Timothy's Thoughts

I watched the new Knight Rider the other night. I suppose it was the pilot. Pilots are notoriously bad, but this show has some major problems that will keep me from watching it again. The original Knight Rider was a classic Superhero story with KITT as Michael Knight’s sidekick as well as his source of strength. Episode after episode, we knew what to expect; Michael and KITT would swoop in and help the underdog. Then Michael would have to leave because the life of a Superhero is a lonely life. The new Knight Rider has an updated KITT, which can transform in to any FORD product. The special effects are better, but the writing is terrible. Instead of being one man against the evil in the world, the new show appears to be a large company against the evil in the world and part of that evil is in the company. More realistic, perhaps, but who wants to see that? We want to believe that we could be Michael Knight with a fancy car and we could right the wrongs that we see around us. If that wa...

An author writes a non-fiction book and sends it to an agent. The agent sends back a reply, You have made the subject easy to understand, but I am unable to offer representation at this time because your platform is weak. The author looks at this response and asks, what is a platform and how do I get one? Many authors go at this process backwards. A platform is not something you need to build if you hope to sell a book you have already written. The platform is what gives you the authority to write the book in the first place. It also makes it a whole lot easier to write the book. Let’s look at an extreme example. Suppose a fourteen-year-old student writes a book about how to drive a car. True, the student may have some very good thoughts on the subject, but without having ever driven a car, he isn’t going to have the experience that someone like the current NASCAR points leader has. The guy from NASCAR has a platform. The student has opinions. We develop platforms in many ways. Someti...

As I was going home the other day, I saw a Porsche traveling very fast down the freeway, passing the rest of the traffic. It wasn’t long and a Jeep pulled in behind the Porsche and began to chase it through traffic. “That isn’t very wise,” I thought. The Porsche may be the one that a friend of mine owns. If it is, I can tell you that she has the speeding tickets to prove that she owns a Porsche. And if that isn’t enough, even though it is never safe to drive fast in a lot of slower traffic, a Porsche is designed for high speed while an SUV is not. My advice to the guy in the Jeep, “don’t chase the Porsche.” We can apply that to writing also. Writers know about the rules . If you have listened to anything I have said on the topic, you know that I prefer the idea of understanding the reason for each of the rules and applying that understanding to writing rather than either following the rules blindly or simply throwing them out. I have seen in the comments of some unpublished and rare b...

Every good story has an element of escapism in it. No matter how gritty a story may be, readers don’t sit down to read a story about their current situation. Readers are looking for looking for something to free them from the boredom of their current situation. I was looking at an Amish romance the other day and I began to wonder why the fans of these novels enjoy them. The only think I could think of was that people dream of a simpler life. It is the same reason that people enjoy Historicals. While sitting in a nice air conditioned house reading these book, it is easy to imagine that life must be simple for the Amish or for the people who lived in past centuries. It is easy to forget that washing clothes was a backbreaking task and to wash the dishes after the meal required someone to carry water and heat it. The world people imagine as they read these books is far from the world as it really was or in the case of the Amish life, as it really is. Modern day novels should be much simpl...

One of the classic plots in the romance genre is that of the convenient or premature marriage . I prefer to call it a premature marriage because the couple marries before they fall in love, but since it is a romance, we know they are going to be in love and looking for a future together before the end of the book. It is a compelling plot because it is a story of self-sacrifice. The woman offers herself up on the altar of marriage to serve some greater purpose. Maybe it is so she can take care of his children, or he her children. Maybe it is a requirement for him to become king. Maybe they both have grown tired of going home to an empty house and there is no one else. We all know this plot is fanciful in modern America. I can’t think of any situation where I would walk up to some woman that I don’t know very well and say, “I don’t expect us to ever love each other, but let’s get married anyway.” For that matter, it is unbiblical. The Bible commands husbands to love their wives. It isn’...

In a painting, a photograph or a movie, the dominant colors determine how the viewer will perceive the image. Blues, for example, tend to make the image seem cold. Yellow make the image much warmer. In writing, there are symbols that do what colors do for images. Snoopy always began his novels with, “It was a dark and stormy night…” The darkness of night, mixed with a storm gives us a sense of foreboding. Something bad is sure to happen. We may stumble upon a dead body, or the house may fall down. Maybe we will find a ghostly figure at our door. Contrast the dark and stormy night with the sunny beach. Nothing bad ever happens at a beach unless it is raining or it is nighttime. Bodies do wash upon the beach during the daytime, but only because someone killed it the night before. Dead is a very important symbol in writing. Dead has finality to it, so it tells us that things can never get better. If the husband walks out of the house and the dog dies on the same day, that tells us that t...

I once knew a woman, the most beautiful woman in the world, and all the kingdom came to see her beauty. She had a large black mole on the left side of her mouth and her right eye would stray off to one side. She weighed three hundred pounds and smelled like fresh hog lard. Does that sound like a description of a beautiful woman? How about this? There was once a beautiful young woman who was white as snow, rosy as the blood, and whose hair was as black as ebony. For some reason, that doesn’t sound very beautiful to me either. I suppose you have to be a magic mirror or a prince to think that is beautiful. I am neither. So, the question of the day is, how do we describe a beautiful woman or for that matter, a handsome man? The answer is, we don’t. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For all I know, someone may think the woman I described in the first paragraph is beautiful. And who am I to say she isn’t. What I consider beautiful and what another person considers beautiful are two d...