Timothy's Thoughts

I normally only post Monday through Friday, but today I left the relative peace and calm of Cowtown and made my way over to Dallas for the Christian Book Expo (CBE). I’ll start with the good. I went primarily to meet a few people I hadn’t meet before, but I knew I didn’t want to take in all of it, so I looked through the schedule and picked a timeslot with something worth doing. I took my copy of The Tender Scar and had Richard Mabry sign it. Then I wandered around the display area for a while. I met Mike Hyatt for the first time, though I wouldn’t ask him to verify that. He was talking to someone else at the time—a white haired man with a gray beard. I didn’t recognize the man and Mike didn’t introduce him. We’ll just call him Santa Claus. And then I went to listen to Rick Lemons talk about his book The Race: From Pit Row to Victory Lane . Let me say something about that. I hadn’t met Rick before today, though we have attended some of the same meetings. I hadn’t heard him speak, but ...

Block quotes in novels are problematic. You know how it goes; you have a character who has received a letter. You want the reader to know what is in the letter and it is too long to put between quote marks, so you drop down, adjust the margins of the paragraph and include the text of the letter. Or maybe the character has written something and you think the reader needs to see it. Now, here’s the problem. While you have thought out the content of the block quote with much care, the reader skims through it. Even with adequate introduction, readers tend to see block quotes as reference material. We will only read it in detail if we determine we need it. We might have a tendency to think that by including the full text of a letter or some other type of writing we are showing the reader the contents. This is inaccurate. Essentially, a block quote is an info dump. Info dumps are always a problem when they are not handled well. The longer the quote, the worse it becomes. To be of value, a b...

We’ve all heard the advice, write what you know at one time or another. I remember hearing it in an English class. Write what you know takes a lot of heat from writers. Some have said it is the worst piece of advise they have ever received. We can point to writers who wrote about things they didn’t know and yet pulled it off. Take Jurassic Park for example. It is obvious to any computer geek that the writers didn’t know enough about computers, but that didn’t keep them from writing a good movie. Still, of all the rules of writing, write what you know might ought to be the one that goes right up there at the top of the list. It’s true that many writers have developed stories around characters who look remarkably like the writer prior to the time he chose to sit down at the keyboard and pound at the keys, but we can’t make every character look like us, act like us, have the same job as us. That would be very boring. And we don’t have time to go try our hand at every job that we might...

Give me a reason to say, yes. Anyone who has ever received a query letter has fodder to tell horror stories about just how bad a query letter can be. One author believes God guided his hand as he wrote. Another believes that if the agent or publisher says not it is because he is demon possessed. The stories go on. But then we find authors like Tosca Lee who do well with their books, but publicly accredit some bad things that have happened to Satan trying to keep the book from reaching publication. How is that different from some of the stuff we see in bad queries? It isn’t. Though I don’t wish to make light of Satan, the real difference between Tosca Lee and the unknown author who makes a similar statement in a query letter is that she provided sufficient reason for the publisher to say, yes. The things that will make a publisher say, yes, are platform and premise with some indication that the author can deliver on the promise . Platform is obvious, since we talk about it so much. I...

I love looking at web search keywords. Sometimes they make you think. I recently had a hit on my blog from someone in Mayagez, Puerto Rico with the search phrase when the protagonist is the antagonist . That gave me something to think about. Is it possible? If so, just what are we talking about? My first thought was of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . But, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are essentially two completely different characters that just happen to share the same body. I also thought of Agatha Christie’s Endless Night , but decided that it also falls short of having the protagonist as the antagonist . Where we do see it is in Romans chapter seven, near the end where Paul is talking about the war between the flesh and the inward man. The chapter ends with the statement, “So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.” This is the struggle of the Christian, but how does that translate into a story that we might write in a book? What we have is a dupl...

It often surprises me that I receive as many hits as I do for an article on my website, The Inciting Incident . Oddly enough, Google only returns 105,000 hits as I write this. It makes me wonder if there might be a lot more that’s worth saying about the subject. The interest in the subject seems to exceed the amount of information available. Definition of Inciting Incident - an event that motivates the protagonist to take action to change his current situation Just to be clear, the inciting incident never takes place on page one of a novel. This is because page one and several of the pages that follow are taken up with defining the current situation of the protagonist for our readers. The inciting incident occurs approximately one tenth of the way into the novel, but it may move slightly one direction or the other. In Where the Red Fern Grows , the inciting incident occurs on page 18 of 249. I sat down on an old sycamore log, and started thumbing through the leaves. On the back pa...

But seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you. – Matthew 6:33 The other day Rachelle Gardner blogged about preparing for success in publishing . The point of the post was that once an author signs a contract with a publisher there will be demands placed on the author’s time. Near the middle of her post she writes: Do you participate in several church or social activities (Bible study, weekly golf date, book club, whatever)? Understand you may need to curtail them for a season... or permanently. First, let me say that anyone who chooses to write is not going to be able to do that without changing one’s schedule. If nothing else, an author will end up watching less television or reading fewer books. That goes with the territory. The problem I see here is the recommendation that a Christian author remove herself from church activities, including Bible study, “for a season…or permanently.” We could say that this is a matter of prio...