Timothy's Thoughts

One of the writing concepts that some people have a hard time grasping is the concept of a protagonist and an antagonist . Many people have the idea that the protagonist is the good guy and the antagonist is the bad guy . While this is often the case, it is not the way we should understand the concept. The protagonist is principal character, but he can be either good or bad. The story will reveal which he is. The antagonist opposes what the protagonist is trying to accomplish and can be either good or bad. Sometimes in the development of a story it is helpful to consider various protagonists. We should ask which characters will change the most during the events of the story and who will push the story forward. I was looking at a story idea the other day in which a woman was going to show up on a doorstep and force her way into a family. I thought of her as the protagonist, but the story just wouldn’t come together the way I wanted. For the story to end with her a member of the family...

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...