Timothy's Thoughts

W riting a book gets easier as you go along. The hard part is getting started. I recently finished a book and as I neared the end, I couldn't keep myself away. I recently started writing another book and I haven't gotten past the first three thousand words. Christmas and work didn't help, but neither did spending last weekend doing all kinds of stuff other than writing. There are plenty of other things on the horizon that will keep me from writing as well. I think, perhaps, that it is good to take a break from writing, from time to time. I don’t know about for everyone else, but I have to find my focus when I am writing a book. So, maybe the best thing is for a writer to give himself some time to be a normal person for a while—read a book, watch some television, spend some time with another hobby—then at a more appropriate time, take up writing again and go at it full force. Question: What do you think? Do you take a break between writing projects? What do you do to...

A mazon.com is a fascinating place to visit. To be quite honest, I spend too much money there—enough that my Prime membership has paid for itself. But its a great place, even if you don’t spend a dime. For the author, it contains a lot of useful information. The first thing we notice is that it gives us a relative index of how popular particular books are. If you are looking for the most accurate and most up to date bestseller list, Amazon.com has it and you can filter it down to pretty much any category you would want. Another thing Amazon.com is useful for is as a means to look at product descriptions. You can walk through Barnes and Noble, pull some books off the shelf and read the backs, but it is much easier to do it on Amazon.com. Besides, Amazon.com has several times the selection of Barnes and Noble. If you are writing non-fiction, Amazon.com makes it fairly easy to find similar books to the one you are writing. With that information, you can then tell any agent you quer...

E ditor’s Note: Today’s post isn’t so much of a story as it is a character sketch. I hope you enjoy it. It was one of those afternoons when there weren’t enough customers to keep the workers as Ellen’s café busy when Sara walked out the front door, made a left and walked down the street. Most of the shops were as deserted as Ellen’s café. A few customers browsed the wares, but many of the shopkeepers sat inside reading books or stood staring out the windows, hoping for any sign that someone would open the door and step inside. And it was little wonder that there were so few people shopping. On top of it being in the middle of the week, the mercury hovered just below eighteen degrees, even with the sun shining brightly and trying its hardest to push it a little higher. A gust of wind hit Sara in the face and she pulled her coat a little tighter. She came to a shop, opened the door and stepped inside. There were three other people inside. One was the owner. The other two were a ...

S ol Stein said that “you are in a long line of storytellers whose job was to keep the listeners attention.” Our primary tasked is to keep the attention of our readers. If you’ve ever wondered why a writer who refuses to follow the rules is able to get a book published and get people to read it, it probably comes down to him having done something that keeps his readers attention. Who really cares if he uses was every other sentence or hops from one head to another? Maybe we do, but we much more willing to overlook such issues if he is holding our attention. He goes on to say that we hold a reader’s attention by getting the reader to want something to happen that isn’t happening yet. This is the essence of suspense, but don’t think of suspense as something that only occurs in the suspense genre; it occurs throughout fiction and non-fiction as well. Consider The Neverending Story . What the reader would like to happen is that we get to explore this fascinating land in which anything is...

I t’s that time of year again, when people start making new year’s resolutions. Right up at the top for many people, just below “lose weight,” is a resolution to write a book. For many people, I think writing a book is some sort of mysterious thing. Conceptually, they believe it is within their power to write a book, but three hundred pages is a daunting task. That could explain why so many authors send unedited first drafts to agents and publishers; it feels like so much of an accomplishment to complete the first draft that the author can’t imagine that there is more work to do. But that’s a topic for another day. If you’re sure you want to write a book, let’s take a look at what it is going to take. Be Inspired I’m going to assume that you intend to write a novel, since that tends to be what is on people’s bucket lists. Before you do anything else, you need an idea for a story. Some authors will suggest that the best approach is to come up with some interesting characters, throw them...

T here’s a rule in photography that we can apply to writing: focus on whatever attracted you to the shot. Or we could word it as, focus on the beauty . The idea is that if you see a beautiful sunset, or an unusual flower, or you like the way something is reflecting off of a building, that you zoom in or frame that aspect of the shot, to that when people look at the photo, their eyes are drawn to the beauty you were trying to capture. Don’t show the whole tree when what attracted you was the setting sun shining through the leaves as a butterfly rests on the blooms. When begin to write a story or anything else, there is something that attracted us to it. With each of my books, I can tell you that one thing that attracted me to the story. In the latest one, And Thy House , what attracted me to the story was a parent teaching his children to reject God and then realizing that he was wrong, after they are too old to listen. The beauty I saw in For the Love of a Devil was the unconditional ...

Cool, windy Monday in late April. Pale sun, scattered cumulus clouds. Nice day for a long, solitary drive into the country, especially when you had a partner and best friend who was getting married in a few days and who was turning everyone concerned into basket cases with his prenuptial mania... There wasn't much traffic on Highway 101 south of King City, and when I turned off at San Lucas there was no traffic at all... -- Bill Pronzini, Quarry I don’t quote this directly from Bill Pronzini, but rather from my friend Richard Mabry who wrote a recent post about the Rules of Writing . Richard identified a number of rules that Pronzini violated in this passage. He begins his book talking about weather; he writes in first person; he uses be verbs; he includes backstory and Richard also mentioned that he didn’t introduce tension early. I will respectfully disagree with that statement, because we see tension in that the narrator is out for a drive to get away from his friend. Rule v...