make some general observations as a writer and not as a legal expert. We may be tempted to think that fair use has to do with things like how much of something we copy, such as a percentage of the whole, or how much money we make from selling the work we copy. I’ve seen several people make this mistake. In actual fact, U.S. copyright law is not very clear on what is and is not fair use . There’s a reason for it not being clear. The principle of fair use is deeply rooted in the principle of freedom of speech . We need the principle of fair use because when we comment, criticize or parod...

I ’ve never read Playboy , but I’ve heard that they’ve got great articles. I’ve never eaten at Hooters, but I understand that they’ve got great wings. Do you notice what those two statements have in common? There is an obvious reason why many of the customers purchase the magazine or visit the bar, but there is also a justifiable reason for them to do so. No one would fault someone for reading a magazine with great articles or for visiting a restaurant with great food. When we do something, there’s often a real reason why we do something and the reason we’re willing to talk about. For example, we buy a car because we want a new toy, but we tell our friends how the old one was falling apart and how much better gas mileage we’re getting. We seldom say, “I bought it because I wanted it.” As writers, we’re trying sell the idea of a book to agents, editors and eventually readers. As we write our manuscripts we want to create two things, an emotional desire for the story and a logical reason...

H istory is an interesting thing that is often flavored by our point of view. One of Tamela Hancock Murray’s clients, Deborah Kinnard, recently wrote about why she sets her stories in medieval times. One of the things she says is that “Medieval Europeans took for granted that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. These weren’t matters for discussion or question—they simply were. Faith informed people’s lives, and if they questioned, they did so privately.” No doubt, that may provide for an interesting framework for a story, but many would say that it is an unrealistic portrayal of the time period. You will recall that the medieval period began a little more than a hundred years after Constantine unified many of the churches in to the Catholic Church. It began as the Roman Empire ended. In the vacuum left by the decline of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church was the strongest political and cultural influence of the time. The result is that much of what we know of the time was...

I n an interview, the late Blake Snyder was talking about Superhero stories—James Bond, etc.—and he said a few interesting things. He said that the superhero is the character is the one offered something, but he knows the problems of accepting it, so he refuses. A superhero warrior might be encouraged to become the king, but refuses to go home to be with his family because he’s seen the problems that come with that position. I can’t help but thing of Jesus Christ. Satan offered him the world. People crowded around him and wanted him to rule over them, but he knew he had something better. The superhero knows the risks and challenges of being special and takes it seriously. Blake also mentioned that while the nemesis wants to bring the power of the world to himself and it destroys him. Some of these characters exert so much effort into their plan that they bleed. I suppose it isn’t that much different from people who seek fame and fortune. Their quest for fame is so hard on them that ma...

O n Sunday I was reminded of how all good storytelling follows the same known structures when my pastor talked about the story of Legion in three acts. I’m going to expound upon that somewhat. As storytellers, we know that in the three act story we have three acts with the second act split in two. The first act is the status quo world, but it is a world that has problems that need solving. The second act is an upside down version of the first world. In the first part of the second act, the protagonist has taken action to move out of the problem world to this new world. In the second half of the second act, the villains appear to have success again. Thing in the third act we create a world where the problems are resolved. You can think of this a down-up-down-up in terms of how the protagonist feels about it. Of course, in a tragedy, we could have an up-down-up-down situation. But let’s look at how Legion’s story fits. Act One: Demon possession The story occurs in more than one place in...

S ometimes in our stories we reach a point where we’ve discovered something that appears to allow us to move into the next act, but should we move into the next act now? Should we have already moved into the act? Should we wait? This is why it is so important to know the structure of the story and how many pages deep into the story each should occur. I won’t go into how to know which pages each structure element occurs on because the answer isn’t must be determined by the study of various successful stories and I don’t wish to bore you with details. However, there is one structural element that has both a known and an obvious location. It will serve well as our example. The midpoint of a story is a structural element that occurs in the middle of the book and in the middle of the second act of a three act story. It is either a false success or a false failure. In my WIP, the midpoint is a false success because it is at this point that Sara finds a person she is looking for. We will find...

C hapter breaks are a lot more important than you might realize. The reader likes to have a chapter break so he can put the book down and go do something else for a while. That may be why some authors have taken to leaving chapter breaks out completely. Personally, I think that’s rather arrogant. Sure, we want readers to say that they never put the book down, but that isn’t really the best measure of a good book. Some of the best books are so thought provoking that the reader takes weeks to read the book, letting each point sink in before moving on. I don’t write books like that, but some people do. But chapter breaks are more important than just allowing the reader a place to put a bookmark before going to fix supper. In my current work in progress, one of the characters is a mysterious little child whose mother has died. His mother is unknown to the other characters and the boy is unable to tell them enough for them to figure out who she is. Besides that, the boy has taken to speakin...

O ne of the problems we writers face is that we have trouble determining if our writing is good or not. We want to believe it is, so our judgment is biased. Agents and publishers are no help because they don’t have time to critique our work. Friends and family are no help because they want to encourage us (or discourage us) and what they say may not be accurate. Critique groups aren’t much help either because there’s a tendency to either say another author’s work is good so that the author will feel good about the critic or to slam it so the critic’s own work looks better in comparison. Here’s something you can do to get past these problems. Write a passage and forget that you did it. I mean that literally. Mix that passage in with similar length passages from other writers, but good and bad. After you’ve had sufficient time to forget what you wrote, go back and pick the passages that you think are well written and those that aren’t. Once you’ve done that, look at how well you rated th...

