Timothy's Thoughts

O n Sunday I was reminded of how all good storytelling follows the same known structures when my pastor talked about the story of Legion in three acts. I’m going to expound upon that somewhat. As storytellers, we know that in the three act story we have three acts with the second act split in two. The first act is the status quo world, but it is a world that has problems that need solving. The second act is an upside down version of the first world. In the first part of the second act, the protagonist has taken action to move out of the problem world to this new world. In the second half of the second act, the villains appear to have success again. Thing in the third act we create a world where the problems are resolved. You can think of this a down-up-down-up in terms of how the protagonist feels about it. Of course, in a tragedy, we could have an up-down-up-down situation. But let’s look at how Legion’s story fits. Act One: Demon possession The story occurs in more than one place in...

S ometimes in our stories we reach a point where we’ve discovered something that appears to allow us to move into the next act, but should we move into the next act now? Should we have already moved into the act? Should we wait? This is why it is so important to know the structure of the story and how many pages deep into the story each should occur. I won’t go into how to know which pages each structure element occurs on because the answer isn’t must be determined by the study of various successful stories and I don’t wish to bore you with details. However, there is one structural element that has both a known and an obvious location. It will serve well as our example. The midpoint of a story is a structural element that occurs in the middle of the book and in the middle of the second act of a three act story. It is either a false success or a false failure. In my WIP, the midpoint is a false success because it is at this point that Sara finds a person she is looking for. We will find...

C hapter breaks are a lot more important than you might realize. The reader likes to have a chapter break so he can put the book down and go do something else for a while. That may be why some authors have taken to leaving chapter breaks out completely. Personally, I think that’s rather arrogant. Sure, we want readers to say that they never put the book down, but that isn’t really the best measure of a good book. Some of the best books are so thought provoking that the reader takes weeks to read the book, letting each point sink in before moving on. I don’t write books like that, but some people do. But chapter breaks are more important than just allowing the reader a place to put a bookmark before going to fix supper. In my current work in progress, one of the characters is a mysterious little child whose mother has died. His mother is unknown to the other characters and the boy is unable to tell them enough for them to figure out who she is. Besides that, the boy has taken to speakin...

O ne of the problems we writers face is that we have trouble determining if our writing is good or not. We want to believe it is, so our judgment is biased. Agents and publishers are no help because they don’t have time to critique our work. Friends and family are no help because they want to encourage us (or discourage us) and what they say may not be accurate. Critique groups aren’t much help either because there’s a tendency to either say another author’s work is good so that the author will feel good about the critic or to slam it so the critic’s own work looks better in comparison. Here’s something you can do to get past these problems. Write a passage and forget that you did it. I mean that literally. Mix that passage in with similar length passages from other writers, but good and bad. After you’ve had sufficient time to forget what you wrote, go back and pick the passages that you think are well written and those that aren’t. Once you’ve done that, look at how well you rated th...

S cientific studies concerning the results of prayer are mixed. Some studies seem to show that it helps while others seem to indicate that it could actually have the opposite effect. Most of these studies have been done concerning the healing of sick patients. The purpose of one study I saw was to determine if prayer could be used as an effective treatment to speed the recovery time from surgery. The result was that the people who knew they were being prayed for had somewhat longer recovery times. So maybe prayer doesn’t work. That’s what that study seems to tell us. But to be honest, I’m not really surprised, given the conditions of the study. It has the appearance of putting God in a test tube to see if we can bottle him and put him to good use. So many times, what people are looking for is for there to be some kind of power in the action itself. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what prayer is. People want prayer to be a type of magic that they can control. They want to pray...

T he topic came up the other day about damsels in distress . It was related to Bella from the Twilight series. The woman saying it was basically saying that Bella is much too weak and stupid. I haven’t read the books or watched the movies, but I’ve gotten the impression that they’re about getting women’s hearts pumping. As such, the idea is to make Bella an average woman that women can connect with and then put her in situations where good looking muscle bound young men can save her. Of course that doesn’t really happen in real life because men like that are too busy looking at their reflections in the mirror and primping for their close-up. But in fiction we’re free to create a world that operates the way we want. But just how strong should a damsel in distress be? I know of some women in real life that really are very weak. They can find their way out of bed by noon, after which they find their way to the mall to buy shoes, but there isn’t a single intelligent thought that runs thro...

C harles Sheldon introduced the world to the question What would Jesus do? when he wrote the book In His Steps 114 years ago. I can’t help but think that that question gets answered in a far different way today than what Sheldon thought it would way back in the day. As I was driving into work yesterday, I had the radio on and I heard about a woman preacher within the Presbyterian Church who is facing church discipline for conducting Sodomite weddings. That is unless the Presbyterian Church votes to change their constitution to define marriage as between two people rather than between a man and a woman. The words I heard her say were, “I was only doing what I believed Jesus would want us to do.” I had thought to write about the ecumenical movement today, because I see so many writers who go to writers conferences and come away thinking that it would be such a good thing for all Christians to put aside their differences and worship together because “we all agree on the important things...