Timothy's Thoughts

Writers walk a fine line and those who do it well succeed. The rest of us languish in obscurity. The one thing that highly successful books have in common is that they are different from their peers. The first novel that does something interesting or different gets the glory. The rest get…nothing. Or next to nothing. We want our work to stand out, but we also have to be careful. Maybe we don’t want to stand out too much. Put God in a dress flipping flapjacks and you have a novel that stands out. But does it stand out for the right reasons? Okay, actually that has already been tried and what I expect is that we will start to see more novels (mostly self-published) that will attempt to rethink God. Perhaps instead of putting him in a dress someone will give him the body of a cow. Isn’t that what the children of Israel did? Read the Bible, God was not amused. But enough about that. As we write, we have to make choices. The most important choice is the story idea. Nothing makes a book stan...

Do you ever have the feeling that all we are ever doing is looking for a way to occupy our minds for our seventy years on this planet? We go to work each day, hopefully to a job we don’t find boring, so we afford to go home in the evening to do things that we find interesting. We do social things, such as attend church or other things, in part because that’s a whole lot more interesting than sitting at home twiddling our thumbs. When we are at home, we occupy our minds by watching television, reading books, working on hobbies or connecting with people online. When I look at some of these Eastern religions that meditate by trying to clear their minds of all thought, I can’t help but wonder if they have a death wish. Visit a nursing home and what will you find? In many nursing homes you will find senior adults with nothing to do but to push their wheelchairs up one hall and down the other. There are many things that cause people to approach death in haste, but I am convinced that many pe...

Just the other day, Cara Putnam asked a question about reviewing books that weren’t right for her (a euphemism used by the publishing industry to describe poorly written books). I don’t advocate writing reviews that sound like every book is the greatest thing that has ever come off the press, but I did say that I am moving in the direction of writing fewer scathing reviews and writing more complimentary reviews. I have chosen to use this blog post to explain why One thing I have noticed since I have begun to write novels is that I am much more critical of the work of others. Jesus said, “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” If I write a scathing review then I am opening myself up for the author or fans of that author to do the same with one of my books. Now, some books deserve a scathing ...

One of the writing concepts that some people have a hard time grasping is the concept of a protagonist and an antagonist . Many people have the idea that the protagonist is the good guy and the antagonist is the bad guy . While this is often the case, it is not the way we should understand the concept. The protagonist is principal character, but he can be either good or bad. The story will reveal which he is. The antagonist opposes what the protagonist is trying to accomplish and can be either good or bad. Sometimes in the development of a story it is helpful to consider various protagonists. We should ask which characters will change the most during the events of the story and who will push the story forward. I was looking at a story idea the other day in which a woman was going to show up on a doorstep and force her way into a family. I thought of her as the protagonist, but the story just wouldn’t come together the way I wanted. For the story to end with her a member of the family...

Much is said about people’s short attention spans. Someone recently asked why we are able to read novels, but we aren’t able to read websites. It made me think a little. What are the major differences between these two types of reading? Here’s what I came up with. We can read a novel anywhere, but a website requires a computer. When reading a novel, we have a well-defined goal of getting to the end of the book. With a website, we have no starting point and no ending point, so we can stop whenever we choose. With a novel or even a non-fiction book, we are reading to learn what the author has said. With a website, we are looking for one piece of information like a needle in a haystack. Once we find it, we declare ourselves done and move on. What other differences can you think of between the two forms of reading?

Fiction is harder to write than non-fiction, or it should be. When you write fiction, you have to make it up as you go. When a writer writes non-fiction, he should know his subject well enough that he doesn’t have to make anything up, he just has to figure out the best order for the information and find a way to get the point across to the reader. Let me show you what I mean. A college professor has spent years studying fish. One day the dean comes to him and says, “I want you to write a book. It will make the college look better.” Now the professor could decide to write about the history of Egypt. “That will give me a chance to learn about Egypt.” But he won’t do that. Instead, he will go to his files, pull out his work from the past several years and he will write about fish. In all likelihood, he could write much of the book from memory, but he will use his work and the work of others to insure the accuracy of his statements. That brings us back to the subject of platform. Our platf...

When someone asks how to know when a novel is complete, I always say that when it is good enough that the author wants to read it just for the enjoyment of reading it then it is done. Another question we might ask is when we know we have a story idea that is worth writing. Before I even knew that someone else had written a novel even loosely based on the story of Hosea, I fell in love with the story and decided that I wanted to tell the story that has since become For the Love of a Devil . As always, the first draft was terrible and I asked myself what I was thinking, but after several edits I got the book to the point where I can enjoy the story. Now I am considering my next project. As I look at some of the ideas that pop into my head, I keep wondering if they will make a good story. I think the key to my next project will be to develop a story for which I love the concept. If I love the concept, after some hard work, I will then be able to produce a manuscript that I love. That does...