Timothy's Thoughts

T hough I will never promise to end all of my stories without tragedy, I’m a big fan of happy endings. People like to reach the end of the story and feel glad that things turned out the way they did. We need sad endings too. Books like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold have their place. Part of the reason I know sad endings have their place is because some of the stories in the Bible have sad endings. What could be more sad than a man achieving a great victory in war and then coming home and sacrificing his daughter? We need those to remind us that not everything works out the way we would like. But happy endings give us hope. I am so much a fan of happy endings that I’m convinced that unless an author has something that can only be said through a sad ending, he should plan on a happy ending. Take Uncle Tom’s Cabin for example. It is about a black slave who is trying to make the best of a bad situation. But in the end he dies a terrible death. The ending is somewhat happy because h...

D eborah is an interesting character in the Bible. We don’t actually know much about her, other than she had a lot of spunk. But I’ve got a couple of theories. Actually, they are more like suppositions than theories. One is that the reason she was a judge was because the men weren’t doing their jobs. That’s not to say that she was wrong to do what she did, but Judges is written about a time when the Jews had turned away from God. They weren’t doing what they were supposed to do. They weren’t worshiping God like they should have been. They weren’t following the leaders they were supposed to follow. I suspect there was a man who God had called to be a judge but was not doing his job. That leads me into the next supposition. Deborah was a prophetess because her husband was a prophet, not because she was called to be a prophet. Consider the wife of Isaiah. She was called a prophetess because she was his wife, not because she was getting messages from God. So it could be that Deborah’s hu...

A new year, a new story. Last year, I wrote two books, and published three, but none were novels. This year, I intend to write at least one novel. I found a story in the Bible that I would like to retell in a modern setting. It’s a great story, but I’ve been having trouble figuring out where to begin. The basic outline is there, but I’ve been having trouble figuring out where the main character is coming from. I know what has to happen, but why? The Bible account is a little vague on that point. It states the facts of the situation, but it doesn’t tell us anything about what is going through people’s heads at the time. Besides that, the Bible account takes up only two chapters, with the second chapter saying much of the same thing the first chapter did. Essentially, I have to take three pages of information and expand them into 300 pages. But after struggling with how to begin, I decided not to begin. Instead, I wrote the final chapter first. I began with the final event and detaile...

I n life, it doesn’t matter how you start as much as it does how you finish. You may begin in poverty or in wealth, but the real question is what you do with your life. Endings are so much more important than beginnings. Think about what you see in the Bible. As great as the beginning is, God always had his eye on the end. In the end, he wanted a relationship with us. In the beginning, he gave us the freedom to choose, but without seeing the relationship he wanted to have with us, none of that mattered.

H ave you noticed that nearly every movie that Hollywood produces has a love story? Stratch that. Have you noticed that nearly every movie Hollywood produces has a romance? There are exceptions, but even a real guy's movie, like Die Hard , has a romance. There's a reason for that. I'm sure I'll take some heat from the romance authors out there, but the fact is that romances are easy to write and easy to sell. At least, they're easier to sell than stories without a romantic element. I believe the reason is that we all have this natural desire to hook up with someone and live happily ever after. But desire and reality are often very different. First there is the struggle to find someone. Then there is problem that marriage turns out to be a lot more work than most people imagined. So we like stories that let us imagine that we can storm a tower, kill a bunch of bad guys, rescue the girl, and walk off into the sunset with her. But just because they're easier to s...

I 've been struggling with a story lately. I have a rough outline done but some of the finer points are difficult. The story involves a woman killing someone, but the story isn't about her, it is about another man. The strange thing about this story is that the man she kills needs to be killed, but I need it to be the case that the reader feels that the man the story is about should have been the one to kill this man. I'm also struggling because the story takes place in a modern setting, so it is hard to see this as justice if it doesn't first go through a court of law.

R omance novels make up the bulk of the Christian fiction market. Harlequin’s Love Inspired is pumping out six a month. Then there are suspense novels, many of which are also romances. Harlequin’s Love Inspired Suspense is pumping out four of those a month. And that’s just a portion of what one publisher is putting out. It seems that the theory of Christian publishers is that there is not story that cannot be rewritten as a romance. I’ve been giving this subject some thought ever since Tamela Hancock Murray brought it up on Steve Laube’s blog ( [1] , [2] ). Tamela is a literary agent and a romance novelist, so that should give you some idea of her view on the subject. But the thing I’m really struggling with is the concept of love that we find in Christian romance novels. I’m not going to tell you that they aren’t clean. I’m not going to tell you that they are poorly written. I could give examples, but most are clean enough that pastors’ wives read them and the readers aren’t complai...