Timothy's Thoughts

When I write a book, I work with an outline. I’ve tried to work without one, but I kept getting lost and forgetting what I needed to say and what I had already said. The outline for my current work in progress is shown in the picture above. I use the FreeMind mind mapping tool. On the left I keep little details about the characters. Lizi Mills, for example, has blond hair. Donna Jacobs has black eyes. That’s a fact that I must have mentioned early in the manuscript, but I don’t recall saying that. I’ll see it in the second draft, but keeping that fact handy will help keep me from saying something about her piercing blue eyes. On the right side I structure my outline around Blake Snyder’s beat sheet and it essentially replaces the storyboard that he recommends. My method is constantly changing and out of five manuscripts I haven’t done it exactly the same way twice. I put a word count total next to each section of the outline, rather than a page count. When working with novels, a word ...

When we write there are things hidden there, under the surface, that the reader never sees and yet these things have a great impact on what the reader sees. Among these undercurrents is the back-story. When we plunk a character down in a story he comes from somewhere. He went to school somewhere or he didn’t go to school. He was born in a hospital or somewhere else. He has ex-girlfriends or not. Many things shape the character’s life, but we don’t tell the reader about these things unless they become relevant to the story. Who cares about the character’s ex-girlfriend if he doesn’t know where she lives, but if she parks her car in front of his house every night then it just might be interesting. Another thing hidden below the surface is what I will call the author’s message. When we write a story, we don’t just sit down with our characters and ask them to describe their day. Nor do we describe the most interesting periods of their day. Instead, we create a day for the character that mo...

There are a lot of houses in the publishing industry. I glanced through my personal library and saw these names on the spines of books: Random House, Bethany House, Charisma House, Portland House and my personal favorite, The Chicken House. If that wasn’t enough, Thomas Nelson’s logo is a house and they put it on the spine of pretty much every book they publish. The Thomas Nelson house is a strange little house--four stories and an attic, but it’s a little bigger at the top than it is the bottom. It looks a little eerie. The one you see here isn’t their logo by a 3D image based on the drawing. It still looks eerie. With all of these houses, I started to wonder just what kind of house this thing is. I’ve decided that it’s a doll house. You know how some children will play by making up things for their dolls or “action figures” to do? I had the little Lego men when I as a kid and I made up things for them to do. Isn’t that what novelist do? The characters in our books are nothing more th...

This is a bonas post, if you will. I'll follow the lead of others such as Michael Hyatt and post links to some of my more popular posts. I don't track statistics for the whole year, so this is based more on a random sample. The following are my most popular blog posts: How to Describe Beauty An Example Book Outline Protagonist/Antagonist "To Be" Verbs -- To Use or Not To Use A Sample Synopsis Show, Don't Tell - Confusion in Action Should Christians Support Prayer in Public Schools? How to Impress God The Faithful Sidekick If I took the figures for the whole year, #4 would probably be at the top, but its popularity was earlier in 2008.

A few days ago, Rachelle Gardner reposted a post about encouragement . I heard of one pastor who said that he doesn’t believe church staff workers need encouragement because only those who are truly passionate about what they do should be doing what they do. I won’t go that far because there are things that get us down from time to time, but I have seen enough church workers put in long hours at a job that only the Lord will notice to know that there is some truth in what he said. Even if he were completely correct, we should encourage each other because God commands it (Hebrews 10:25). Rachelle was talking about the need writers have for encouragement. They are looking for someone to say, “you can do it,” or something like that. I was sitting in my living room and looking at the painting you see here. If you can’t tell by the signature on the painting, I am the artist. When I painted it, I wasn’t trying to paint something that someone would purchase or hang in an art gallery. I didn’t...

When I see writers ask agents questions like “Is it ok to introduce a passage of showing with a passage of telling?” it makes me think that they are missing the point. While show, don’t tell can be very good advice, it is useless if people don’t understand how to apply it. Before a foot race, there may be a lot of talk among those who are running. Hopefully it is good natured, but one runner might tell another runner, “I could run backwards and still beat you.” That is telling. It is just talk unless the runner actually runs the race backwards and wins. In that case it is showing. Character is revealed by action. You could tell your children that you love them every day, but the truth isn’t revealed until we see whether you are the type of parent who fixes your kids’ lunches or who slaps them in the face every day when they get home from school because you know they must have done something to deserve it. The same is true of fictional characters. Their nature is revealed through the a...

Evaluating our own writing is always a difficult thing; we are always too critical or not critical enough. Even so, it is a necessity and when I look at my own writing, including the three novels in print and my current work in progress, I can see similarities among there differences. If you have read the three novels then you know that they are very different in their focus. Searching for Mom is about young Sara’s attempt to find a mother through an online dating service. How to Become a Bible Character shows a teenager’s desire to receive recognition for his service to the Lord, through the eyes of his youth pastor. For the Love of a Devil is Hosea’s story told in a current day setting. My work in progress is about a mother who takes her daughter to meet the girl’s father. All of these are similar in the role the family and friends play in the outcome of the story. Any of these could have had a much darker tone then they do, especially For the Love of a Devil . What really stands ...