Timothy's Thoughts

C all it writing research if you will, but I was looking at the question of putting a father’s name on a baby’s birth certificate (not mine, I assure you) and became bombarded with websites in which unmarried women are asking about whether they should or should not put the father’s name on the birth certificate. Being naïve like I am, the thought had never crossed my mind that a mother who knew the name of the father would leave it off because she thought it would prevent him from laying claim to the baby or something like that. As I perused those websites, it shocked me how self-centered people can be. These women had not thought for what would be best for the father of their child. They had no thought for what would be best for what would be best for the child. All they cared about was what would make their own lives easier. You would think that the baby was nothing more than a possession and the baby’s father was nothing more than a means of obtaining that possession. People find ou...

J . R. R. Tolkien stated that critics of escapism confuse the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter . His claim was that no one would scorn a prisoner for trying to get out and go home. He was talking specifically about fairy-stories, but I like his terminology and I think it beneficial to consider these terms in light of any form of fiction. Two Types of Escapism Escape of the Prisoner The prisoner we’re talking about here is the reader, so we must consider what prison he has found himself in. There are many kinds of prisons, but none is as depressing as everyday life. A man gets up in the morning, eats breakfast, kisses his wife goodbye, goes to work, returns home, kisses his wife, eats supper and goes to bed. Another prison is the unhappy marriage. It goes something like the first prison, but he doesn’t kiss his wife and he may know she’s spending part of the day with another man. We understand a man wanting to escape that prison. We can write stories that keep tha...

T he maxim is that people perform at the level they are recruited. It applies in more places than you might think. Consider the difference between blogs and books. A reader discovers a book in the book store, pays for it and takes it home. The reader discovers useful information, decides this author really knows what he is talking about and reads the rest of the book, looking for similar jewels. Another reader discovers a blog through an internet search engine and reads the same information, storing that information away, but after reading the post he clicks away. I’ve been thinking about serialization. In Dickens’ day, serialization was a common way to present a book to readers. A magazine would print one chapter at a time, encouraging readers to come back each week or month for the next installment of the story. If the book were printed and bound, the readers might purchase the book to finish the story more quickly or to find the chapters they missed. Today, it seems like the blog wo...

Last week, I mentioned the Rachel Held Evans sees 1 Timothy 2 as one of her least favorite Bible passages—in particular verses 11-14, so I felt I should discuss the passage more completely. She isn't the only one. This is one of the more controversial passages in the Bible. There isn't much controversy in what it says. Paul very clearly states, "Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." You can go look it up in the Greek if you like, but that's pretty much what it says. The controversy is over what we're supposed to do with what Paul said. There are enough churches with women preachers to tell us that not all churches take this to mean that women should actually be silent at church. The range of ideas spans from this meaning women shouldn't say anything, to women shouldn't teach men at church, to this only applies to wives, to the passage doesn'...

O n Amazon.com I read a review for the book Evolving In Monkey Town by Rachel Held Evans. When I saw the review, only 1 of 4 people voted to say it was useful, but I felt the reviewer presented some interesting points.   But after reading the book, I felt a bit sad for Evans. She doesn't seem too sure about anything really. She's not sure she's saved (pg.133), she's not sure there's such a thing as a biblical worldview (pg.193), and she's not sure that hell is eternal (pg.224). While I haven't read the book, I've watched the book video with the author discussing the book. The basic premise seems to be that she has found a way to hold onto her faith even though she has many questions about the things she had been taught. I'll have to say that as I watched the video and read the sales material I kept wanting to offer a quote from The Princess Bride , "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." In this case, ...

V eggieTales is one of the best children’s entertainment brands out there. One of the techniques they use in story creation is retelling Bible stories. Unlike the original stories, the VeggieTales version has vegetables as the characters. Obviously, they have to make modifications to fit their situation. Because they are operating in a world of fantasy already, it isn’t a far stretch for the writers to place the characters in which they are using swords to play out the skit one time and drive a car in another, giving them the freedom to follow the Bible version of the story quite closely. Things get more complicated when we try to fit a retelling into a realistic modern world, but the technique is worth considering. I used this technique in For the Love of a Devil and I’ll tell you that it wasn’t easy. We read the Bible and it doesn’t seem so strange to see a woman leave Hosea for other men, see him continue to care for her and eventually buy her back when she becomes a slave. We so...

B efore you do anything else you should write a brief statement about what your book is about. You shouldn’t write the first paragraph, the first sentence or even the first word without doing that. And when I say brief, I mean brief. Get it down to one short sentence. There isn’t a bestselling novel out there that can’t be summarized with one brief sentence. All the great movies can be summarized with one brief sentence. When you think about it, it makes sense. If someone asks someone about what they’re reading or a movie they’ve seen word of mouth is more likely to work if the reader can summarize the book in just a few words. What’s Beauty and the Beast about? It’s about a young woman who is forced to live in castle with a beast. The Hunt for Red October ? It’s about a Soviet submarine captain defecting to the U.S. without telling anyone what he is doing. But if someone asks us about a story and all we say something like “it’s complicated,” our hopes of them remembering the story ar...