Timothy's Thoughts

Here’s a rule, every Superhero needs a good sidekick. We have seen this work often enough. In the show Lois and Clark , Lois played Superman’s sidekick. Watson was sidekick to Sherlock Holmes. Jane Marple in many of Agatha Christie’s books had various sidekicks from a police officer who just wasn’t as smart as her to one of her friends to some young man who could do some running for her. But why is the sidekick so important? The superhero has trouble connecting with the world. The superhero is better than the lowly people around him and though they men wish they were as strong and the women want to have his baby, they want him to stay aloof. They don’t want to think of him as living somewhere as a common man with his own problems. They want him to always wear the cape and always be on guard. The sidekick sees things that most people don’t wan to see. The sidekick sees the superhero with his hair down. The superhero can talk to the sidekick. This is an important aspect of all sidekicks,...

Here are the first three chapters of For the Love of a Devil . I am posting these hoping that they will entice you to purchase the book. If not, then maybe they will serve their purposes by helping you decide if the book is right for you. The book is about a beleaguered English teacher, Geoff Mywell, longs for the love he once thought his wife had for him, but when she leaves him for another man on their fifth anniversary, he is forced into the life of a single parent. He isn't sure whether to give in to the relief of having her out of the house or be sorry that the marriage seems broken beyond repair. He goes after her as she moves from one man to the next and eventually falls into prostitution. Geoff must enter the darkness and pull her back or lose the woman he loves forever.

There is a very unheated debate over whether to outline a novel before writing it or not. For me, it is easier if I know where I am going, so I create an outline. Also, as I noted in a previous post, if you ever need to write a synopsis, an outline can cut your workload significantly. There are different ways to do an outline. I find that I describe the current state more than I describe the action. The action will come as the manuscript begins to take shape. Below, I have included my outline for For the Love of a Devil . Some of you may recognize the high level outline as coming from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat . If you haven’t read that book, you really should. The numbers beside each heading are word count totals. Blake Snyder defines when things should happen by page count, but novelists tend to think more in terms of word count. My goal was an 80,000 word novel. I went a little above, so the work count is a little off, but the intent was that it would tell me when I f...

Last week I mentioned the writer’s platform . It is a term that is thrown around a lot, but it isn’t always used in a meaningful way. The dictionary definition of a platform is a position of authority or prominence that provides a good opportunity for doing something . Let’s consider what this means. A platform is not the same as a fan base . Many people look at celebrities. A movie star’s platform is based on his prominence. He can be as stupid as a fence post, but people will listen to him because of his prominence. People start to think that this means that how many people you can get to listen is more important than what you know. If we look at the other piece of the definition, a platform is a position of authority . Do people really listen to the political statements that movie stars make? Not really. Some of them have a lot to say, but most people just ignore them, but if a Senator gets up to speak, people listen. They may not agree, but they listen. The Senator has a positio...

I watched the new Knight Rider the other night. I suppose it was the pilot. Pilots are notoriously bad, but this show has some major problems that will keep me from watching it again. The original Knight Rider was a classic Superhero story with KITT as Michael Knight’s sidekick as well as his source of strength. Episode after episode, we knew what to expect; Michael and KITT would swoop in and help the underdog. Then Michael would have to leave because the life of a Superhero is a lonely life. The new Knight Rider has an updated KITT, which can transform in to any FORD product. The special effects are better, but the writing is terrible. Instead of being one man against the evil in the world, the new show appears to be a large company against the evil in the world and part of that evil is in the company. More realistic, perhaps, but who wants to see that? We want to believe that we could be Michael Knight with a fancy car and we could right the wrongs that we see around us. If that wa...

An author writes a non-fiction book and sends it to an agent. The agent sends back a reply, You have made the subject easy to understand, but I am unable to offer representation at this time because your platform is weak. The author looks at this response and asks, what is a platform and how do I get one? Many authors go at this process backwards. A platform is not something you need to build if you hope to sell a book you have already written. The platform is what gives you the authority to write the book in the first place. It also makes it a whole lot easier to write the book. Let’s look at an extreme example. Suppose a fourteen-year-old student writes a book about how to drive a car. True, the student may have some very good thoughts on the subject, but without having ever driven a car, he isn’t going to have the experience that someone like the current NASCAR points leader has. The guy from NASCAR has a platform. The student has opinions. We develop platforms in many ways. Someti...

As I was going home the other day, I saw a Porsche traveling very fast down the freeway, passing the rest of the traffic. It wasn’t long and a Jeep pulled in behind the Porsche and began to chase it through traffic. “That isn’t very wise,” I thought. The Porsche may be the one that a friend of mine owns. If it is, I can tell you that she has the speeding tickets to prove that she owns a Porsche. And if that isn’t enough, even though it is never safe to drive fast in a lot of slower traffic, a Porsche is designed for high speed while an SUV is not. My advice to the guy in the Jeep, “don’t chase the Porsche.” We can apply that to writing also. Writers know about the rules . If you have listened to anything I have said on the topic, you know that I prefer the idea of understanding the reason for each of the rules and applying that understanding to writing rather than either following the rules blindly or simply throwing them out. I have seen in the comments of some unpublished and rare b...