Timothy's Thoughts

A s I was driving to work the other day I saw a city bus. The lights were on inside so I could see all of the seats. They were all empty. But there was the driver, following the route, not knowing whether there would be someone at the next stop or not. I wondered how he feels about that. Does he feel like he is wasting his time? Sure, he gets paid, but what’s the point? It made me thing of writers. Most writers have very few readers and it make you wonder what’s the point? There’s no money in it, so the bus driver has one up on us, but we keep on writing. I suppose we do that because we hope that it will turn into something great and sell a bunch of copies, just like the bus driver hopes that someone will get on the bus at the next stop. But see, the bus driver’s job isn’t to drive people from stop to stop as much as it is to provide the opportunity for people to ride the bus. If the driver quit because no one was on the bus then people wouldn’t be able to make the choice one day to le...

W hat is the difference between a writer and an author ? In a recent comment to Rachelle Gardner’s blog, one person implied that it is pretentious to call one’s self an author until one has a publishing contract. Comments like that leave me feeling a little uneasy because it makes published authors to be snobs. I have four books in print. No one will say that I am not the author of those books, so that makes me an author . That doesn’t, however, make me better than the lowly writer who has no books in print. Either there is no difference between a writer and an author or we need a better way of drawing the distinction. I suggest we go back to the beginnings of the word. The word author comes from the word autor (“father”). An author is the father of a work. An author is the person who began or originated the work. You will recall the use of the word in Hebrews 12:2, which describes Jesus as the “author and finisher of our faith.” As we frequently use the term author , an aut...