Timothy's Thoughts

E lectricity is a fascinating thing. You can cook a hotdog by plugging it into a wall socket, but a bird can sit on a high voltage line and not be harmed. Using a curling iron in the bathtub could kill you, but lightning strikes the ocean all the time with no harm to the sea life. Electricity works when there is a difference in voltage and a path that the current can follow. Okay, other than to say that some writers need to take a physics class before they kill off any more characters with electricity, I am going somewhere writing related with this. Stories, are about relationships and a means by which those relationships can be revealed. Let’s say we have two characters, A and B. For the sake of this discussion, let’s say A is like the ground and has a voltage of zero (an arbitrary value). A is a normal average citizen, but B is a high voltage guy. He is a drug dealer and a murderer. As long as A stays in his part of town and B stays in his part of town, there’s no story because they...

I heard the other day that a lot of people are dropping out of mega-churches and are attending house churches as their only place of worship. A house church is a church that meets in someone’s home and has less than twelve or so members. I’ve got no problem with churches like that. I grew up in a church about that size. The highest attendance I ever saw was twenty-five, but we had a church building to meet in. I’ve known of several mission points that were started by meeting in someone’s home. Some say they are returning to the way the early church worshiped by having house churches. Personally, I think that’s hogwash. There’s evidence in the Bible of big churches, little churches and everything in between. If you feel more comfortable in a tiny church, by all means attend a tiny church, but don’t try to say that makes you closer to God. Another justification for these house churches is that people see it as a way of shaking off the tyranny of the larger churches, requiring them to p...

M otivation is one of those things that seems to come to me naturally when I write. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the need for a character to be have motivation. When a character does something I just naturally ask why he would do it. This works for me, but I’m not beyond making mistakes. The other day I found myself in a position of having about twenty pages that I could fill with things related to the subplots of my novel. The story is told from Sara’s point of view, so I decided I would have a particular character talk to Sara. The easiest way to introduce conflict into the scene was to have the character complain about her food and that’s the way I wrote it. At this point, the reader knows who the character is, but they know little else. If they knew her, they would know she actually a better person then her husband, but I don’t want the reader to know that yet. The problem is that because she is a good person she wouldn’t complain without cause and yet she has nothing...

T he very first thing a reader wants to know is why the things that are happening are happening. Don’t tell him. In fact, anything the reader wants we shouldn’t give it to him. Make him work for it. The villain hurts our hero and the reader wants the hero to strike back, don’t do it. The reader wants to know why the door is open. Don’t tell him. The reader wants to know why the characters react the way they do. Don’t tell him. Okay, eventually you have to tell him something, but the longer you make him wait the more he will have to read to figure it out. When you do tell him what’s going on, tell him in such a way that the answer raises more questions. Why is the door open? Because the killer left it open. Who is the killer? Someone who feared the victim. Why would someone fear the victim? And it goes on.

W e often talk about stories in terms of a three act structure. We usually break the second act into two halves, divided at the midpoint of our story. If we’re trying to develop the outline of a story, whether it is before we write or afterward, one way to start is to hang the story off of the three act structure. The first act is a picture of the way things are before the lead begins to change. In this act, the lead is going through a slow death. For our example today, let’s look at the story of Hosea. The first act of this story is that Hosea is commanded by God to marry a whore. Hosea does as he is commanded and marries Gomer. Gomer stays with him for a while, but she isn’t happy with the situation. She has children but it appears that at least one of the children isn’t Hosea’s. She moves out of the house and chooses to spend her time with other men. Act two is like the act one turned on its head. The lead of the story chooses to do something that brings him out of the slow dead of ...

W hen someone does something right I like to point it out. Take a look at the book videos below. They both answer a very important question, “Why do I need this book?” The big problem I’ve seen with book videos is that most don’t answer that question. Yeah, I know it’s harder with fiction than non-fiction, but these guys are doing something right. While we’re on the subject, why is it that it is so hard to create videos for fiction while it is easier for non-fiction? If you watched the first video you can see that one of the reasons people will want to read Rework . Meetings to plan planning meetings can’t be a good thing and if these guys can say anything that will help keep this from happening then it is well worth reading. But what about fiction? How do we make fiction well worth reading? Fiction is written for entertainment, but it is similar to non-fiction in some ways. I’ve never read it, but I’ve heard that Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code reads like a documentary. More than for e...

A few days ago, Rachelle Gardner raised the topic of what writers have to pay for rather than the publisher. One of the things is permissions to use various copyrighted materials. In the comment section, the topic moved from what writers pay for to a discussion of copyright and fair use . Visit the Stanford University website if you want a well written discussion of fair use . What I want to do is to make some general observations as a writer and not as a legal expert. We may be tempted to think that fair use has to do with things like how much of something we copy, such as a percentage of the whole, or how much money we make from selling the work we copy. I’ve seen several people make this mistake. In actual fact, U.S. copyright law is not very clear on what is and is not fair use . There’s a reason for it not being clear. The principle of fair use is deeply rooted in the principle of freedom of speech . We need the principle of fair use because when we comment, criticize or parod...