Timothy's Thoughts

H ave you noticed how much we try to live up to the expectations of others? Authors have a lot of expectations placed on them. There are the expectations of the family. If you write a book, people expect you to get it published and make millions or at least thousands. There are the expectations of other authors. There are the expectations of agents and publishers. All of these expectations are driving toward one thing. The author is expected to write the next Harry Potter. The fact is that we can’t live up to the expectations of others. We must determine our own goals and strive to achieve them. I think of all the computer books I have sitting on my shelves at home. Some are great books and others leave something to be desired, but there’s not a one of them that has been hugely successful for the publisher. There are some very solid performers. There are some that almost any software engineer or electrical engineer will recognize, but there are no huge successes. The thing is that th...

W e often think of magic as something along the lines of a miracle. In the real world, magic is a bad thing because it puts peoples hopes in things that either have no ability to help them or have no desire to help them. But storybook magic is often a means by which a character is given something or an ability that he wouldn’t receive during the natural course of life. But suppose we wanted to apply a similar concept to a story that doesn’t have magic. Storybook magic is an ability of a character or object to do something that we don’t understand. In a more realistic setting, there are many people who have the ability to do things others can’t. In A Little Princess , the appearance of the fine things in her room seemed like magic, even though we know where it all came from. I was at a gas station a few weeks ago when a man showed up with a gas can and asked if I could put fifty cents or a dollar of gas in it. Other than it costing money, it was a small thing for me to go ahead and fi...

M agic is powered by children’s wishes. And those of adults too. Look at how many stories there are in which magic comes into a person’s life and it turns his world upside down. If you look, you’ll discover that someone has made a wish. Cinderella wished to go to the ball. Aladdin had three wishes. Charlie wished to visit the chocolate factory. There’s always a wish. Sometimes it comes in the form of a prayer either to God, Santa Claus, or some other being, but there is always a wish. The thing about a wish is that it acknowledges that the wisher has no or limited ability to accomplish what he would like to happen. Charlie was locked out of the chocolate factory and had no money to buy candy bars. Without the help of a higher power, he would have had no way of getting inside. I suppose wishes in stories are a parallel to prayer in real life. But wishes are fleeting. They have power for a while, but stories are about character change. The higher power in the story gives the character ...

I got up early this morning and having nothing better to do I read several blogs. I read Eat, Pray...Hate? at Girls Write Out , the gist of which is that people don't like the "truth" of some people's stories, even going so far as to criticize Eat, Pray, Love because the woman left her husband. To that post, I wrote a response saying that it is natural for readers to feel hurt when someone hurts someone they like. In this case, the writer of Eat, Pray, Love hurt her husband, who appears to have wanted the marriage to work, whatever his failing might have been. I said that readers will feel the story is unresolved if the person doesn't admit wrong doing and apologize to not only the other person but the reader. Of course, the character can get comeuppance and that works too (sometimes even better). But what got me is that I included a link to For the Love of a Devil and to a couple of Bible verses because I felt that For the Love of a Devil was relavant to ...

T oday, I want to continue the topic of Cinderella from yesterday, but I want to discuss Cinderella’s magic. Where does it come from? We don’t normally think of Cinderella having magic of her own, but magic is used to give her gifts. It appears to be in the control of a fairy godmother or a tree, depending on which version you read. Indirectly, the magic appears to come from her mother, who is watching over her from heaven. None of the stories make a huge deal about her mother, but some do talk about God and her mother looking down on her. In the Gimms’ version, the tree is planted on her mother’s grave and watered with Cinderella’s tears. Even the fact that some versions reference a fairy godmother alludes to a higher power. I don’t know much about godmothers, but my understanding is that they are to help protect their godchildren. In terms of storytelling, the power comes from none of those things but from Cinderella. Had Cinderella not been “pious and good,” I don’t think it woul...

S everal days ago, they topic of Cinderella came up on another blog. I won’t go into the details of that discussion, but one of the things I mentioned was that in all of the versions of Cinderella we see a selfless girl of humility and quiet strength. Some of the other commenters disagreed with that. I didn’t say that there, but I’ll say it here that to disagree with that is like arguing with a sign post. In all of the versions (not just the Disney version), Cinderella is treated like a servant by her step-mother and step-sisters. In the Grimms’ version, when her father wishes to bring the girls a gift, her sisters ask for fine things, but Cinderella requests only the first twig that brushes her father’s hat. She plants the twig at her mother’s grave and waters it with her tears. She is described as “pious and good.” While the stories don’t come out and say, “Cinderella was humble,” they don’t have to. The stories show us her humility and selflessness. As storytellers, there’s much ...

I t’s official, my top five posts for the past week, the past month and for all time are: 1. Review: WestBow Press 2. How to Describe Beauty 3. An Example Book Outline 4. The Meaning of the Cinderella Story 5. A Sample Synopsis I tried to post that same list in a comment on Michael Hyatt’s blog the other day, but it didn’t take. I think it must have gone in his spam file or something. His blog doesn’t like me very much. I think you can see the pattern. This blog is attracting aspiring writers more than it is attracting anyone else. Of course, that also means that this blog is a waste of time in terms of trying to sell books. I keep saying that I’m going to move this blog in the direction of attracting readers rather than authors, but the fact is that I don’t really know how. I tried Fiction Friday for a while. As you can see, none of those posts appear in the list above. They aren’t in the top ten either. In fact, the only post in the top ten that isn’t aimed at writers is...