Timothy's Thoughts

A s we reach the last quarter of our novel, the Death Knells are ringing in our ears. We have no hope of success. We are out of options and the half-man has testified to the strength of our opponent. What are we to do? “Never give up! Never surrender!” cries Tim Allen’s character from Galaxy Quest . “It’s a good day to die!” cry the Klingons from Star Trek . When all is lost, protagonists don’t sit down and wait for the inevitable. They are cut from a different cloth than half-men . No, protagonists fight to the end with the idea that I’m going to die with my boots on . It is typical for sci-fi writers to send their protagonists on suicide missions. They will either save the day or die trying. Can we do the same with other types of stories? The answer is yes. Suppose a man is very good friends with a woman. They are just friends, or so they tell each other, but when she decides to marry another man, the first man tries to talk her out of it. This upsets her and we reach the point ...

Y esterday, I mentioned what some people call the half-man . A half-man could be a literal half-man, either missing limbs or in sci-fi he could be part man and part machine. But he doesn’t have to be. His purpose is to be a death knell . Often, the half-man is fighting the same fight as our protagonist and has already faced the enemy. Unfortunately, the half-man failed, getting away with his life, but with the knowledge that he didn’t accomplish what he had hoped. Take a look at the video below. This is one of the most emotionally charged scenes in the movie version of The Neverending Story “They look like big, good, strong hands don’t they?” Rock Biter says and they certainly do. So, if Rock Biter is powerless to defend his friends against the Nothing, what makes us think that Atreyu has any hope of defeating it? We don’t. That’s the whole point. Atreyu is down for the count. He has lost everything and he might as well sit down next to Rock Biter and wait for the Nothing to come. ...

O nce we have established what needs to be changed and the protagonist takes action toward that change, the death knells fall silent for a while. Throughout the second quarter of a book, there is almost no chance of death for the protagonist. It is during this time that he is successfully making change toward what he must become. We reach the middle of the book and he has succeeded. Things are going good, but we can’t leave it like this. That would be boring. We’ve got 45,000 more words to write. So, we listen closely and off in the distance we hear them. The death knells have returned. After crossing the mid-point, the antagonist regroups and begins pulling the protagonist back to what he was before. We’ve already established that what he was before will lead to death, so through out the third quarter of the book the death knells grow louder and louder. The protagonist fights it, but he is losing ground. We reach a point where he looks death in the face. He isn’t dead yet, but w...

I n a good novel, the death knells come early. The first place we should hear them are in the first chapter. In The Pilgrim’s Progress we hear them on page one. “…I am certainly informed that this our city will be burned with fire from Heaven; in which fearful overthrow, both myself, with thee my wife, and you my sweet babes, shall miserably come to ruin, except (the which yet I see not) some way of escape can be found…” This statement is like the death knells ringing for Christian’s death and that of his family. Stories are about change. This being the case, we begin each story with something that needs to change. But just any change is not sufficient for a novel. We could begin with a husband and wife needing to change the wall paper in a bathroom. I might make an entertaining chapter, but it isn’t big enough to carry the whole novel. The need for change must be such that the reader sees it and believes that if change doesn’t happen then death will come. We see a very obvious deat...

A death knell is the toll of a bell announcing death or some omen that tells us that death is coming. The bright light from a nuclear explosion, for example, is a death knell because though the light will not kill, the shock wave and the radio active fallout that follow most certainly will. Death plays a significant role in storytelling. There are many views concerning death, but there is no disagreement on one thing. With death comes an end to our ability to accomplish our current goals. So in storytelling, when a character dies, the goals of the character are no longer attainable. That impacts our stories in many ways. In computer games, which is one form of storytelling, the threat of death (or the dreaded game over ) drives the player to play longer and harder. In novels, death comes in many forms, but it serves the same purpose. The toll of the death knell drives the reader to keep reading. In the classic love triangle, the death knell may come in the form of a wedding engage...

I n a recent article, Jason Cruise talks about the church’s message for men . He tells of a preacher giving sermon designed to inspire men to become more actively involved and then ruining it by creating a visual of men wearing a wedding dress. I haven’t noticed the problem he describes in the church of which I am a member, but I’ve heard enough about this problem to believe it exists. Some people believe we have a similar situation in Christian fiction. How can you possibly expect men to read Christian fiction if there’s nothing but historicals and romances? There is a difference in the novels that men enjoy and those enjoyed by women. The Guardian reported in 2006 that women favor the emotional, while men favor novels about social dislocation and solitary struggle. No surprise there. I don’t, however, agree with Charlotte Higgins’ assertion that “the novel that means most to men is about indifference, alienation and lack of emotional responses. That which means most to women is abou...

S ome people have the idea that publishers see the first person point of view (POV) as a bad thing. Literary agent Chip MacGregor says that he doesn’t believe this is the case, but he does go on to say why authors—particularly new authors—struggle with it: Many first-person novels from beginning writers suffer from an overuse of the "I-verb" syndrome ("I started... I walked... I ate... I moved... I handed... I answered..."). That endless parade of I-verbs creates a really dull novel. First-person fiction can be great, but in my view it's harder to master than third person. – Chip MacGregor’s Blog What is an author to do? Conversationally, we use first person all the time. “I went to the store and I bought milk, bread and jelly beans. I ate the jelly beans on the way home.” Three uses of the word I in two sentences. You can imagine that a reader will tire of seeing this if a whole novel is written this way. We could rewrite this as, “I went to the store and boug...