Timothy's Thoughts

This is a bonas post, if you will. I'll follow the lead of others such as Michael Hyatt and post links to some of my more popular posts. I don't track statistics for the whole year, so this is based more on a random sample. The following are my most popular blog posts: How to Describe Beauty An Example Book Outline Protagonist/Antagonist "To Be" Verbs -- To Use or Not To Use A Sample Synopsis Show, Don't Tell - Confusion in Action Should Christians Support Prayer in Public Schools? How to Impress God The Faithful Sidekick If I took the figures for the whole year, #4 would probably be at the top, but its popularity was earlier in 2008.

A few days ago, Rachelle Gardner reposted a post about encouragement . I heard of one pastor who said that he doesn’t believe church staff workers need encouragement because only those who are truly passionate about what they do should be doing what they do. I won’t go that far because there are things that get us down from time to time, but I have seen enough church workers put in long hours at a job that only the Lord will notice to know that there is some truth in what he said. Even if he were completely correct, we should encourage each other because God commands it (Hebrews 10:25). Rachelle was talking about the need writers have for encouragement. They are looking for someone to say, “you can do it,” or something like that. I was sitting in my living room and looking at the painting you see here. If you can’t tell by the signature on the painting, I am the artist. When I painted it, I wasn’t trying to paint something that someone would purchase or hang in an art gallery. I didn’t...

When I see writers ask agents questions like “Is it ok to introduce a passage of showing with a passage of telling?” it makes me think that they are missing the point. While show, don’t tell can be very good advice, it is useless if people don’t understand how to apply it. Before a foot race, there may be a lot of talk among those who are running. Hopefully it is good natured, but one runner might tell another runner, “I could run backwards and still beat you.” That is telling. It is just talk unless the runner actually runs the race backwards and wins. In that case it is showing. Character is revealed by action. You could tell your children that you love them every day, but the truth isn’t revealed until we see whether you are the type of parent who fixes your kids’ lunches or who slaps them in the face every day when they get home from school because you know they must have done something to deserve it. The same is true of fictional characters. Their nature is revealed through the a...

Evaluating our own writing is always a difficult thing; we are always too critical or not critical enough. Even so, it is a necessity and when I look at my own writing, including the three novels in print and my current work in progress, I can see similarities among there differences. If you have read the three novels then you know that they are very different in their focus. Searching for Mom is about young Sara’s attempt to find a mother through an online dating service. How to Become a Bible Character shows a teenager’s desire to receive recognition for his service to the Lord, through the eyes of his youth pastor. For the Love of a Devil is Hosea’s story told in a current day setting. My work in progress is about a mother who takes her daughter to meet the girl’s father. All of these are similar in the role the family and friends play in the outcome of the story. Any of these could have had a much darker tone then they do, especially For the Love of a Devil . What really stands ...

It’s the first day of the year, so I would imagine that many people have made or are making New Year’s resolutions. As in years past, I figure there is a large number of people who have decided that this is the year that they will write that novel they keep saying they will write. Books are a status symbol. There are many people who want to have written a book. I think people like the idea of writing a book because it is difficult enough that it seems like a big accomplishment, but there’s nothing to keep anyone from trying. With four books behind me, writing a book doesn’t seem like as much of an accomplishment as it once did, though it hasn’t gotten any easier. Once someone writes a book, it doesn’t take long to discover that there are even more status symbols in publishing. In the publishing industry, a person with an agent has a higher status than someone who has only finished a manuscript. A person with a publishing contract has a higher status than people with no more than an age...

We’ve reached the end of 2008 at last. This has been a really strange year for me. So much has happened this year that I didn’t expect. At the beginning of the year, I expected to publish three or four books this year. I published two and one of them isn’t even mine. I did finish one of the books I had planned and I have made it more than halfway through writing another book, but not one of the ones I planned. I at this time in time in 2007 I never would have expected that I would be carrying around an Elite status frequent flyer card now. I really didn’t expect to spend thirteen weeks flying back and forth between Fort Worth and Atlanta. Looking back at it, I kind of enjoyed it, but it isn’t something I expected to happen. There are things that I wish would have happened this year that didn’t. I’m not complaining. That fact is that the Lord has blessed me far better this year than I deserve, but I don’t think there’s been a year that I was as happy to see disappear as this one. It ha...

I watched an old Columbo episode the other day. As always, the episode begins with the focus on the killer, but in this case it was especially interesting because it begins with silence—five minutes of silence. There are the normal sounds, like water running and footsteps, but no one speaks for the first five minutes of the show. I found myself wondering if I had muted the television or something. Five minutes, in television, is a very long time to go without saying anything. We would normally expect that the first five minutes of a television show would take five pages of a script, but it is possible that the first five minutes of the show required less than one page. That tells us something about silence and the writing. They don’t mix very well and yet there is something about silence that can make a scene especially poignant. The writer may have said something like, “INTERIOR, DAWN: man removes power charge from shell casing and replaces with four strips of C4, while sweating prof...