Timothy's Thoughts

T he movie version of Holes isn't that far from the original story. I say that based on my memory of the movie and the book. I watched the movie version first. But as a storyteller, there are a number of things that stand out in the way the story was told in the movie and how Louis Sachar originally told it. The original story has a clear focus on Stanley Yelnats and the connections with the events so many decades earlier seem to be focused more on him. As I recall from the movie, a lot more emphasis was put on the events that caused the treasure to be hidden in the first place. In the book, we are told those things, but it doesn’t have quite the same poignancy to the death of the characters that the movie has. Good or bad, that’s the way it is. Given the nature of the story, we might think the story is a coming of age story or a love story of some kind. In actual fact, it is a whydunit . Throughout the story, we have more and more information revealed about why the boys ar...

I n case you haven't noticed, book titles are not unique. I generally track search results for the titles of my books. Anytime someone says something about one of my books, I want to know about it. The other day, search results showed up for <i>For the Love of a Devil</i>, but the author wasn’t me. For <i>And Thy House</i>, there’s no hope for uniqueness and I didn’t expect there to be, but what really got me thinking was when I saw two authors talking about <i>Thicker Than Blood</i>. One was new and one was old. One is a first book and one is the second book in a series. But it made me wonder if the publisher of the newer book gave it much thought when they  used the title. There are some advantages and disadvantages to using a previously used title. If there is a popular book with the same name, then your book may sell more copies, just because it happens to show up in the search results when someone types in the name. On the other hand, by...

Y ou no doubt have heard of the Snowflake Method that Randy Ingermanson recommends . For those of you who have heard of it, but haven’t taken the time to understand it, here it is in a nutshell: Write a one-sentence summary of your novel. Expand the sentence to a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters and ending of the novel. Write a summary sheet for each major character. Expand each sentence of your summary paragraph into a full paragraph. Write a one page description of each major character and a half page description of each minor character. Expand one-page synopsis into a four-page synopsis. Create full-fledged character charts. Take a hiatus and wait for the book to sell. In the meantime, make a spreadsheet showing the scenes. (optional) Take each line of the spreadsheet and expand into a multi-paragraph description of the scene. Write the first draft. The basic idea behind this method is to...

A s a general rule, I try not to post twice in one day, but this is big news that won’t wait. You can now get all of my novels for as much as 35% off the suggested retail price. And Thy House , For the Love of a Devil and How to Become a Bible Character are all priced at $9.95 on Amazon.com. You can also purchase Searching For Mom at 25% off the SRP. Buy all four and that is a savings of $22.

G enerally, I don’t read guest posts and I certainly don’t link to them, but I happened to see a guest post by Steven James on Brandilyn Collins’ blog titled Things Look Bad? Make Them Worse . You ought to read it when you get a chance. He talks about how many people think stories are a series of events, but they are not. He then makes the statement that “you do not have a story until something goes wrong,” and he talks about making things worse to increase the tension in the story. I’m sure those of you reading this blog already knew that, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat it. I do want to talk a little more about this concept of going wrong . We’ve talked before about Where a Story Should Begin , but when do things go wrong? I asserted in that article that we begin a story when the protagonist needs to change, but is unwilling to change. For our discussion here, the key phrase is needs to change . The fact that something needs to change tells us that something has already gone wrong. Le...

E ditor’s Note: Today I'm giving you another video. At four minutes, thirty-eight seconds, it is lengthy for a book video. Most of the ones I have seen come in at less than half of that. But please watch the video and then we'll talk about it. This isn't the first time I've talked about book videos and it won't be the last. The current understanding of book videos seems to be that they probably help sell some books, some of the time, but we may have been able to sell those books anyway, using a cheaper method. In other words, we don't know how much book videos help with sales and we don't know if they are worth it, but they may be. They are certainly not a silver bullet. You can't just put a video out there and get thousands of people to read the book. For that matter, it is hard enough to get thousands of people to view the video, and it is free. If you are a bestselling author, your publisher might foot the bill for a book video. For the rest...

L et’s talk about demographics and psychographics . Demographics deal with such things as sex, race, age, income, education level and location, among other things. Psychographics deal with personality, values, attitudes, interests and lifestyles. There’s a fuzzy line between the two, since things like sex, race, age and education level can indicate some things about a person’s attitude, but it is helpful to think of them as separate. If you are trying to sell a how to book, demographics are likely more important than psychographics. If the book is about how to write a device driver for a new piece of hardware, your target audience is like to be highly educated in Electrical Engineering or Computer Science. That could also be considered a firmographic (dealing with a person’s firm). But when we move over into the fiction world, demographics aren’t as important. If we write a story that takes place in New York, we can’t assume that someone in Los Angeles won’t be interested. Just becau...