Timothy's Thoughts

B randilyn Collins recently wrote about lying to the reader and put her finger on what I don’t like about close third person or deep third person , as she calls it. If you look at the article, you will see that she makes a distinction between the author’s narrative and the narrative of close third, but the example paragraph is exactly the same. As writers, we may say that it is okay to lie to the read in one while it isn’t in the other because in one the reader is listening to the voice of a flawed character and in the other he is listening to the voice of the author, who has had the benefit of having read the book several times and knows that fifty pages away the character is going to prove the character’s assumption wrong. But how is the reader supposed to know that? If there is no difference between what the author says in his authority to what the character says in his flaws, the reader has no way of knowing whether the passage is written by the author or by the character. In fir...

S ome statistics that I have seen indicate that the most popular book category is mystery and suspense, with a 19% hold on the fiction market. I don’t know how old those statistics are, so it may be different now, but all we have to do is look around to see that mystery and suspense are popular. We can draw a distinction between these two, but we don’t need to, for our purposes. The story that is typically told in both mystery and suspense is that of the Whydunnit or Whodunnit , if  you prefer. There are nine other stories that we can tell and if we do nothing more than divide the rest of the 81% evenly between them, the average popularity of the other stories is only 9%. The Whydunnit enjoys more than twice the popularity of the other stories. In other words, mystery and suspense are hugely popular. Even romance writers are getting into the act by writing Romantic Suspense . If readers love the Whydunnit so much, it would do us good to understand it better. What It Is This ...

G reat news! My latest book is out and available on Amazon.com. They even have the Search Inside feature turned on already. I didn’t expect it so soon, but I’m thrilled. And Thy House What’s the book about? It’s about an ordinary guy who has little use for church and has raised his daughters outside of church. He has kept them away from their mother, who is the church secretary. But one day, this ordinary guy realizes that he is going to hell and his daughters are going there too, all because of him. He tries everything he can to persuade them that what he taught them was wrong, but they are even more against church than he was.

I knew there was disparity between men reading fiction and women reading fiction, but I didn’t really see the situation for what it is until I saw a statistic the other day. Publisher’s Weekly was quoted as saying that of all fiction sold, 55% was bought by woman and 45% was bought by men. I really expected the gap to be much wider. Walk into any Christian bookstore and you’ll see a sea of pink. Walk into nearly any bookstore and books for women will get preferential treatment. Look at the faces of most authors and you’ll see a lot of makeup. Talk to most men and you’ll hear them say, “I read more non-fiction than I do fiction.” Put that together and the picture you’ll get is that fiction is primarily a woman thing. We’re going all out to sell fiction to woman and still men buy 45% of the fiction sold. On top of that, many men don’t buy fiction because they read whatever their wives have around the house. Consider that there are millions of book buyers in America. Now, if we take ...

E ditor’s Note: Today for Fiction Friday, I thought I would give you a video. I know we say we prefer reading to seeing a scene in a video, but sometimes we want to see it, even if it is a little corny.

O kay, so I was over at Mike Dellosso’s blog the other day and he had this short post about possibly writing about using Fiction to Evangelize. It got me to thinking about how that can be done. If you’ve read, How to Become a Bible Character , you know that it tells the way of salvation several different times. I can’t say that I was trying to do that, but it’s just that kind of a story. And Thy House is also that kind of a story. It is a about a guy who becomes a Christian and then has to deal with daughters who don’t think he should have. But is that the way to evangelize through fiction? One thought I’ve had is that instead of focusing our attention on getting people saved, we writers should focus our attention on getting people lost. I don’t mean that we should write the most confusing prose imaginable. Some authors seem to think that is their goal in life, but if the message of salvation is going to have any meaning, people must see their need of salvation. A drowning man will l...

T erry Burns recently wrote about the calling to write . Some people talk about the calling to write. When you think about it, that sort of leaves the rest of us out in the cold. Who are we to say we even have the right to call ourselves writers if others are called by God to write, but we are not? What I like about what Terry said is that he called what the rest of us do an offering. There’s an awful lot of stuff I do that I wouldn’t consider a calling. I work with kids in our church’s Awana program. While I enjoy doing that, I don’t see that as a calling. But that isn’t to say that isn’t to say that I’m doing it for myself; it is an offering. The stuff I do with our church’s website: that is more of a calling. I won’t go into how I know the difference. The point is that there are some things we are called to do and some things that we simply offer up to God as we worship him. If you are called to write, great, but there is no sin in writing if you just have a desire to write and want...