Timothy's Thoughts

T he theme runs throughout the story from beginning to end. When watching television shows, I’ve noticed that whatever issue is being handled in the A-plot is also being handled in the B-plot. If the character in the A-plot is having an argument with his wife, we may see a character in the B-plot having an argument with her boyfriend. I began to wonder about this because it seem like we might be able to work backwards from some of the things we see happening in the B-plot and discover where the A-plot is headed. That isn’t a problem unless by doing so we reveal too much. Suppose that in our story a murder has taken place, but the reader doesn’t know who did it or why. In our B-plot, we reveal that the theme is about the importance of family. In our list of suspects we only have one person with a motive based around a family. In keeping with the theme, this person has to be the one to commit the crime. If the reader discovers this and has a rudimentary understanding of story structure,...

A friend of mine mentioned that her twin daughters were having a birthday and it got me to thinking about names. Parents want to give their children good names because they are likely to be stuck with the name for a very long time. We writers like to give our characters good names that fit the character. But I got to thinking about naming twins. A couple discovers the woman is pregnant and they begin thinking about names. Perhaps they settle on one—the others just aren’t good enough. Then the woman goes to the doctor and he says, “There’re two heartbeats in there.” Now the couple has to come up with another name. The day comes when the children are born and one gets one name and one gets the other. But who gets which name? Is it first come first served? I suppose it may be different for different folks, but when those two children are there in their parents’ arms, looking so much alike, there really isn’t much of a way to figure out which one should be Brad and which one should be Bri...

Y ou may have already seen this video elsewhere. If not, I recommend that you watch it and then come back and we’ll talk about it. The basic premise of the video is that while money is a motivator, people are also motivated by purpose. Give people enough money that they don’t need to be concerned about money and they will turn their attention to those things that seem to have purpose, when we’re talking about something that requires cognitive skills. While that may not be immediately obvious, I think it makes sense if we consider the logic carefully. Our first priority is survival. Without money we fear we won’t survive, but once that is taken care of we are free to consider other things. Applying This to Books From the standpoint of authors and writing, the application is obvious. We write, not because of money, but because of some greater purpose that we see in writing. We want money for our writing so we can write without concern about money. But what about for the book buyer? What ...

I recently saw a discussion about whether book two is easier to get published than book one. From my point of view, I think it is pretty obvious that it is. Just look at it in terms of years. If it takes ten years for an author to get the first book published and the contract for book two is in place even before book one reaches the shelves then it is obvious that the author didn’t have as much trouble getting the second published. But let’s look at why this is. The first reason is that the author already has an agent. Agents don’t really like signing new clients. What they really want is for their existing clients to make them tons of money. Life would be much easier for agents if they had seven clients who were making enough to live on rather than having twenty clients who are scraping by. If the agent has a client that a publisher liked in the past, the agent is going to push for publishers to publish that client again. An author with a traditionally published book is more likely t...

S ome time ago, Randy Alcorn posted a video about pornography. He likened giving a seventh grader unrestricted access to the Internet to buying a stack of pornographic magazines and storing them in his closet. In his comments he also talks about how men who have been looking at the airbrushed images they find in magazines will compare how their wives look to those images and their wives will never measure up. It got me to thinking about the books we write. Granted, a lot of romance books are mildly pornographic, but instead of thinking about that, consider the way we portray other things in our books. After reading our books, do people compare their own lives to the lives of our characters and regret that their lives don’t measure up? Consider the woman who reads a book about a couple. The man woos the woman with flowers and chocolates and by being attentive to her. The woman in the book returns the sentiment by cooking a nice meal, setting candles on the table. They talk late into the...

D isappointment comes from anticipating things that don’t happen. Events begin to take place and we anticipate what will happen next. A friend calls up, for example, saying that he’s going to be in town for a few days and would like to get together for a few hours. We look forward to that time, thinking about what we’ll do and the fun we’ll have. Then the day comes and we’re ready to go meet him, but we receive a phone call, “Sorry, I can’t make it, but something came up.” It hurts us when things like this happen. Things are rarely the way we imagine they will be. Sometimes they are worse, sometimes they are better, but if we aren’t careful disappointment will cloud our judgment of which is which. Because we are so disappointed that we didn’t get what we wanted, we fail to see that what we got is actually better. For the Christian who trusts in the Lord, we can have confidence that though disappointment may come all things will work out for our good. There are things that we want so mu...

W hat is a story? There are several different ways to look at a story. How we perceive a story helps us to set our goals when writing a story. One way to look at a story is as the actions of the villain as told by the lead . We often think of the story as being the lead’s story, but when we consider how much of the lead’s life we ignore we might question that. However, when we look at it as the villain’s story it begins to make sense. Look at the story of Cinderella for example. Her father is gone. It isn’t clear why. The storyteller may throw some reason in there, but it doesn’t really matter why he is gone and yet that would have been a very important event in Cinderella’s life. The reason we don’t put much emphasis on that event is because it has very little to do with the story we’re telling. Stories are about disturbances in the lead’s life, so that’s why it becomes the villain’s story as told by the lead. If we take all the stuff that villains do to a particular person and bind ...