Timothy's Thoughts

I ’m writing non-fiction again. I estimate that I’m about 15% complete with the project. This project isn’t another computer book. I rather expected that I would write another one and that I would write it sooner than now, since my first book has done better than I ever expected. I haven’t been getting rich, but it has allowed me to claim a profit on my income taxes. The book I am writing is about plot devices. I suppose it is somewhat risking for me to write this book, but where there is no risk there is no reward. It’s a book that I would have liked to have read, if I had found one on the subject, but I haven’t found a book where the author covered the topic the way I have chosen to cover it. So, I’m excited about it. Much of it, I could have used it as fodder for this blog and some of it I think I have, but it would take at least six months for me to disseminate this information through blog posts and I think I would grow tired of having the blog follow that theme for so long. As th...

T his is a book review and to keep the federal government pencil pushers happy, I am writing this review of my own free will. I purchased the book with my own money and neither Tyndale nor C. J. Darlington paid me any money for my comments concerning this book. She didn't even buy me a cup of coffee. That being said, I'm going to try to keep to my previous commitment concerning book reviews and keep this review positive. Fortunately, that isn’t impossible with this book. First, let me say that this book is not what I expected. “Christy Williams never imagined that a stolen Hemingway first edition would leader her back to the sister she left fifteen years ago,” the back of the book says. “But when things begin to unravel, she finds herself on May’s doorstep, fearing for her life. After a bittersweet reunion, will the two discover that some hurts can’t be healed or is there a tie that’s thicker than blood?” After reading that, I expected that the story would begin with Chris...

T his is supposed to be Fiction Friday, but today we’ll call it Fat Friday instead, and there’s nothing fiction about it. Besides, I can’t afford to head off down to Ellen’s and smell all that good food. Fictional or not, I’m sure those visits are adding inches to my waistline. Why Fat Friday? You guessed it; I’m fat. Yeah, I know you can’t tell it from the picture, but as Richard Mabry noticed when I went to one of his book signings last year, I’ve put on a few pounds since the picture was taken. I haven’t changed the picture because I keep telling myself that I’ll get back down to that weight again. And I intend to, but the last couple of years haven’t been conducive to that and here I am trying to be a writer. That doesn’t help either. I spend my days sitting in front of a computer screen and I hardly get up. These days, I may be sitting there for twelve hours each day. Then I get up and go home, where I sit in front of another computer, trying to complete a book. The result, I’m ov...

L et consider personal reality , but before we consider that specifically, let me say that I believe in absolute truth . I believe in the God who created the Universe and I believe that he knows exactly how things really are, even though we may not see them the same way. So, please don’t construe what I have to say about personal reality to mean otherwise. Every character in a story has a unique personal reality . Take the recent earthquake in Haiti, for example. As I write this, I am looking at an Associated Press report online that says there estimates that 200,000 people have died, 1.5 million people are homeless and the U.S. military has begun dropping prepared meals and bottled water, though they were previously reluctant to make airdrops for fear that it would create fighting on the ground. Next to the article is an ad for NFL Total Access and an ad for a personal injury attorney. People are dying by the hundreds of thousands in Haiti, but back in the comfort of our climate cont...

W hat is the most important rule in writing? We hear about the rules all the time—show, don’t just tell; don’t use be verbs; don’t include backstory—but which rule is the most important? For the most part, the rules are nothing more than general rules of thumb. There are plenty of examples where writers have successfully violated each of the ones I listed above and there are times that we will violate them as well. But there is one rule that is an absolute; we must follow it no matter what. Some writers have attempted to violate it. I suppose all of us have violated it at some point, but none have done so successfully. And yet, if we handle this one rule well, the other rules either fall into place or they don’t matter quite as much. So, what is this all important rule? Every story must have conflict. It sounds simple enough, but the thing that kills a story more quickly than anything else is lack of conflict. Do you have a sagging middle? That is caused by lack of conflict. Are yo...

E very novel begins with a section of setup. It is within this section that the author establishes the problem that must be solved. Perhaps the protagonist is down on his luck or he is lonely or whatever. In any case, we establish this in the setup section, which occurs before the inciting incident. Often, the reader knows what is going to happen after this section because we told him on the back cover, but we can’t leave it out or the story will be incomplete. The setup section is also where we establish who the characters are. Once we move into the later sections, the characters will be in flux and we won’t have the opportunity to show them as they were. But how do we show our characters in such a way that we show them as multi-dimensional people without boring our readers. Most people have three aspects of their lives that reveal most of what they are like—work, home and play (or free time). People act differently at work than they do at home and differently at home than they do at ...

W e talk about the inciting incident . That is the moment in a story when an event causes an emotional response within a protagonist whereby he decides to leap into action. He leaves the status quo behind and moves into a new stage of his life. But let’s get real. It doesn’t always happen in real life that a person will leap into action after experiencing a traumatic event. Oh, we see some cases where national campaigns have started because something bad happened to a child and her parents don’t want to see it happen to anyone else’s children, but not all people react the same way and not all events are big enough convince these people to take action. In terms of our writing, we may encounter this with our characters. Something happens, but the character is either too stubborn to leap into action or the event just isn’t big enough to call for action. What we could do is to pick a less stubborn protagonist, or we could make the inciting incident even bigger. Instead of the criminal ste...