Timothy's Thoughts

S ol Stein said that “you are in a long line of storytellers whose job was to keep the listeners attention.” Our primary tasked is to keep the attention of our readers. If you’ve ever wondered why a writer who refuses to follow the rules is able to get a book published and get people to read it, it probably comes down to him having done something that keeps his readers attention. Who really cares if he uses was every other sentence or hops from one head to another? Maybe we do, but we much more willing to overlook such issues if he is holding our attention. He goes on to say that we hold a reader’s attention by getting the reader to want something to happen that isn’t happening yet. This is the essence of suspense, but don’t think of suspense as something that only occurs in the suspense genre; it occurs throughout fiction and non-fiction as well. Consider The Neverending Story . What the reader would like to happen is that we get to explore this fascinating land in which anything is...

I t’s that time of year again, when people start making new year’s resolutions. Right up at the top for many people, just below “lose weight,” is a resolution to write a book. For many people, I think writing a book is some sort of mysterious thing. Conceptually, they believe it is within their power to write a book, but three hundred pages is a daunting task. That could explain why so many authors send unedited first drafts to agents and publishers; it feels like so much of an accomplishment to complete the first draft that the author can’t imagine that there is more work to do. But that’s a topic for another day. If you’re sure you want to write a book, let’s take a look at what it is going to take. Be Inspired I’m going to assume that you intend to write a novel, since that tends to be what is on people’s bucket lists. Before you do anything else, you need an idea for a story. Some authors will suggest that the best approach is to come up with some interesting characters, throw them...

T here’s a rule in photography that we can apply to writing: focus on whatever attracted you to the shot. Or we could word it as, focus on the beauty . The idea is that if you see a beautiful sunset, or an unusual flower, or you like the way something is reflecting off of a building, that you zoom in or frame that aspect of the shot, to that when people look at the photo, their eyes are drawn to the beauty you were trying to capture. Don’t show the whole tree when what attracted you was the setting sun shining through the leaves as a butterfly rests on the blooms. When begin to write a story or anything else, there is something that attracted us to it. With each of my books, I can tell you that one thing that attracted me to the story. In the latest one, And Thy House , what attracted me to the story was a parent teaching his children to reject God and then realizing that he was wrong, after they are too old to listen. The beauty I saw in For the Love of a Devil was the unconditional ...

Cool, windy Monday in late April. Pale sun, scattered cumulus clouds. Nice day for a long, solitary drive into the country, especially when you had a partner and best friend who was getting married in a few days and who was turning everyone concerned into basket cases with his prenuptial mania... There wasn't much traffic on Highway 101 south of King City, and when I turned off at San Lucas there was no traffic at all... -- Bill Pronzini, Quarry I don’t quote this directly from Bill Pronzini, but rather from my friend Richard Mabry who wrote a recent post about the Rules of Writing . Richard identified a number of rules that Pronzini violated in this passage. He begins his book talking about weather; he writes in first person; he uses be verbs; he includes backstory and Richard also mentioned that he didn’t introduce tension early. I will respectfully disagree with that statement, because we see tension in that the narrator is out for a drive to get away from his friend. Rule v...

E ditor’s Note: Wouldn’t you know it? Fiction Friday falls on Christmas, of all days. I’m spending the day with my family and I figure most people are too. What dedication for you to come by this blog on Christmas! Rather than reward your dedication with a post that says that I won’t be posting today, I thought I would invite you to come with me and visit Sara and her family as they celebrate Christmas. Mark Jr. peered into the box—the last package—turned away from it and went back to the car he had been running across the hilly terrain of the couch. He mashed one of the buttons on top; the lights began to flash and the siren began to blare. “I guess that tells us what he thought of that,” Ellen said. She put her own gifts on the floor and stood up. “I’m going to go fix breakfast.” Her husband didn’t look up from his effort to affix a new scope to a riffle. Sara looked up briefly, but her eyes went back to the new book she had in her hand. “That is, if you guys want breakfast...

T he movie version of Holes isn't that far from the original story. I say that based on my memory of the movie and the book. I watched the movie version first. But as a storyteller, there are a number of things that stand out in the way the story was told in the movie and how Louis Sachar originally told it. The original story has a clear focus on Stanley Yelnats and the connections with the events so many decades earlier seem to be focused more on him. As I recall from the movie, a lot more emphasis was put on the events that caused the treasure to be hidden in the first place. In the book, we are told those things, but it doesn’t have quite the same poignancy to the death of the characters that the movie has. Good or bad, that’s the way it is. Given the nature of the story, we might think the story is a coming of age story or a love story of some kind. In actual fact, it is a whydunit . Throughout the story, we have more and more information revealed about why the boys ar...

I n case you haven't noticed, book titles are not unique. I generally track search results for the titles of my books. Anytime someone says something about one of my books, I want to know about it. The other day, search results showed up for <i>For the Love of a Devil</i>, but the author wasn’t me. For <i>And Thy House</i>, there’s no hope for uniqueness and I didn’t expect there to be, but what really got me thinking was when I saw two authors talking about <i>Thicker Than Blood</i>. One was new and one was old. One is a first book and one is the second book in a series. But it made me wonder if the publisher of the newer book gave it much thought when they  used the title. There are some advantages and disadvantages to using a previously used title. If there is a popular book with the same name, then your book may sell more copies, just because it happens to show up in the search results when someone types in the name. On the other hand, by...