Timothy's Thoughts

M entor - somebody, usually older and more experienced, who advises and guides a younger, less experienced person ( Encarta Dictionary ). Recently, I’ve been noticing an increase in what I would call a misuse of the work mentor . I first noticed this when I our church was going into John C. Maxwell’s Injoy program (which I now consider to be a huge waste of money). I think he may have backed away from this wording some now, but I saw wording that stated that John C. Maxwell had mentored thousands or millions or whatever it was. My first thought was, Wow! How does he have time? and then came to realize that they were talking about how many people had bought his tapes. In my book, that isn’t mentoring at all. More recently, I’ve noticed people in the publishing industry using the verb mentor as a pseudonym for edit . I was on Rachelle Gardner’s website the other day and saw a list of freelance editors. I was curious to see what they were charging for editing a manuscript. I clicked ...

C an you imagine trying to write a novel with one of these? Then again, with the predictive sentence technology, type the first letter and all you have to do is find the novel already written. And here's the kind of treatment you can expect if you ever sell so many books that people like Michael Hyatt think you're important.

F ollowing the Presidential election of 2000 there were what seemed like endless recounts in the State of Florida as the United States tried to figure out who really had won the election. With both eventual President George W. Bush and then Vice-president Al Gore claiming victory, the news media had nothing better to do than sit around discussing how the nation would accept the man who took office. I remember someone saying that once that man put on the mantle of the presidency people would accept him because appeared presidential. There is a similar principle in writing that we might call the writer’s mantle . Every reader begins with expectations. Suppose a reader believes a writer is humorous, he laughs when the dog dies at the first of the book. He rolls in the floor when the mother dies. He is sixty pages into the book when he realizes it is a serious book. One reader opens a book, expecting it to be good and it is. Another reader opens the same book, expecting it to be bad, and ...

A manila folder in my filing cabinet has the word ideas written at the top in black ink. Into this folder I put book ideas for a time when I am between books and I don’t know what to write. Many are written on Post-It notes. Others are hand written on larger sheets of paper. Some have even been typed on the computer and printed. Some are written on the little sheets of paper from a notepad I keep in my nightstand. Some of the best ideas come from that strange land between awake and asleep. Some of these ideas are complete scenes, while other are just a single sentence. On one of the smaller white pieces of paper in that folder, blue ink spells out a story idea involving Tina’s parents reorganizing their church in an attempt to make it more appealing to the people in the community. That idea started back when I was working on How to Become a Bible Character and I was certain that I wanted to include it in the series. I might have written it next, but I had fallen in love with the ide...

W hat is the best advice you have ever been given about writing? It seems like this question shows up every time someone interviews an author. Sometimes it is reversed as, What it the worst advice you have ever been given about writing? I’ve tried to think, if someone were to ask either of those question, how would I answer? There plenty of tidbits of advice out there. Here are a few I’ve run across: Write what you know: Some writers call this good advice and others call it bad. Mostly, I think it depends on how you interpret it. If you take it to mean that all you can write about is an author sitting at a computer, pounding out a novel, then yeah, its bad advice. It becomes good advice when we talk about emotions and motives. When writing about an emotion, such as grief or anger, draw on a situation were you felt the same feelings. Write to the middle: This is a great piece of advise. Do you have a problem with sagging middles? Write to the middle. The reason middles sag is becaus...

W hen we think of a king (or queen), we usually think of a man who has the authority to do pretty much what he pleases. Historically, many kings have had the power and we tend to think that that is the only kind of king there is. Going from that assumption, we might look at the British monarchy, which has little formal authority and what it has is rarely exercised, and wonder why it still exists. We read through the Book of Daniel and see that the law of the Medes and Persians prevented the king from amending his own law. That seems to go against our concept of what a king is, but there it is. The law supersedes the power of the king. In fiction, kings are often very boring creatures. The problem is that we often ignore the authority of the law over the king. Suppose the law requires the crown prince to marry before his twenty-fifth birthday. We say, “Change the law,” but that doesn’t make for a good story. Consider the real life King Darius from the Book of Daniel. He signed a law sta...

I remember from when I was a child, sitting the car watching the corn fields fly past and imagining how much fun it would be to walk between the rows of corn. These days, they plant an extra row where I would have walked. A child could hardly make his way through and an adult certainly couldn’t. But for a moment there, weren’t you thinking about what it would be like to wonder off into a corn field? Maybe you were riding along with me in rural Missouri, watching the ten foot tall corn stalks pass outside the window. When we tell a story, the listener shares the moment. I’ve been giving Twitter a try. I’ve been following a few people. Some of these people are more prolific Tweeters than other. I mostly ignore the most prolific. I figure that if they can tweet every minute then they haven’t taken time to think about what they’re saying. But this week, one person in particular has gotten interesting. Michael Hyatt is in Ethiopia and every so often he tweets about what they are doing. On o...