Timothy's Thoughts

S ome days ago, Richard Mabry blogged about Donald Maass' book The Fire In Fiction: Passion, Purpose, And Technique To Make Your Novel Great . I went to Amazon.com and read a portion of the book, saw a few things that made me think I would be interested in reading it and clicked the buy button. It arrived a couple of days later and I put it next to the computer, thinking I would read it later. I currently have bookmarks in two novels, The Almost True Story of Ryan Fisher and Inkdeath . Donald Maass’ book kept calling to me. My left hand kept reaching over to pick it up and I kept scolding it, until it refused to obey. I found myself reading the book. As Richard said, Donald Maass has some good things to say in the introduction. I read that and moved on to Chapter One: Protagonists vs. Heroes . He also had some good things to say there. Even though I have written about how I hate block quotes , I forced myself to read the examples he lifted from various novels. I tried to understan...

aspire to seek to attain a goal wannabe somebody who tries to be like someone else or to belong to a specific group (informal disapproving) [source: Encarta Dictionary] Wannabe is often a derogatory term. “Is he any good?” someone will ask. “No, he’s just a wannabe ,” we might respond. Notice the definitions above. A wannabe has the goal of being like someone else while to aspire allows for any kind of goal. In the context that it is often used, a wannabe is someone putting on the appearance of being something, but is not. One of the marks of a wannabe -author is that he gets his feelings hurt when someone implies that his writing isn’t that great. Why? Because his only goal is to be an author and he is willing to take shortcuts to get there. He is something of a copycat. He mimics authors. When his manuscript has all the elements that he enjoys about the books written by a favored author, he su...

S ome things are best left alone. According to Publishers Weekly, Margaret K. McElderry Books has acquired the rights to publish a book that purports to be the sequel to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess , a classic that was published in 1905. That’s more than a hundred years ago and about a year after the ice cream cone was invented. According to the article, Hilary McKay found the novel’s ending “perfect in all ways but one.” She had questions about what happened to the children Sara left behind when she drove away at the end of the book. Well, she has taken it upon herself to answer those lingering questions. Now, I have no doubt that Hilary McKay is perfectly capable of writing a story about Ermengarde, Lottie, Lavinia and all the rest. But sometimes it does harm to a story try to tie up the loose ends created by secondary characters, besides the fact that Hilary McKay is not Frances Hodgson Burnett. No matter what she might say about the characters, the question will a...

Y ou have before you, a box. What is it? One of the requirements of a story is that it must have a setting. In television, there are some very real limits. It can take thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours to build a set, so you don’t go creating totally new sets very often. Also, different locations may require additional actors. They can be expensive too. To balance out the cost of some of the more expensive shows, a television series will do an elevator show . I’m not sure if that’s the proper name, but it is essentially an episode in which two or three of the characters, usually the ones that like each other the least, are locked in a room (a stuck elevator) and they do nothing but talk. It saves the show a ton of money and it lets the actors shine. In novels, we don’t have to worry about how much it costs to put our characters into a particular box. Our box can be as large as the Universe or as small as an atom and it doesn’t cost us anything. We can write about billions ...

J uly 7, 1947, something happened near Roswell, New Mexico. Aliens? Flying Disc? Weather balloon? Cover-up for something else? It hardly matters. Whatever happened out there, the story of aliens being recovered from a crash captured the imaginations of people around the world. We tend to think that science uses facts and logic to draw conclusions, but more often then not scientists are captivated by a story and that is the basis for their research. How else can we explain SETI? Stories captivate the mind and incite people to action. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been accused of starting the Civil War and there is some truth to that. It’s high praise to say that a novel helped to end legal slavery in America, but what if they incite the wrong action? When CBS aired the radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938, many listeners panicked, thinking the news bulletins were real. Fiction has just as much power to motivate wrong action as it does right act...

A nd so, we begin. Many people believe that a novel must begin with a strong hook . Think of the hook as a question. Some people confuse the hook and the inciting incident . They are not the same. The inciting incident is an event within the story that incites the protagonist to take action. The hook causes the reader to ask a question. Where the Red Fern Grows begins with a great hook , “When I left my office that beautiful spring day, I had no idea what was in store for me.” If Wilson Rawls had stopped here, we would ask, “What was in store for you?” We are “hooked” at this point because we aren’t going to quit reading until we find out what happened to him on this “beautiful spring day.” Foreshadowing is one way of creating a hook . The narrator has already experienced the events of the story, so he can tell the reader enough about what he is going to say that the reader becomes curious and decides to stick around. An opening problem is also a way to create a hook . A novel op...

I n general, men don’t read novels. Male readers tend to read non-fiction. There plenty of people with theories about this and some have done studies in an attempt to understand it. I’ll leave that sort of thing to them. I’ll offer instead, a case study of a male reader—that of myself. I was slow to begin reading. They stuck me in remedial reading in the second grade. It wasn’t long after that I developed a love for reading. I began to read anything I could get my hands on—literally. If someone put a book down, I would probably pick it up and begin reading. Many of those books were romance novels, because that was most of what Mom had around at the time and I quickly read through my books. I read a lot of Agatha Christi. I loved reading fantasy. I read The Owlstone Crown many times. I was interested in the Oz books for a while. School work kept me from reading part of the time, but I spent my summers reading, even when I was in college. But by that time my tastes had turned to Tom Cla...