Timothy's Thoughts

I ’ll blame this on Chip MacGregor. I’m sure several people have said it before him, but someone mentioned that Chip MacGregor said that we sell fiction by talking about non-fiction themes. This works in whatever method you use to communicate, whether it is speaking at book clubs, on the radio or through a blog. Since most of the people who read this blog also have blogs, let’s focus our attention on blogging, looking at why and how it works. Why It Works By far, the book that has been the easiest for me to sell has been Church Website Design . The main reason for that is that when my target audience goes online to find the information they need they find my book. The title is one of the search phrases they might use when looking for a book on the subject. Essentially, I positioned the book in such a way that my target audience is looking for it, instead of me looking for them. We want to do something similar with fiction. With fiction, our target audience seems much more scattered. Wi...

I ’ll admit it, fantasy is one of my favorite genres. Send me off on horseback with a magic sword in my hand to fight some evil sorcerer. But one of the problems with fantasy and perhaps one of the reasons I’ve never completed a novel in this genre is that so much of it is based around pagan religion. This can really be an issue when we start talking about Christian fantasy . For the most part, the magic in fantasy isn’t real magic. Real magic involves religious practices in which a person prays to the dead or to spirits in order to enlist their help. Sadly, this practice exists in some Christian denominations. There’s often some set of magic words that are spoken in fantasy, but it isn’t made obvious that the magician is calling on some spirit to help him. In fact, if the words are in English, there usually isn’t a name mentioned at all and the rule seems to be that as long as it rhymes it will work as a magic spell. In pagan magic, the belief seems to be that as long as the person kn...

P ublishers try to dispel the myth that they books are successful because of the money they put into marketing by asking the question: If publishers had the power to make a book a bestseller, don’t you think they would do that with every book? While their point is valid, it is hardly so simple. It really comes down to one of those chicken or the egg questions. Is a book popular because the publisher convinces people they should buy it or does the publisher choose to invest in the book because they have the vision to see that people will like the book? To think that the only reason that latest book we’ve written isn’t selling like hotcakes is because a publisher hasn’t given it a chance is naïve. But it is just as naïve to think that publishers have some special vision that allows them to find the books that will sell well and the money they throw at some books is not the primary reason for their success. Just because we can’t throw money at all books and make them bestsellers doesn’t m...

W e all struggle with beginnings. Some people get better at it, but then you pick up a book by a bestselling author and the beginning just doesn’t grab you for some reason. So, we talk about hooks and throwing the reader into the middle of the action, but we also talk about setup and getting the reader to like the character. Sometimes, I think it would do us good to just practice writing beginnings. Don’t write another novel until we’ve written one hundred beginnings or something like that. How do we do all of that? How do we begin with action and still give the reader the proper setup? When we read discussions of how to begin, it is easy to get the idea that we should put the inciting incident on page one, so that something happens on page one that causes the protagonist to decide to do something. I’m going to give you a rule that we must never break. There are many writing rules out there that are just firm suggestions, but here is one that you should never break: Never put the inc...

F antasia has funny clocks. They aren’t so strange when you try to use them, but we can visit any time we wish. We can see things that haven’t happened yet and maybe never will, but it only works if you have licensed writer as your guide. With me being such a writer, I decided to move forward in time and explore a little, hoping to resolve this plotting issue I’ve been having with book five. I closed my eyes and when I opened them I found myself standing on Main Street, just outside of Ellen’s café. In front of me I saw what appeared to be a car wreck. A camera boom was positioned near it, but I saw no cameras or camera crew or anyone at all. I heard the door open behind me. It came to a stop so hard that the glass rattled. I turned around and saw Sara coming toward me. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you!” she said, pointing at me as she spoke. I could see the redness in her face. “Me?” I asked, putting my hand against my chest. Sara seemed to cool a couple of degrees. “You didn’t thi...

H ere’s an odd thing: 16,000 words into a manuscript, I decided I couldn’t do anything with the story without major changes, so I made the changes and only lost about 5,000 words. I put the manuscript aside and went back to the outline. Aside from the theme, the characters and the setting, I started from scratch. The original was about Sara helping a woman convince the father of her child to do the right thing. The revamped version is about Sara’s efforts to keep Ellen from losing a catering contract for the movie that is being filmed in the area. I then went back through the manuscript and deleted everything that didn’t fit. I still had over 10,000 words. I may still have to move some of those words around, because some of the problems to be solved in the new outline were not mentioned in the first 39 pages, but I don’t think I’ll lose many more words. Maybe no one else finds that interesting, but I find the commonality of these two stories very interesting. It seems to indicate that ...

I f you think Christians agree, you’re only fooling yourself. It’s hard to find complete agreement in one church, much less in an interdenominational gathering of people from different churches. Let me tie this back to the writing community. A Facebook friend recently posted, “Honored to assist in serving Palm Sunday communion to 350 writers and 75 authors/editors/agents in a beautiful redwood setting.” He was referring to the Mount Hermon Writers’ Conference. I won’t go into the details of my belief right now, but suffice it to say that I have problems with this on many levels. Someone once talked about Christian doctrine as being in concentric circles. At the core we have the things most Christians agree on, such as, the trinity, the virgin birth, the deity of Jesus Christ, the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures, the death, burial and resurrection of Christ and the return of Christ. Moving outward, we have things for which there is disagreement between denominations or associations...