Timothy's Thoughts

The fire flickered in the fireplace as the children gathered around the old man. They crowded in close, sitting on the floor. One of the smaller children, a girl, climbed into the old man’s lap while still clutching her favorite doll. The adults had been talking about other things, more important things, like the price of corn or the person who should be the next President, but they too grew silent. The old man stroked his beard a couple of times, straightened his suspenders and began, “Once upon a time…” There’s something about a story that stirs the imagination. Long before there was television, there were stories. After a long day working, people would sit around telling stories. For that matter, people would tell stories while they were working and still do. Some were true. Some were not, but they told stories. Jesus told stories as he went around teaching. One of the best ways to teach something is to tell a story. We turn to television for entertainment today, but watching an act...

Book A Book B Author Marketing Hours 90 0 Publisher Marketing Hours 10 100 Marketing @ $50/Hour $500 $5000 I had an epiphany the other day and it has caused me to rethink a few things. Publishers don’t pay authors. When a publisher signs an author, the publisher cuts a check for the advance. This looks very much like the publisher paying the author. It is often structured such that the author doesn’t receive the full amount until the book reaches various phases. This makes it look even ...

Twain simply listed his last seven rules and I think I will also. An author should: Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it. Use the right word, not its second cousin. Eschew surplusage. Not omit necessary details. Avoid slovenliness of form. Use good grammar. Employ a simple, straightforward style. These rules are closely related. We can summarize them by saying pay attention to details . We know that Twain advised killing most adjectives and adverbs. That is part of what he mean by Eschew surplusage , though he meant more than that. We have many words and phrases that we use in our spoke language that we don’t really need in conveying our message with written language. These words and phrases find their way into our work. Some of the rules we don’t see in Twain’s list are things like maintain a consistent point of view , avoid speaker attributes and avoid “be” verbs . Maybe these are the three that Twain didn’t include in his nineteen rules, but I wouldn’t read too ...

Moving on to Twain’s ninth rule, we see an admonition against dues ex machine . The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausably set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. Twain is telling us that we should obey the rules of the world we have created. Twain used miracles some in his own writing, such as in A Connecticut Yankee in King Author’s Court , so he isn’t against fantasy as much as he is against things that happen without cause. I saw an example of a problem in a television show I was watching the other day. The show was portraying the fall of the City of Troy. The show had a villain who moved between the two camps through a door (painted to look like stone) that someone had put in the wall of the city. I can’t help but wonder why anyone would bother building a horse to roll into the city when all they had to do was walk through the hidden door. We also have to wo...

Today, I’m continuing our talk about Mark Twain’s eighteen rules of writing. We begin with his sixth rule, a rule that is very familiar. When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. Can you see it? This is Twain’s version of the immensely popular show, don’t just tell rule. If we have a character that we have described as a delicate flower and then she comes in cussing like a sailor, we have violated this rule. Perhaps we think it’s funny to have a delicate flower let loose and come out of her shell for no apparent reason, but the reader will not be amused. I saw a little of this problem with Lori Wick’s The Princess . The book begins with us seeing this sweet girl with a great relationship with her parents and other people. It is for this reason that she is selected to marry the prince. Then later in the book we see her explode when her husband changes her schedule without asking. Sh...

Today, I’m continuing our talk about Mark Twain’s eighteen rules of writing. We begin with his third rule. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. Have you ever had a character that doesn’t stand out? The character has a name, but we might as well have name her, Woman #5 since no one is going to remember her anyway. Maybe we put her in the story to give another character someone to talk to and all Woman #5 does is say, “I agree.” The other character might as well be talking to a corpse. We can fix Woman #5. First, let’s give her a name, like Barbara. Next, let’s make her interesting by giving her a peg leg. Lastly, let’s give her some thoughts and motives of her own. Maybe Barbara secretly hopes the other character’s boyfriend will break up with her and ask Barbara out. That’s a lot better than a corpse. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient ...

Authors, agents and editors talk much about the rules of writing . Most of us will agree that these rules are more like guidelines than laws set in stone. What we can’t agree on is what the rules are and what they mean. Oh well, such is life. Mark Twain said there are nineteen rules, though some people say there are twenty-two. He doesn’t say what the nineteenth rule is, though I doubt he knew since he mentions it in a critique of James Fenimore Cooper’s work . I think he chose the number nineteen to bring attention to how poorly written he believed Deerslayer to be. Twain does give us the eighteen he said Jame Fenimore Cooper violated. I see among them some of the same rules we keep spouting today, so I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at Twain’s eighteen rules governing the literary art in the domain of romantic fiction over the next few days. As we do, I will say that knowing the rules and understanding them is a far cry from being able to apply them to our own...