Timothy's Thoughts

T oday we leave our regularly scheduled program to talk about the big news in the Christian publishing world. (Okay, it’s a few days old, but we’ll talk about it anyway.) Anne Rice has left Christianity. Apparently, Anne Rice thinks you can switch from being a Christian to not being a Christian like you can change your underwear. Some time ago she left to become an atheist, then she came back. Well, now she’s gone again. And you know what? I refuse to be like some of these other churches and beg her to come join us instead of doing whatever she’s doing. As someone has said, none of us have a right to hear the gospel twice before everyone has heard it once. I believe she is a prime example of what is wrong with Christianity today. But before I get into that, let’s look at her own reasons for leaving Christianity this time: In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse t...

Y ou may not have noticed, but Christianity is losing ground. The percentage growth of the world population exceeds the percentage growth of the Christian faith. What we’re doing isn’t working. Or at least it isn’t working as well as it should. I realize that we have no control over how many people accept the gospel, but we have the responsibility to share it anyway. I realize that many people hear the gospel and reject it. And maybe the world is on final approach to the last judgment and we’re losing ground because the Lord is about to put an end to this period of grace. There’s plenty of maybes, but I don’t like to just throw up my hands and say, this is just the way it’s going to be. I don’t like to be on the losing side of anything. I don’t like that it makes God appear weak because his people aren’t accomplishing what he has called us to do. The most important thing we can do to turn this thing around is to pray. There is much that God can do that can change the current trend. We...

M arriage is a sacred institution, but some people just don’t get it. In a book I read the other day was a statement by a character concerning another character that was considering leaving her husband for another—actually, I can’t say man here because she would’ve left him for an elf. The statement was along the lines of you are the only one who can decide what will make you happy. Happy? Really? At what point did marriage become about the happiness of the individual? And what if the other person doesn’t make you happy? Marriage is about commitment. The Bible tells us that a man is supposed to leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife. The Bible also tells us that a man is supposed to love his wife and the wife is to respect her husband. That’s not to say that if a man doesn’t love his wife and she does respect him that they should split up. These things aren’t optional. These things are commands. Men are commanded to love their wives, but even if they don’t, wives are com...

T he solution comes first. That’s not the case all the time, but I’ve been looking at the process of developing story outlines and what I’m seeing is that the most logical place to start is with the solution . In location, the solution is the first half of the second act. This is the section that Blake Snyder called the fun and games section because this is where the characters are doing all the fun stuff that we see in the movie trailer. In the movie Up , which I talked about before, this is the section in which the house goes floating into the wild blue yonder. In Where the Red Fern Grows this is where Billy trains the dogs. In Searching For Mom this is where Sara searches the Internet for someone she can set her father up with. And if you were going to tell a literary agent what your book is about, this is the section that you would focus most of your attention on. This section is what the book is about. I think you see where I’m going with this. Without an interesting solutio...

N o backstory allowed. That’s the rule anyway, but so many authors are quick to violate it. Usually it is because we feel the need to justify a character’s actions rather than trusting the reader to figure out that if the character is doing something then there’s something in the character’s past that caused it. As my pastor likes to say, when you see a turtle sitting on a fence post, you know he didn’t get there by himself. In writing, it’s sufficient to write about how the turtle gets down from the fence post. But we still have a tendency to explain the whole thing. Backstory is a story that happens before the story. It isn’t actually part of our story, but how can we tell the difference between things of the past that are part of our story and things that aren’t. Using our turtle example, if the turtle got even with the person who put him on the post, then the action of putting the turtle on the post is part of our story rather than being backstory. And I’ve thought about the mo...

I deas for stories come in many different forms, but I sometimes struggle with converting those ideas into an actual story. Often what happens is that I picture a scene that intrigues me, but I don’t know where it fits or what I can do with the characters. Even with an outline framework, I began to question what part I should figure out first. As I considered this, I realized that there are five basic elements to every story, a character, a problem, a solution, a challenge and a victory. If we can determine each of these then we have our story. A Character The character is your protagonist . Sometimes you’ll know who this is at the first and sometimes it is better to wait till you determine the other four before deciding on the character. A Problem Your character begins the story with a problem. This isn’t the hook or the initial disturbance , though those things may help to show what the problem is. The bigger the problem is the bigger the story. If you’re talking to a friend, you mi...

T oday’s topic: pet words. A pet word is a word that a writer tends to use in his writing to the distraction of the reader. A pet word could be anything, such as just , so , was , inconceivable (I couldn’t resist paying homage to The Princess Bride with that last one). There’s a guy that used to work where I do whose pet word is really . He says it loudly and with a question mark at the end as if whatever someone said is utterly surprising. It gets irritating. We don’t want to irritate our readers. Our brains are wired to use pet words. When someone asks us something, we answer in practically the same way every time. Only when we take time to think about the answer do we say things differently. Because we are talking to different people throughout the day, no one notices that we said the same thing as we said before. Also, different people have different pet words, so a person listening to several conversations may not pick up on the pet words. In a book, we magnify our pet words be...