Timothy's Thoughts

R elay the story as if you were telling it to a friend is a piece of advice I picked up the other day. I won’t say it tells me anything I didn’t already know, but having it put into words like that often helps. When we consider the stories written by Mark Twain we see that he took that concept to heart. Each time we pick up one of his books we feel as if we were sitting by the fire with him as he tells of some experience he or an acquaintance had. The narrator of his stories seems very real, even though it is clear at times that it isn’t Mark Twain himself or even one of the principle characters. His technique makes it easy for us to slip into the story. Details One of the things we must consider when relaying a story as if to a friend is who this friend is and what he already knows. Our friend is likely an intelligent person and doesn’t need us to explain every little detail. Imagine sitting in your living room and telling your friend about a trip you took. What details would you need...

R omance novels typically fall into a class of stories in which two people who can’t seem to get along come together and discover that they really need each other. In romances they have to fall in love, but in other stories of this type that is not a requirement. But how are we to pull this off without the reader hating one or both of the characters? A good place to start is to find a way for both characters to be right. In You’ve Got Mail it is a battle between the big huge store and the little independent store. There’s nothing wrong with either. Both the man and the woman are trying to make a living with their business. Each has its good points and each has its bad points. So aside from some prejudices, the audience has no reason to hate either character. While the battle between good vs. evil makes for many great stories, the ideal conflict in this type of story is created when both characters want directly opposing things and yet the reader is cheering for both of them. Of course...

T he theme runs throughout the story from beginning to end. When watching television shows, I’ve noticed that whatever issue is being handled in the A-plot is also being handled in the B-plot. If the character in the A-plot is having an argument with his wife, we may see a character in the B-plot having an argument with her boyfriend. I began to wonder about this because it seem like we might be able to work backwards from some of the things we see happening in the B-plot and discover where the A-plot is headed. That isn’t a problem unless by doing so we reveal too much. Suppose that in our story a murder has taken place, but the reader doesn’t know who did it or why. In our B-plot, we reveal that the theme is about the importance of family. In our list of suspects we only have one person with a motive based around a family. In keeping with the theme, this person has to be the one to commit the crime. If the reader discovers this and has a rudimentary understanding of story structure,...

A friend of mine mentioned that her twin daughters were having a birthday and it got me to thinking about names. Parents want to give their children good names because they are likely to be stuck with the name for a very long time. We writers like to give our characters good names that fit the character. But I got to thinking about naming twins. A couple discovers the woman is pregnant and they begin thinking about names. Perhaps they settle on one—the others just aren’t good enough. Then the woman goes to the doctor and he says, “There’re two heartbeats in there.” Now the couple has to come up with another name. The day comes when the children are born and one gets one name and one gets the other. But who gets which name? Is it first come first served? I suppose it may be different for different folks, but when those two children are there in their parents’ arms, looking so much alike, there really isn’t much of a way to figure out which one should be Brad and which one should be Bri...

Y ou may have already seen this video elsewhere. If not, I recommend that you watch it and then come back and we’ll talk about it. The basic premise of the video is that while money is a motivator, people are also motivated by purpose. Give people enough money that they don’t need to be concerned about money and they will turn their attention to those things that seem to have purpose, when we’re talking about something that requires cognitive skills. While that may not be immediately obvious, I think it makes sense if we consider the logic carefully. Our first priority is survival. Without money we fear we won’t survive, but once that is taken care of we are free to consider other things. Applying This to Books From the standpoint of authors and writing, the application is obvious. We write, not because of money, but because of some greater purpose that we see in writing. We want money for our writing so we can write without concern about money. But what about for the book buyer? What ...

I recently saw a discussion about whether book two is easier to get published than book one. From my point of view, I think it is pretty obvious that it is. Just look at it in terms of years. If it takes ten years for an author to get the first book published and the contract for book two is in place even before book one reaches the shelves then it is obvious that the author didn’t have as much trouble getting the second published. But let’s look at why this is. The first reason is that the author already has an agent. Agents don’t really like signing new clients. What they really want is for their existing clients to make them tons of money. Life would be much easier for agents if they had seven clients who were making enough to live on rather than having twenty clients who are scraping by. If the agent has a client that a publisher liked in the past, the agent is going to push for publishers to publish that client again. An author with a traditionally published book is more likely t...

S ome time ago, Randy Alcorn posted a video about pornography. He likened giving a seventh grader unrestricted access to the Internet to buying a stack of pornographic magazines and storing them in his closet. In his comments he also talks about how men who have been looking at the airbrushed images they find in magazines will compare how their wives look to those images and their wives will never measure up. It got me to thinking about the books we write. Granted, a lot of romance books are mildly pornographic, but instead of thinking about that, consider the way we portray other things in our books. After reading our books, do people compare their own lives to the lives of our characters and regret that their lives don’t measure up? Consider the woman who reads a book about a couple. The man woos the woman with flowers and chocolates and by being attentive to her. The woman in the book returns the sentiment by cooking a nice meal, setting candles on the table. They talk late into the...