Timothy's Thoughts

C hip MacGregor says that he is looking for a book that will change him. That’s good, because I believe most good writers write with the intent that their books will change people. Books can change people in many ways, from giving people joy for a few hours to encouraging people to look at something in a way that they haven’t looked at it before. We tend to focus our attention on the entertainment value of a novel, but the thing that makes a novel memorable is in the way it changes us. Take Bridge to Terabithia for example. If it were just a story about two children creating an imaginary kingdom, it would be forgettable. As hard as it is to read, the thing that makes it memorable is that one of the children dies and the other has to deal with that. Killing off a primary character isn’t the only way we can change people with a story and unless you are Nick Sparks, you probably don’t want to do it in every book. But what we do want to do is consider how people will see the world after t...

T his is the tale of two search phrases. When I wrote Church Website Design , I chose a title that reflected the content of the book. My goal was to match the target audience of the book with a name that they are likely to use in searching for books about a topic that interests them. This is what publishers try to do with every non-fiction book title. It creates a win-win situation because I’m more likely to sell books and the potential readers are more likely to find a book that solves a problem they have. Now consider the second book, Searching for Mom . In that case, I chose a title that I hoped would convey the premise in that Sara uses the Internet to search for a mother. What I did not anticipate is that this is also a popular search phrase for a certain segment of Internet users. I felt I had done my due diligence by running it through Google and seeing what results I got. I went several pages deep and saw nothing to convince me that I shouldn’t use that title. It wasn’t until I...

L ast week, I attended the annual meeting of the Baptist Missionary Association of America (BMA) in Fort Smith, Arkansas. If you don’t know anything about the BMA, it is an association of churches that sends missionaries to many different nations around the world, broadcasts the gospel through radio broadcasts, publishes Sunday school material, facilitates conferences and a number of other things, but this post is about none of that. This post is about what happened outside of the meeting. My parents are members of another BMA church and have attended the annual meeting for as long as I can remember. We usually end up running around together during the week of the meeting. This time, as they were crossing southern Missouri on the way to the meeting, a turkey flew up in front of them and struck their windshield while they were traveling at 65 or 70 miles per hour. Now a wild turkey isn’t as big as the kind of turkey you might eat for Thanksgiving dinner, but he’s still a big bird. This...

A uthor intrusion is when the author inserts something into the text that the point of view (POV) character wouldn’t know. For example, we might have a POV character who is a young child, but the author might mentions something about the election that year. It is something the author, who knows everything, would know about, but the child probably wouldn’t. Generally, this is considered bad form, unless you are using an omniscient POV, which is also considered to be bad form these days. But the fact is that these things slip into our writing. We sometimes see author intrusion in books published by well known authors and as well as the manuscripts produced by wannabes. While the publishing industry usually highlights author intrusion, I can’t help but wonder if the frequency of it might tell us something. What I think it might tell us is that author intrusion doesn’t bother most people. As writers, we’re conditioned to think that author intrusion is bad. It gives us one more thing we can...

W hen I said I was struggling with my latest work in progress, I wasn’t kidding. I decided I needed to change the story one more time, so I went downtown to talk to Sara. It was supper time and Ellen’s café was noise, so I asked Sara to walk down the street with me. We left the restaurant and walked north along Main Street, going past the other restaurants and shops. There were several other people out for an evening stroll. I nodded at an elderly couple and thought I would wait till we got past them before I brought up the reason I needed to talk to Sara. She had already guessed. “You’re changing the plot again, aren’t you?” “Yeah,” I said as the white hair woman hobbled past me. “I got to thinking that having you help Kelly while you’re caterer isn’t that big of a change. And I’ve been giving the beginning some more thought. I got to thinking that the thing that would just kill you at the beginning is if you were on the outside of the movie production looking in with little means of ...

W e looked at what it costs for a publisher to publish a book, which turns out to be about $50,000, but what does it cost for the author to publish a book? Let’s not make this a comparison between traditional publishing and self-publishing. Let’s instead focus our attention on publishing via the traditional route. Going this route, the saying is that money should always flow toward the author and what I would like to look at is how much money should be flowing toward the author. Let’s say it takes the author four weeks to write the book and the author makes a wage of 22.5 dollars an hour. I realize that many people take longer than that, but Agatha Christie said a month was plenty of time to write a book and we don’t want to get greedy. That puts the labor cost of writing the novel at $3,600. You’re going to need an agent and we are told that to get an agent you will need to attend some conferences. Let’s send you off to a conference like ACFW. By the time you account for conference fe...

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...