Timothy's Thoughts

Some authors don’t know the theme of their novel until after they have finished writing it. It can be helpful to know the theme as you write because it will guide you through the writing process. Scenes that don’t support or oppose the theme in some way can usually be eliminated without hurting the novel and doing so often helps. If we know the theme, early in the novel we need to state the theme. We don’t do something as blatant as saying, “My theme is good conquers evil.” Instead, we do something offhand. We don’t even have our protagonist state the theme. In a classic hero/villain story, we wouldn’t want to have the hero tell the villain, “you can’t win because good conquers evil.” Instead we might have a friend of the hero talking about a mean person at work. “No matter how badly she treats me, I going to treat her good, because good overcomes bad.” Then in the rest of the book we will go about proving that statement, mostly through the interaction between the hero and villain, rat...

I’ve talked about theme before. Yesterday, I listed many different Christian themes. We can think of those as Super-themes rather than an actual theme you will find in a novel. A theme in a novel is like a statement that we have set out to prove. In Christian fiction, we must approach it with a Christian world view, but that has more to do with the conclusion than what it does with the theme. Our theme statement can be either a statement in support of a Christian world view or the converse. Picking one of the themes from yesterday, let’s look at an example. Tithing. There’s a topic we don’t see much in Christian novels (probably for a good reason). What kind of theme statement might we have in support of tithing? Pulling a line from many sermons on the subject, we could say, “The Lord blesses those who tithe.” The converse is something like, “There’s no reason for Christians to tithe.” Creating the theme statement is the easy part. The difficult part is how we cover the topic in a no...

Christian Literature is often defined as writing that deals with Christian Themes and incorporates a Christian World View. So what are the Christian Themes? I came up with 101 of them. There are bound to be more and there is much disagreement, even among Christians, about what the Bible teaches about many of these. 1. Salvation 2. End Times 3. Marriage 4. True Love 5. Redemption 6. Return and Forgiveness 7. Stewardship 8. Obedience 9. Faith 10. Reap What You Sow 11. Wasteful Living 12. Husband Love Wife 13. Wives Submit 14. Church and Government 15. Prayer 16. Sin 17. The New Christian 18. Temptation 19. Lust 20. Church Attendance 21. Christian Service 22. Respect of Persons 23. Racism 24. Good Over Evil 25. Church Perpetuity 26. False Religion 27. Angels 28. Suffering 29. Dating 30. Tithing 31. Bible Study 32. The Workplace 33. Spiritual Warfare 34. Abortion 35. Love Thy Neighbor 36. The Bride of Christ 37. Church Discipline 38. Discipleship 39. Church Fights 40. Prophecy 41. Worship ...

One of the problems with Christian Fantasy that I have seen is in how it steps through the looking glass. This is a problem that isn’t unique to Christian Fantasy, but it is a problem that Christian Fantasy authors must handle if they hope to succeed. Some have and some haven’t. The Fantasy author must find a way to step through the looking glass with his story. If he doesn’t, the reader will apply the rules of our Universe to the universe of the story. When we write, we want to create the suspension of disbelief . That is more difficult in Fantasy when the story closely approximates our world. If the Fantasy author tells us that there are elves living among us, we are willing to suspend our disbelief for the space of the story, but suppose he tells us that the 9/11 attacks were planned by our government. We will refuse to accept that. Creating the suspension of disbelief requires a few things we can’t prove. While we have never seen elves, we can’t really prove they don’t exist. The...

Happy Thanksgiving! If you are reading this on Thanksgiving Day, you ought to get something for your dedication—a free book, a hundred dollar bill, a free turkey, something. But no, I’m not giving out any of those things. All I have to offer are my thoughts on writing about holidays. When we include a holiday in a novel, there is a tendency for it to over power the novel. If you mention Christmas, you might as well call the book a Christmas novel. If you mention Valentine’s Day, the book might as well have a pink cover. For all practical purposes, holidays don’t occur in Fantasia except when the author wants to talk about a particular holiday. Holidays carry with them some requirements of their own. If we write about Veteran’s Day we can expect it to involve the armed forces. Ground Hog’s Day stories had better have a ground hog. Christmas is the big one. Christmas stories are about family, peace, the jolly old elf, magic and some other things. We deviate from these things to keep it i...

When we write stories, we sometimes come up against plot elements that don’t seem possible. The reader simply won’t believe it. What are we to do? I came up against a situation like this in For the Love of a Devil . To maintain consistency with the biblical account of Hosea I had to find a way to put the female character in slavery, but we don’t see slavery so much in America. I did the research and yes there is a very active slave trade in the United States, but it stays hidden in the shadows. The events leading up to that just didn’t seem believable. Even though she was already in a bad situation, it didn’t seem possible that the person who did so would sell her into slavery. I stumbled upon a solution that turned out to be much simpler than I would’ve expected and it even has a name. The plot device that I stumbled upon is called lampshade hanging or spotlighting . When one of my characters was about to tell my main character what had happen, I had her say, “You won’t believe me.” ...

There are a couple approaches to writing a novel. Some people like to write novels by the seat of their pants and just write, while others like to develop an outline. Forgive me if I generalize a little, but it seems to me that seat of the pants novelists favor character driven stories while outliners favor plot driven stories. For our purposes, let’s define these two terms. Character Driven Story – a story in which the author creates interesting characters with a natural dislike for each other, throws them together and sees what happens Plot Driven Story – a story in which the author creates an interesting plot and then goes and figures out what kind of characters would do such a thing In a character driven story, the author might say he has a company owner and a union boss as characters. You can pretty much bet that the plot is going to have something about union negotiations, since that is what normally brings these people together. Or if you go at it form the other direction, i...