Timothy's Thoughts

Much is said about people’s short attention spans. Someone recently asked why we are able to read novels, but we aren’t able to read websites. It made me think a little. What are the major differences between these two types of reading? Here’s what I came up with. We can read a novel anywhere, but a website requires a computer. When reading a novel, we have a well-defined goal of getting to the end of the book. With a website, we have no starting point and no ending point, so we can stop whenever we choose. With a novel or even a non-fiction book, we are reading to learn what the author has said. With a website, we are looking for one piece of information like a needle in a haystack. Once we find it, we declare ourselves done and move on. What other differences can you think of between the two forms of reading?

Fiction is harder to write than non-fiction, or it should be. When you write fiction, you have to make it up as you go. When a writer writes non-fiction, he should know his subject well enough that he doesn’t have to make anything up, he just has to figure out the best order for the information and find a way to get the point across to the reader. Let me show you what I mean. A college professor has spent years studying fish. One day the dean comes to him and says, “I want you to write a book. It will make the college look better.” Now the professor could decide to write about the history of Egypt. “That will give me a chance to learn about Egypt.” But he won’t do that. Instead, he will go to his files, pull out his work from the past several years and he will write about fish. In all likelihood, he could write much of the book from memory, but he will use his work and the work of others to insure the accuracy of his statements. That brings us back to the subject of platform. Our platf...

When someone asks how to know when a novel is complete, I always say that when it is good enough that the author wants to read it just for the enjoyment of reading it then it is done. Another question we might ask is when we know we have a story idea that is worth writing. Before I even knew that someone else had written a novel even loosely based on the story of Hosea, I fell in love with the story and decided that I wanted to tell the story that has since become For the Love of a Devil . As always, the first draft was terrible and I asked myself what I was thinking, but after several edits I got the book to the point where I can enjoy the story. Now I am considering my next project. As I look at some of the ideas that pop into my head, I keep wondering if they will make a good story. I think the key to my next project will be to develop a story for which I love the concept. If I love the concept, after some hard work, I will then be able to produce a manuscript that I love. That does...

Yesterday, I talked about large and small publishers. In case you missed it, the point was that large publishers can produce a higher quality product and market it more efficiently than a small publisher. Before you conclude that small publishers have nothing going for them, let me discuss some reasons why a small publisher can be a good thing. No publishing company is very large, when compared to businesses in other industries. Random House has less than 6,000 employees and the big boy in the Christian publishing world, Thomas Nelson, has somewhere around 700. The reason I point that out is because we really can’t claim that small publishers are more personal. They are all small enough to have a personal feel to them. One of the real advantages that a small publisher has over a large publisher has to do with risk. Suppose I am a small publisher with five employees. A manuscript comes along and we fall in love with it, but it may seem offensive to our customer base. In fact, it might b...

There is a perception among some people that smaller companies are better because they have a smaller overhead. I noticed this when talking about building contractors. A friend of mine thought a large company would tack more onto the contract to cover the cost of paying office personnel. I noticed that Jeff Gerke holds that same view as it relates to publishers. Traditional Christian publishing companies have so many employees and so much overhead that they have to sell at least 5,000 units of any book in order to break even. MLP has one staff member and has such a low overhead that it needs to sell only 250 units of any title to break even. (Jeff Gerke, MLP Website ) Jeff’s assertion is that a company like Random House, the parent company of one of his former employers, with about 6,000 employees or even the much smaller Christian publisher Thomas Nelson, with about 700 employees, can’t make a profit from a book that sells only a small number of copies. That's an interesting claim...

For many years, Stargate: SG1 was a relatively popular television show. Eventually, the producers spun off Stargate: Atlantis . The two shows were very different and very much alike. On the DVD special features for one season, someone related to the shows made the comment that they viewed the shows as taking place in the same universe. Just because things are happening on Atlantis and we can’t see Stargate Command doesn’t mean that things aren’t happening back there. When we think of our stories as taking place within the same universe, it gives our backstory more depth. Even if books aren’t part of the same series, tying the story back to another book gives the reader the sense that the universe of our story is a much bigger place. We could have a story that is set in a small town and we might feel like that small town is all there is, but if one of the characters mentions a sister from Dallas that has a major role on another book, the world begins to take shape for the reader. The r...

If you have paid attention lately, you probably know that I am a fan of Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat . A big part of that is because he views writing in a similar way to how I viewed it before I read his book. If there is any book that should be recognized for its crossover potential, it his Save the Cat . I first came across the book after hearing the author of a computer book refer to it as indispensable to her work. Many novelists are using this book as a guide. The truly fascinating thing is that Save the Cat bears the subtitle The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need . That’s right, Save the Cat is a book about screenwriting. Obviously, there are many similarities in all forms of storytelling and that explains why there is so much crossover. It makes little different whether a writer puts a save the cat scene in a novel, a script or a computer manual, it will have the same affect of making someone look good. The beats Blake says are in all good screenplays are easy to fin...