Timothy's Thoughts

Y ou may have heard of the page 69 test. I’m not sure who deserves credit for thinking of it. I’ve seen similar tests before. The premise is that you can open any book to page 69, read what is there and know whether you want to read the book or not. I think there is some truth to the premise. Page 69, in many books, comes before the break into the second act, so we’re still identifying the problem to be solved, but we’ve gotten most of the introductory stuff out of the way. Page 69 is likely to be the climax of the problem definition. I applied this test to my WIP, The Unwanted Mother (or whatever the title is by the time this post airs). It turns out that on page 69 of my manuscript, Fox is talking to his wife about the two guests that have shown up unexpectedly. He has taken his wife breakfast that was prepared by the woman and he discovers that while his wife had initially accepted the girl the woman brought with her as her granddaughter, she is rethinking her position. During the...

L et me tell you about my latest book. I’m excited about it. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited about any book that I’ve written. It took me some time to settle on a title, but once I did, I don’t think there could be a better title for this book. And the cover—I’m excited about that too. I love the bold colors; there are no pastels here. Thomas Nelson, Zondervan, Abingdon and everyone else take note; this is how I think you should be doing covers. But more than the colors, what I excites me about this cover is that no matter what you do with it, the title is readable. Scale it down to the size of a postage stamp if you like. Convert it to grayscale or even black and white. Whatever you do to it, it still looks great. Okay, so I don’t think anyone is going to buy the book just to look at it; let’s talk about the important stuff, the story. As our story begins, we find a mother and daughter who are on their way to Fort Worth, but what we quickly discover is that the wo...

I f the number of comments is any indication; the most controversial topic in writing is the use of the F-bomb. On a blog I follow, one of the writers brought up that topic and there were several times the comments they usually get. Though I don’t think we can completely divorce the word from the pornographic connotations, I think the reason many writers feel comfortable using it is because much of its usage in common language is to express frustration upon the realization that something isn’t going the way one might hope. I choose not to use the F-bomb and a number of other offensive words in my writing. Some authors have the idea that we use it because it adds realism to our dialog. Personally, I think that’s utter nonsense. The author who writes truly realistic dialog writes boring dialog. Compare reading trial transcripts with reading a novel about a trial and you’ll see that they are far different. One is completely realistic while the other communicates the information and a way...

H ave you noticed how much we try to live up to the expectations of others? Authors have a lot of expectations placed on them. There are the expectations of the family. If you write a book, people expect you to get it published and make millions or at least thousands. There are the expectations of other authors. There are the expectations of agents and publishers. All of these expectations are driving toward one thing. The author is expected to write the next Harry Potter. The fact is that we can’t live up to the expectations of others. We must determine our own goals and strive to achieve them. I think of all the computer books I have sitting on my shelves at home. Some are great books and others leave something to be desired, but there’s not a one of them that has been hugely successful for the publisher. There are some very solid performers. There are some that almost any software engineer or electrical engineer will recognize, but there are no huge successes. The thing is that th...

W e often think of magic as something along the lines of a miracle. In the real world, magic is a bad thing because it puts peoples hopes in things that either have no ability to help them or have no desire to help them. But storybook magic is often a means by which a character is given something or an ability that he wouldn’t receive during the natural course of life. But suppose we wanted to apply a similar concept to a story that doesn’t have magic. Storybook magic is an ability of a character or object to do something that we don’t understand. In a more realistic setting, there are many people who have the ability to do things others can’t. In A Little Princess , the appearance of the fine things in her room seemed like magic, even though we know where it all came from. I was at a gas station a few weeks ago when a man showed up with a gas can and asked if I could put fifty cents or a dollar of gas in it. Other than it costing money, it was a small thing for me to go ahead and fi...

M agic is powered by children’s wishes. And those of adults too. Look at how many stories there are in which magic comes into a person’s life and it turns his world upside down. If you look, you’ll discover that someone has made a wish. Cinderella wished to go to the ball. Aladdin had three wishes. Charlie wished to visit the chocolate factory. There’s always a wish. Sometimes it comes in the form of a prayer either to God, Santa Claus, or some other being, but there is always a wish. The thing about a wish is that it acknowledges that the wisher has no or limited ability to accomplish what he would like to happen. Charlie was locked out of the chocolate factory and had no money to buy candy bars. Without the help of a higher power, he would have had no way of getting inside. I suppose wishes in stories are a parallel to prayer in real life. But wishes are fleeting. They have power for a while, but stories are about character change. The higher power in the story gives the character ...

I got up early this morning and having nothing better to do I read several blogs. I read Eat, Pray...Hate? at Girls Write Out , the gist of which is that people don't like the "truth" of some people's stories, even going so far as to criticize Eat, Pray, Love because the woman left her husband. To that post, I wrote a response saying that it is natural for readers to feel hurt when someone hurts someone they like. In this case, the writer of Eat, Pray, Love hurt her husband, who appears to have wanted the marriage to work, whatever his failing might have been. I said that readers will feel the story is unresolved if the person doesn't admit wrong doing and apologize to not only the other person but the reader. Of course, the character can get comeuppance and that works too (sometimes even better). But what got me is that I included a link to For the Love of a Devil and to a couple of Bible verses because I felt that For the Love of a Devil was relavant to ...