Timothy's Thoughts

M y research on the subject is by no means scientific, but my observations indicate that most authors aren’t interested in learning how to write, just in getting whatever they’ve written published. I base that statement on the fact that I get far more traffic and comments from people looking for information about getting published than the people who are looking for ways to improve their own writing. I have naïvely hoped that by posting about writing I would be able to spur some discussion about writing. I thought maybe someone would disagree with me on a few things and it would get interesting, but that has not been the case. What I have found, however, is that people are very interested in posts I’ve written about the details of getting published. Let’s face it folks, getting published is easy and cheap. With a little knowhow, you can get anything you want published in book form and available for sale around the world within a few days. But convincing other people that they want to ...

R ecently, I’ve been thinking about three words, blessing , praise , and worship . In those three words we have two pairs. We often use blessing and praise in a similar way. The Bible tells us to praise God and it also tells us to bless God. And we often talk about praise and worship. But as we consider these words, I think few people use blessing and worship correctly while praise isn’t used enough. The reason I say that is that I believe many churches are doing a lot of praise while forgetting about blessing and worship. Praise is an easy word to understand. When a child does something good, we praise him for it. We never praise a child for something that he will do in the future. The same is true when we talk about praising God. We don’t praise God for the things he is going to do, but when we talk or sing about the great things he has done for us, that is praise. The song says, “Praise him! Praise him, Jesus our blessed redeemer. For our sins he suffered and bled and died.”...

H ow do we make a character likeable? It isn’t always an easy task and yet we need people to like a character or they won’t stick with him throughout the story. By like I mean that readers want to know more about him, not that they want to be his friend. It isn’t as easy as making the character the good guy. Jar Jar Binks is perhaps the most despised character in the Star Wars franchise and yet he is one of the good guys. Conversely, the television show Dexter is built around a serial killer. I haven’t watched more than a few minutes of the show, but it seems that he is a likeable character. Blake Snyder used to talk about making a character likeable through the use of a device he called the save the cat moment. Essentially, this works by having the character do something good, such as saving a cat, when we’re introduced to the character. Whatever bad stuff the character might do later, we’ll always remember that there’s something good about him, there’s something worth saving. In ...

W hen you blog, sometimes things you say take you by surprise. The thing that surprised me about yesterday’s post was the statement that many story ideas begin with the inciting incident . I believe that’s a useful thing to know because it helps us know where we are and what we need to do. The inciting incident is a great starting point for the story idea because it allows us to ask the question of how we, other people, or our characters would handle the situation if something happened. If a child is killed in a hit and run accident, one person might lobby for a new traffic light, while another person might hunt down the driver and kill him with her car. The inciting incident is the same in both cases, but the story is very different.

P lot or character? I suppose you might call it a debate, but there are people who insist upon writing plot based stories and there are people who insist upon writing character based stories. I’ve also seen some people say we should chuck it all and writer premise based stories. I can’t say that’s such a bad idea, but the person who said it didn’t know what a premise is, defining it as the foundational idea upon which the characters and plot are based. [1] It may be good at this point to remind you that a premise is the statement we attempt to prove or disprove in an argument. The statement “writers should focus on character development first” is a premise, but that doesn’t mean we can create characters and plot from it. At the heart of this debate over plot, character, premise, or whatever is the underlying question of where should I start? Let’s say you have a story idea. We won’t call it a premise, but you know enough to want to write the story and you’re looking for the best ...

R ecently, in the comments on The Kill Zone , Nancy J. Cohen stated, “In a murder mystery, [the premise] is usually who the victim is and where the body is found.” She’s actually wrong, but her statement is a premise . May sense? If so, you can stop reading now, but the rest of us are going to look at what a premise is. Many people have the idea that the premise is what the story is about. Frankly, I may be guilty of using the word that way from time to time, but if we look at the dictionary definition of premise we find that it is “a proposition that forms the basis of an argument or from which a conclusion is drawn” (Encarta Dictionary). In more simple terms, a premise is a statement we’re trying to prove. Many novelists take issue with this because they see themselves writing to entertain rather than to make a point, but when examining story structure it’s beneficial to look at the similarities between a story and a traditional argument. Before we go too deep, let’s look at an...

B lake Snyder is dead now, but the other day I listened to an interview he did shortly before he died. One of the things the interviewer asked was what mistakes he saw screenwriters making. In response, Blake said that he saw a lot of people making the mistake of pitching the catalyst rather than the fun and games. I could tell from the follow up questions that he interviewer didn’t have a clue what he was saying, but I listened with interest and thought to myself that he was absolutely right, patting myself on the back for not making that mistake. Then a few days later I opened a document in which I’d recorded what I saw as the logline for one of my stories. As it turns out, my clearly worded logline was the catalyst (inciting incident). So let’s say it’s an easy mistake to make. If we pick on Where the Red Fern Grows again, the story is about a boy training two dogs to be championship quality hunting dogs. We’ll all agree that’s true and it turns out that that is exactly what happe...