Timothy's Thoughts

W hen I was a kid, we used to go to these meetings. At some of these meetings someone would ask people to tell about the time when they were saved—give a testimony. “I was in a cotton patch when I felt the Lord dealing with me,” one person might say. “Before I was saved, I played guitar in a bar, but when the Lord saved me, he saved my guitar too,” I remember another man saying. “The church was in revival services all week and I was under conviction. On that last day, I was afraid I wouldn’t live through the day. I was out in the watermelon patch and I told the Lord that if he’d let me live I’d give my heart to him that night,” another testimony goes. There were many more. Some of them were truly fascinating and all I could think about is that if someone asked me to give my testimony it would sound so unimportant compared to the others. I was eight years old when I accepted Christ. I wasn’t in a cotton patch, in the cow pasture or even at church. I had my own room, a tiny space that ha...

E very novel begins with the status quo . It sounds boring, doesn’t it? It had better not be or we’ll lose our readers. Actually, the status quo is just what your protagonist’s life is like before he reaches the crisis of the inciting incident . If your protagonist happens to be James Bond, the status quo might include blowing things up and kissing a few girls. In many romances, the status quo shows a woman who has it all together, running her own business, doing well for herself, certainly not in need of a man. Or does she? She goes home to her cat and cooks a microwave dinner. There are these little hints that her life isn’t what she would like for it to be or needs it to be. This part of the novel is where we define the problems that must be solved. She is coping, but for how much longer? There’s no way around it, the status quo is not good enough. Something has to change or we won’t have a story, but for argument, let’s suppose nothing changes. The status quo keeps going. Th...

T he Almost True Story of Ryan Fisher follows the path of a real estate agent who is struggling until he realizes the power of marketing himself as a Christian. One thing leads to another and he begins attending church, because that’s what Christians do. But it doesn’t stop there. The real money isn’t in selling real estate as a Christian, but in pastoring a church. It isn’t long before Ryan Fisher goes off and starts his own church, a church that doesn’t offer salvation for free, a church modeled after his own heart, because you see, Ryan Fisher isn’t saved. I was somewhat disappointed when I began reading this book. The Almost True Story of Ryan Fisher has been billed as satire, so I cracked the spine expecting a good satire. The purpose of satire is to point out what is wrong with what people do. It typically shows these actions at an extreme, so that while the story may seem unbelievable, there is no mistaking the real life reference. Rob Stennett does not give us this. In fact, ...

I n the summer of 1995, a co-worker told me of an idea he had for a pre-lit Christmas tree. He only told me of the idea after I assured him that I wouldn’t repeat it. His plan was to go invent the thing. True to my word, I kept my silence, but a few years later, practically every artificial tree on the market was pre-lit. To my knowledge, my friend wasn’t responsible for any of them. A few weeks ago, I was looking through some of the novels that are scheduled for release and I saw one that had the same premise as one I had seen earlier. The characters were different, the setting was different, but it was the same story, told by two separate authors. Great minds think alike, or so the old saying claims. We come up with these ideas and then discover that someone else has been thinking along the same lines. Some people find this very upsetting. “That was my idea! He stole my idea!” But it might not be a case of someone stealing at all. It could be that we are all exposed to the same glob...

I like happy endings, but no happy ending is ever as affective as a tragic ending. Sometimes a story just needs to come to a tragic conclusion. There’s several ways to do this. One way is to have action to the end, but the heroes just aren’t up to the task. This is somewhat common with the older nuclear weapon movies. Our hero is trying to prevent an explosion, time runs out, there is a flash of white light and we fade to black. Game over. It works, but it doesn’t give the audience time to think about what just happened. A reader puts the novel down and starts thinking about doing laundry instead. The audience needs a breather between the tragic event and the actual end. Not a long breather, a few pages or so, but enough to respect the reader’s mourning over the loss of a character. Suppose a character decides life isn’t worth it and jumps from a bridge. We know he’s dead, but the story goes on and we find something that indicates he may not be dead. Then they find his body and sure e...

F or some time now, the de facto standards for measuring a novel’s quality has been in terms of whether it is a page turner or the reader couldn’t put it down. The formula for creating such a book is simple. Never satisfy the reader’s curiosity until the final page. But I don’t want to talk about that. Instead, I want to walk about how non-page-turner, poorly written books can make it to the top of the bestseller lists. Several months ago, I visited a forum and someone asked the question, “Has anyone read The Shack ? What did you think of it?” I hadn’t heard of it at the time, so I did a little looking around and discovered that it was self-published and yet it had the appearance of a book that was going to do well. At the time, it hadn’t hit the top of any charts yet, but it was on its way up. I bought a copy, just so I would be knowledgeable enough to discuss it. I don’t mean to discuss the ills of The Shack here, other than to say that it is no great surprise that the major Christ...

S ome days ago, Richard Mabry blogged about Donald Maass' book The Fire In Fiction: Passion, Purpose, And Technique To Make Your Novel Great . I went to Amazon.com and read a portion of the book, saw a few things that made me think I would be interested in reading it and clicked the buy button. It arrived a couple of days later and I put it next to the computer, thinking I would read it later. I currently have bookmarks in two novels, The Almost True Story of Ryan Fisher and Inkdeath . Donald Maass’ book kept calling to me. My left hand kept reaching over to pick it up and I kept scolding it, until it refused to obey. I found myself reading the book. As Richard said, Donald Maass has some good things to say in the introduction. I read that and moved on to Chapter One: Protagonists vs. Heroes . He also had some good things to say there. Even though I have written about how I hate block quotes , I forced myself to read the examples he lifted from various novels. I tried to understan...