Timothy's Thoughts

You arrive at the designated classroom five minutes before class time. Some of the other students have already arrived, so you take a seat near the front of the room. On the table in front of you is a binder and a cardboard placard. You use the green marker to write your name on the placard. It isn’t neat, but it will do. You place the placard on the table, doubting that anyone will read it. You begin to look through the course materials and wonder why you are required to take this class. The instructor takes his place at the front of the room. The first slide in his presentation tells you what number to put on your timesheet. The next slide shows an outline of the day’s activities. Then you hear those familiar words, “Let’s go around the room. Tell us your name, how long you have worked her and what department you are in.” Why do we have to waste time doing that? You try to think up what you need to say, so you don’t sound silly. What’s the name of our department again? Though their ...

I read the article What Agents Hate the other day. It talks about things agents hate to see in the first chapter. One of the things is a backstory or an information dump. That, I am afraid, is one of the things I struggle with. It is my nature to want people to understand where I am coming from with what I say. Even with this post, I told you about the article I read. I could have just gone into what I have to say, but I gave you the backstory first. Fictional characters should be like a carving. We begin with a simple blob that has an uninteresting shape. Slowly, we reveal details about this blob until it isn’t a blob any more, but the shape of a person, or an animal or something else. The worst thing we can do with writing about a character is to simply state what he is. Let’s look at an example. The ball flew high into the air and out over left field. The left fielder watched it and ran back toward the fence. The ball hit the glove and then the player hit the chain link fence. The ...

Which Jesus do you follow? Have you ever stopped and wondered if the Jesus you worship is the same Jesus that died for your sins? It is interesting to listen to people talk about Jesus. I don’t believe Jesus would allow anyone to go to hell, one person might say. I don’t believe Jesus causes us to suffer, he just allows us to suffer, another might say. It isn’t that big of a deal if we get a divorce, Jesus just wants us to be happy , may be someone’s statement. People make many statements about Jesus. It is popular right now to think of Jesus as a buddy who wants our worship and gets it by standing by ready to pat us on the back and say, “I know you messed up again, but that’s alright.” Maybe we will find him out in the woods cooking pancakes. But is that the same Jesus who died on the cross? What we know about Jesus is what is in the Bible. We can’t just make up a new Jesus because we don’t like the Jesus in the Bible all that much. If we do, all we have done is give someone else th...

Recently, this blog has focused on writing. Occasionally, I cover some topics that aren’t as mundane as others. Some may even offend a few people. You may recall that I took a strong stance on Thomas Nelson’s statement about the Nicene Creed, a few weeks ago. It keeps things interesting. Today, I want to cover a similar issue, so it may offend a few people, but it also has something to do with writing. Thomas Nelson has made the statement that if a writer says he or she is a Christian they aren’t going to question that. I want that to be a reminder to me that I should not make claims that specific writers are not Christians. But I believe I am safe in saying that there are many Christian authors who are not saved. You may find that easy to accept. I don’t care what church you attend, you will probably find a few church members who aren’t saved. Even among those that give evidence of salvation, there are many who don’t understand the very basic doctrines of the Bible. Let that sink in....

Here’s a rule, every Superhero needs a good sidekick. We have seen this work often enough. In the show Lois and Clark , Lois played Superman’s sidekick. Watson was sidekick to Sherlock Holmes. Jane Marple in many of Agatha Christie’s books had various sidekicks from a police officer who just wasn’t as smart as her to one of her friends to some young man who could do some running for her. But why is the sidekick so important? The superhero has trouble connecting with the world. The superhero is better than the lowly people around him and though they men wish they were as strong and the women want to have his baby, they want him to stay aloof. They don’t want to think of him as living somewhere as a common man with his own problems. They want him to always wear the cape and always be on guard. The sidekick sees things that most people don’t wan to see. The sidekick sees the superhero with his hair down. The superhero can talk to the sidekick. This is an important aspect of all sidekicks,...

Here are the first three chapters of For the Love of a Devil . I am posting these hoping that they will entice you to purchase the book. If not, then maybe they will serve their purposes by helping you decide if the book is right for you. The book is about a beleaguered English teacher, Geoff Mywell, longs for the love he once thought his wife had for him, but when she leaves him for another man on their fifth anniversary, he is forced into the life of a single parent. He isn't sure whether to give in to the relief of having her out of the house or be sorry that the marriage seems broken beyond repair. He goes after her as she moves from one man to the next and eventually falls into prostitution. Geoff must enter the darkness and pull her back or lose the woman he loves forever.

There is a very unheated debate over whether to outline a novel before writing it or not. For me, it is easier if I know where I am going, so I create an outline. Also, as I noted in a previous post, if you ever need to write a synopsis, an outline can cut your workload significantly. There are different ways to do an outline. I find that I describe the current state more than I describe the action. The action will come as the manuscript begins to take shape. Below, I have included my outline for For the Love of a Devil . Some of you may recognize the high level outline as coming from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat . If you haven’t read that book, you really should. The numbers beside each heading are word count totals. Blake Snyder defines when things should happen by page count, but novelists tend to think more in terms of word count. My goal was an 80,000 word novel. I went a little above, so the work count is a little off, but the intent was that it would tell me when I f...