S cientific studies concerning the results of prayer are mixed. Some studies seem to show that it helps while others seem to indicate that it could actually have the opposite effect. Most of these studies have been done concerning the healing of sick patients. The purpose of one study I saw was to determine if prayer could be used as an effective treatment to speed the recovery time from surgery. The result was that the people who knew they were being prayed for had somewhat longer recovery times. So maybe prayer doesn’t work. That’s what that study seems to tell us. But to be honest, I’m not really surprised, given the conditions of the study. It has the appearance of putting God in a test tube to see if we can bottle him and put him to good use. So many times, what people are looking for is for there to be some kind of power in the action itself. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what prayer is. People want prayer to be a type of magic that they can control. They want to pray...

T he topic came up the other day about damsels in distress . It was related to Bella from the Twilight series. The woman saying it was basically saying that Bella is much too weak and stupid. I haven’t read the books or watched the movies, but I’ve gotten the impression that they’re about getting women’s hearts pumping. As such, the idea is to make Bella an average woman that women can connect with and then put her in situations where good looking muscle bound young men can save her. Of course that doesn’t really happen in real life because men like that are too busy looking at their reflections in the mirror and primping for their close-up. But in fiction we’re free to create a world that operates the way we want. But just how strong should a damsel in distress be? I know of some women in real life that really are very weak. They can find their way out of bed by noon, after which they find their way to the mall to buy shoes, but there isn’t a single intelligent thought that runs thro...

C harles Sheldon introduced the world to the question What would Jesus do? when he wrote the book In His Steps 114 years ago. I can’t help but think that that question gets answered in a far different way today than what Sheldon thought it would way back in the day. As I was driving into work yesterday, I had the radio on and I heard about a woman preacher within the Presbyterian Church who is facing church discipline for conducting Sodomite weddings. That is unless the Presbyterian Church votes to change their constitution to define marriage as between two people rather than between a man and a woman. The words I heard her say were, “I was only doing what I believed Jesus would want us to do.” I had thought to write about the ecumenical movement today, because I see so many writers who go to writers conferences and come away thinking that it would be such a good thing for all Christians to put aside their differences and worship together because “we all agree on the important things...

H ow do we write a story with a twist at the end. You know the type—a man spends the whole story searching for the person who hit and killed his wife with a car. He finds a man and the man goes to prison, but as the story closes we see something that tells us that the man who was searching for the killer is actually the killer himself, so he was just looking for a scapegoat. I think one of the things that make stories like this interesting to us writers is that we’re essentially writing two stories at once. We have the story that we want the reader to believe throughout the book, but it has to match up with the story that will be revealed on the final page. Some of our characters have two motives. There’s the motive that we want the reader to believe and the motive that the character actually has. Both motives must be capable of producing the same action. Writing a story like this requires that we start at the end, because that is the most important part. We may have a rough idea of wh...

O n her blog, I’ve seen Rachelle Gardner write that she would rather see a well written manuscript with a poor plot than a poorly written manuscript with a great plot. The assumption here is that an agent can make suggestions concerning the plot and through a collaborative effort the author and agent can produce a good book, whereas poor writing is much more difficult to correct because it requires going through the manuscript sentence by sentence to make changes. I see some truth to that. Assuming the agent has the ability to do either, improving the plot requires less work, but is that a safe assumption. I kind of wonder if literary agents aren’t somewhat like movie directors who believe they can fix all of the mistakes that happened on the set in the editing room. The implication is that plotting is so easy that anyone can do it. Recently, I’ve watched many of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes. You would be hard pressed to find a television series with better written episodes...

W hat does it take to have a good novel? As much as we would like to know the answer to that, it isn’t always an easy thing to answer. There’s lot of subjectivity. A lot of people talk about the rules of writing, but there’s always an exception that people point to and wonder why that particular author was able to get by with it. So what I would like to address today are three things that must be handled well in every story, without exception, in order for the story to be good. These three aren’t checkbox items that you have or you don’t but rather things that as you handle them better your story improves. The best stories handle them very well and the worst stories handle them poorly. A Likeable Protagonist We’ve all run into stories with a protagonist we had trouble connecting with. Maybe we didn’t out and out dislike the guy, but we didn’t care what happened to him. It’s like the story of the woman who had fifteen kids. One of them fell in a tar pit and the children came running to ...

S ome people are just better at writing backstory than others. As a rule, backstory isn’t a good thing because it tends to bring the story to a halt, but many writers still insist on using it and some of the bestselling books have large segments of backstory. With an if you can beat them, join them attitude, let’s consider what it might take to create interesting backstory. One idea is that once we’re invested in the character we’re more likely to be interested in the backstory. This is the concept behind the idea that we shouldn’t have any backstory until page [insert some page number here]. I believe there’s some truth to that, but it doesn’t explain why some writers are able to begin a book with backstory and people read the book anyway. I saw a blog the other day in which someone was talking about Justin Cronin’s The Passage . The blogger stated that she found the book to be a page turner, even though Cronin broke so many rules, including using so much backstory. I haven’t read th...

C all it writing research if you will, but I was looking at the question of putting a father’s name on a baby’s birth certificate (not mine, I assure you) and became bombarded with websites in which unmarried women are asking about whether they should or should not put the father’s name on the birth certificate. Being naïve like I am, the thought had never crossed my mind that a mother who knew the name of the father would leave it off because she thought it would prevent him from laying claim to the baby or something like that. As I perused those websites, it shocked me how self-centered people can be. These women had not thought for what would be best for the father of their child. They had no thought for what would be best for what would be best for the child. All they cared about was what would make their own lives easier. You would think that the baby was nothing more than a possession and the baby’s father was nothing more than a means of obtaining that possession. People find ou...