Timothy's Thoughts

T hree heavy hitters in the marketing community went at it this week. It began with Chris Anderson's book, Free . The second heavy hitter, Malcolm Gladwell, wrote a review for The New Yorker titled Priced To Sell: Is free the future? . His review disagreed with much of what Chris Anderson said in his book. Gradwell's claim being that no matter how cheap individual units of something become, the infrastructure of producing the whole will be too large to truly make them free. On Tuesday, Seth Godin came to Anderson's defense with his post, Malcolm is Wrong . So, who is right? Are Chris Anderson and Seth Godin correct that we will reach the point where information is so cheap that we might as well give it away? Have we reached the point? Or is Malcolm Gladwell correct that the cost of generating and delivering the information will prevent us from offering it for free? What was it your mother told you? There is no free lunch. I definitely am going to have to side with Malc...

N ovelists spend a lot of time writing. When treating it like a full-time job, it can take a month to write a novel. Sporadic writers may take a year or more. The whole time, the writer is wondering if it is a waste of time. We wonder if anyone will want to read what we have written. That leads us into the next question from Andy Stanley’s pod cast . We want other people to believe that what we have written is worthwhile. Why do they need to know it? We talked yesterday about the theme of our novels, or to use Andy Stanley’s term, the one thing . We don’t usually sell novels by telling people we’re going to teach them something, and yet, stories have a higher purpose than entertainment. Stories have always been the most efficient way to convey information that people will remember. Stories must be entertaining, or people won’t read them, but we must never forget their higher purpose and as such, we must write in such a way that people see what we are telling them as relevant. If you ...

H ow do you handle criticism? As writers, we open ourselves up for it. We labor over some of the decisions we make with our writing, from what our characters like to the theme of our books to whether to self-publish or traditionally publish. It is all open to scrutiny and every writer has his share of praise and criticism. We love the praise, but the criticism is hard to take. It might be better if we don’t handle criticism the way mediabistro.com reports Alice Hoffman reacted to a less than ideal review . Allegedly, she chose to respond by Tweeting the reviewer’s phone number and e-mail address, encouraging her fans to respond to the review. I can think of worse things she could have done, but the word for this is vengeance . She later apologized . I’m sure most of us have looked at something someone said or did that we didn’t like and thought, “I’m going to make him pay. He’ll regret he ever did that.” If I were to guess, that is what I believe must have been going through Alice Hof...

E ver wondered how you can get you’re your readers’ attention? Though not specifically addressing that question, in his March 2009 pod cast Andy Stanley talks about five questions that can help. He was speaking to a group of pastors on the subject of how leaders would effectively communicate their vision to an audience, but it occurred to me that these five questions apply to writers as well. Their application in the non-fiction realm is obvious. Most of what he says in his pod cast applies directly, so I want to focus on the fiction realm instead, with the assumption that you will go listen to his pod cast. What do they need to know? Novels provide information. You might think of a historical novel and some historical tidbit that you gleaned from its pages, but that isn’t what we’re talking about. What people need to know is the events of the story. Our readers need to know the problems our protagonist faces, how he tries to solve them and the result of his actions. But which proble...

A s things go in this online community, the death of Michael Jackson led to Michael Hyatt writing a post about that, with a link back to a post about Creating a Life Plan . I used to have a life plan, but I got off of it when I didn’t get married by the time I was twenty-four. That used to bother me—a lot. Now, ten years later, I don’t even remember that I’m not married most of the time. I find it much easier to say, “Whatever you will, Lord.” It isn’t that I have a problem with people making a life plan, but I would have missed out on some really good things if I had stuck to my plans. Mike also suggests identifying key accounts, ordered by priority. I’ll show you my list and then we’ll talk about it: God Family, Church and Friends Self Ministry Finances Career Hobbies (including writing) God must come first. If he doesn’t, I’m in sad shape. For the second item, I included all three because I have a real hard time keeping my family, my church and my friends separate. They all seem li...

T ritagonist —there’s a term you don’t hear much. In a Greek play, the tritagonist was the third (and least) important character. In novels, we aren’t limited in how many people we can use in a scene, so we might not think as much about the deuteragonist and the tritagonist . These characters could be anyone. When the deuteragonist is the antagonist , the tritagonist may be the sidekick to the protagonist . Or, if the tritagonist might be the antagonist or someone else. The reason we might want to think in terms of protagonist , deuteragonist and tritagonist is that it is difficult to keep tack of more than three characters at a time. Consider the work of Agatha Christie. At times, she would have several characters in a room, such as when a murder was committed or when the killer was revealed, but during the investigative process, she often used a three character setup, one investigator talking to a couple or two investigators talking to one suspect. Even when a scene involves...

A ll prophecies are true, or so we would be led to believe from reading or watching fiction. Apparently, this is one of the rules . Publishers expect prophecies to come true. Now, I don’t think they would have a problem if the story is about what happens if people have been expecting a prophecy to come true, but then it doesn’t. That could be an interesting story. I suspect that the real problem is when the protagonist chooses to ignore the prophecy and it doesn’t come true. In real life, not all prophecies come true. We know that, so it shouldn’t be a big deal if a fictional prophecy doesn’t come true. But if it isn’t a big deal, then what impact does it have on the plot? An unfulfilled prophecy that the protagonist has ignored and no one is going to get upset over when it is proven incorrect is a non-event. Things are much more interesting when the prophecy comes true. Our protagonist may still ignore it, but we keep seeing these signs that the prophesied fate is coming. A true pr...