Timothy's Thoughts

Karen opened the door of her crimson red Honda Civic GX NGV sedan and being careful not to damage her fingernails, freshly painted red with gold sparkles beneath two layers of a clear coat, she turned the key and brought the engine to life. O kay, enough of that. When you read a book, do you ever get the idea that an author is reading the description from a spec sheet as she writes? For lack of a better term, let’s call it description overkill . It happens when an author wants too much control of the scene. The result is that the book reads more like an engineering drawing than a story. It’s an easy mistake to make. We want the reader to see exactly the same seen as we see as we write. This is usually because what we see gives us some special feeling that we want the reader to have. But when you get down to it, it probably doesn’t matter if Karen drives a red Honda Civic or a blue Chevy Malibu. The reader isn’t going to remember, unless that detail is relevant to the story. Let’s suppo...

W hen I was reading a book the other day, I came to a chapter that began something like this: “Your hair looks different today,” Matt said. “No, it’s the same as it’s been for a long time,” lead said. “Maybe it’s something else,” he said. “So how’s that trouble you were telling me about the other day?” Lead and Matt spend several paragraphs discussing the main problem of the book. I’ve changed the character names and the dialog to protect the author and shorten the passage, but it was essentially what I wrote above. But before I go any farther, let me ask you a question. What is missing? It may be difficult for you to answer, since you don’t have the benefit of having read the rest of the book, but go ahead and make a guess. You don’t have to tell me if you are wrong. Having read the book, I had already met these characters. The lead I met on page one and Matt I met in a later chapter. But Matt is not a main character. I had forgotten about this guy, so when he is reintroduced into th...

W e’ve talked about the inciting incident before and you know that I say the inciting incident doesn’t happen on page one. But some people have this thing about saying that it does. So, I think what we need is another name for that thing that does happen on page one. When talking about beginnings, James Scott Bell mentioned that we begin with a “disturbance to the lead’s ordinary world.” Borrowing from his terminology, I would like to suggest that we simply call it the initial disturbance . The inciting incident is that thing that incites the lead to make a change in order to solve a problem that we’ve mentioned in the first act. The initial disturbance doesn’t incite change, it is just an irritation. In Cinderella , the inciting incident happens when she is prevented from attending the ball, but the initial disturbance is that her mother died. She doesn’t change who she is because her mother died, but after she is prevented from attending the ball she makes the transformation fr...

T he saga continues, I’m afraid. Another week has passed and I find it necessary to discuss the plot of my work in progress with my protagonist, Sara. She was with a customer when I arrived, but I told Carla why I was there and she seated me at a table in the back corner, poured me a cup of coffee and promised to tell Sara to come talk to me. I amused myself by looking at some old pictures of Ellen’s grandparents that were hanging on the wall back there. It was interesting to see how different the place looked when they first opened it. “What’s up?” Sara asked, arriving at the table as my coffee cup reached the halfway point. Let’s call it half empty—I’m in that kind of mood. “Sit down,” I said. “We need to talk about the story.” “Again? What are you planning to do to me now?” She sat across the table from me and rested her crossed arms on it. “This thing about you guys losing the contract just doesn’t seem to be working as well as I think it should. I could having story where you’...

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...