Timothy's Thoughts

I really don’t expect that I’ll ever be an A-list author. And I’m fine with that. I’ve made some observations about a similar environment, that of preachers. There are a number of A-list pastors out there. You can hear most of them on the radio or read their books. Some of them are great speakers and provide great entertainment. They can attract thousands of people each week. But here’s the interesting thing, if someone were to ask me to name the best pastor living today there isn’t a single A-list preacher that would come to mind. Of course, my own pastor would come to mind, but if I broadened my field of view to include other churches, the pastors that would come to mind mostly pastor small churches. A few of the men that come to mind pastor larger churches, but none are A-list preachers. There is a simple truth that we so often forget. God uses people who are weak to accomplish his work in order to show himself strong. I truly believe that he has put some of his best men in some o...

W e want our characters to be fish out of water. You must realize, of course, that I’m an expert on fish out of water. But that has nothing to do with writing. Often, when we look at the story structure we find that the second quarter of the story is when the protagonist is the most out of his element. In Cinderella this is when she makes her appearance at the ball. In Beauty and the Beast this is where Belle goes to live in the beast’s castle. It is always the case that we go from a character being within his element, but his element is killing him to him being out of his element and having to learn something to survive, or so it would seem. It’s interesting, but there is a whole class of stories that don’t follow that model. In fact, it is reversed. Look at the detective story. In the detective story, our protagonist begins as a fish out of water, but when the mystery appears he really hits his stride. The detective protagonist is too much for the ordinary world. Look at Diagnosis...

Y esterday, I read that publishers are accepting 1-2% of the books submitted to them, including those submitted by agents. The same blog post stated that 1-5% of self-published books are being picked up by traditional publishers. On the surface, this makes it appear that a self-published book is twice as likely to be selected by a traditional publisher as a book that has an agent. I want to take a closer look at this, but before we go too far, I want to point out that these numbers may not be completely accurate and it isn’t always easy to compare the self-published path to the traditionally published path. Still, if were willing to accept some uncertainty, this “fact” is interesting. Considering that publishers don’t like accepting unsolicited manuscripts without an agent, it isn’t too much of a stretch to assume that publishers are accepting 2% of the agented books submitted to them. But what is that in terms of the likelihood that one particular book—your book—will be picked up by ...

M y research on the subject is by no means scientific, but my observations indicate that most authors aren’t interested in learning how to write, just in getting whatever they’ve written published. I base that statement on the fact that I get far more traffic and comments from people looking for information about getting published than the people who are looking for ways to improve their own writing. I have naïvely hoped that by posting about writing I would be able to spur some discussion about writing. I thought maybe someone would disagree with me on a few things and it would get interesting, but that has not been the case. What I have found, however, is that people are very interested in posts I’ve written about the details of getting published. Let’s face it folks, getting published is easy and cheap. With a little knowhow, you can get anything you want published in book form and available for sale around the world within a few days. But convincing other people that they want to ...

R ecently, I’ve been thinking about three words, blessing , praise , and worship . In those three words we have two pairs. We often use blessing and praise in a similar way. The Bible tells us to praise God and it also tells us to bless God. And we often talk about praise and worship. But as we consider these words, I think few people use blessing and worship correctly while praise isn’t used enough. The reason I say that is that I believe many churches are doing a lot of praise while forgetting about blessing and worship. Praise is an easy word to understand. When a child does something good, we praise him for it. We never praise a child for something that he will do in the future. The same is true when we talk about praising God. We don’t praise God for the things he is going to do, but when we talk or sing about the great things he has done for us, that is praise. The song says, “Praise him! Praise him, Jesus our blessed redeemer. For our sins he suffered and bled and died.”...

H ow do we make a character likeable? It isn’t always an easy task and yet we need people to like a character or they won’t stick with him throughout the story. By like I mean that readers want to know more about him, not that they want to be his friend. It isn’t as easy as making the character the good guy. Jar Jar Binks is perhaps the most despised character in the Star Wars franchise and yet he is one of the good guys. Conversely, the television show Dexter is built around a serial killer. I haven’t watched more than a few minutes of the show, but it seems that he is a likeable character. Blake Snyder used to talk about making a character likeable through the use of a device he called the save the cat moment. Essentially, this works by having the character do something good, such as saving a cat, when we’re introduced to the character. Whatever bad stuff the character might do later, we’ll always remember that there’s something good about him, there’s something worth saving. In ...

W hen you blog, sometimes things you say take you by surprise. The thing that surprised me about yesterday’s post was the statement that many story ideas begin with the inciting incident . I believe that’s a useful thing to know because it helps us know where we are and what we need to do. The inciting incident is a great starting point for the story idea because it allows us to ask the question of how we, other people, or our characters would handle the situation if something happened. If a child is killed in a hit and run accident, one person might lobby for a new traffic light, while another person might hunt down the driver and kill him with her car. The inciting incident is the same in both cases, but the story is very different.