Timothy's Thoughts

H ow dark is too dark in Christian fiction? Before we can answer that question, we need some idea of what dark fiction is. What is Dark Fiction? Dark is devoid of light. It also refers to evil, or something that is dismal or gloomy. All of these are somewhat related, so when we talk about dark fiction we are talking about stories that deal primarily with evil and/or are without hope. Suppose our story is about a drug dealer who eventually kills a pastor who has been standing against the drug dealer while sleeping with the drug dealer’s wife. With two evil men as our protagonist and antagonist, there is a strong possibility that the story will turn out dark. To insure that the story is dark, we could focus our attention on the shadier parts of the story, showing the drug dealer carrying out his business with the children in the area, showing the pastor sneaking around with the drug dealer’s wife. The more emphasis we place on the evil, the darker the story becomes. Some people descri...

Y esterday, we looked at safety net characters and said that they lighten a story. It then stands to reason that to darken a story we need a glass ceiling character. This is a character that has the ability to thwart our protagonist’s attempts with impunity. Just as the safety net character is able to aid the protagonist without fear of the antagonist, the glass ceiling character is able to aid the antagonist and nothing the protagonist might like to do will harm this character in any way. This is more than just an antagonist with the upper hand. We all know of scenes in which the protagonist begs the villain not to shoot someone, maybe even reveals a secret to prevent it and then the villain shoots the person anyway. That too darkens the story, but the villain will eventually get his due. A true glass ceiling character is more like these secret organizations that are supposed to be above the law. Our protagonist arrests someone and that person is out of jail in short order becau...

L ast week I mentioned a character who has too much going for him to be a protagonist. Then Ellen came and talked to us. She also has too much going for her to be an affective protagonist. But these characters can serve as safety nets. I’ve used Ellen and her family that way in the past. I had a character who needed a house, so Ellen and her husband went out and bought a house, which they then allowed this character to stay in rent free. Without her successful restaurant, that wouldn’t have been possible. Some people will cry foul, suggesting that it would be better to leave the protagonist without a safety net, but that isn’t the way it works in real life. As much as I hate the thought of losing my job and not being able to pay my bills, I know that in time of need there are people I could go to for help, such as my church or my family. Putting these safety net characters into a story changes it in a very specific way. They help raise a story out of the darkness. Think about the Cin...

A nother couple of questions from the 20 questions for leaders that Michael Smith of ClearView Baptist Church in Franklin, Tennessee asked Mike Hyatt . Today they deal with new employees and hiring. How do you help a new employee understand the culture of your organization? I wish I had a profound answer to this one. I don't. Some time ago, I had a man take offense to something I did. He questioned whether I had violated Robert's Rules of Order . I suppose, if you want to take it down to the letter of the law, yes, I did, but I have grown accustomed in our organization for people to be more interested in working together in harmony than worrying about some of the finer details of Robert's Rules of Order . Had that culture been communicated to this person when he came onboard, the issue might not have come up and it would have saved us both a lot of heartache. But how do you communicate something that requires experience to learn? Write a story? Create a video? That'...

E ditor’s Note: I stopped by the Main Street Cafe and Pastry Shop the other day. It was as busy as ever, but Ellen graciously agreed to a guest appearance on my blog. I’m not much of a writer, but Timothy asked me to talk about my business and I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to talk about one of the great passions in my life. I own the Main Street Café and Pastry Shop . A lot of people have asked me why I don’t just change the name to Ellen’s Café , since that’s what everyone calls it anyway. I suppose that would make sense, but you’ve got to realize that it isn’t my café. It is, obviously, since I own the place, but my grandparents started the place. There are days that I can still see them there, either in the kitchen or out talking to the customers. It has changed a lot over the years. It started out as just a coffee shop, if I remember correctly. It was small enough that my grandparents could run it by themselves. They lived upstairs and the shop took up part of the bott...

S ome authors include alter egos in their books. We have to slip into the heads of all of our characters, but even while doing that, we stay distant from most of our characters. There are things about our characters that we can’t fully understand. A man writing about a woman or a woman about man creates one obvious situation in which a full connection between author and character cannot be achieved. To reach such a connection would be just wrong. Even so, we can achieve some very good stories while remaining somewhat distant from the characters. Then there are those characters that just mesh. In my WIP, there is a character who is that way for me. In many ways, he isn’t like me at all and yet when I think about the story I imagine that if I could slip into that world for a while that he is the character I would want to be. He has a minor role in this story and doesn’t even have a name yet. He’s one of these big picture kind of guys who may not know everything that’s going on, but he h...

W e learned yesterday that Blake Snyder passed away due to a heart attack. Blake was a well known screenwriter, but his claim to fame wasn't as much for the movies he wrote as it was for his Save the Cat books. These books dealt primarily with the categories of plots that all stories fall into and the basic outline for each of these plots. The writing community has lost a good friend.