A Few Questions for Timothy Fish

Published: 1/4/2008

If you had only a few seconds to tell someone about your latest project, how would you describe it?

How to Become a Bible Character is about a young man, Neal, who wants to become a Bible character. It is told from the point of an associate pastor, Wayne. Neal is determined that he can do something that will make him stand out like a Bible character. Wayne is at something of a loss to figure out how to handle the situation.

How to Become a Bible Character is the second book in a series. How does How to Become a Bible Character relate to the first book, Searching for Mom? How will the other books relate?

Searching for Mom is a story about a girl, Sara, and her mother, though they are not your typical mother and daughter. Two of the primary characters in How to Become a Bible Character, Neal and Ben, were unnamed in Searching for Mom, but they do appear as eighth graders in some of the fight scenes. Part of the reason I wanted to write How to Become a Bible Character was to explore the unusual friendship that these two boys have. They are older in the second book, but they have remained friends. At least they did until Neal decided to try to be like Moses. Sara appears in How to Become a Bible Character and she will be appearing in the rest of the books as well. She is the common thread for the series.

When do you find time to write?

I usually write in the evenings and weekends. I don’t follow a strict schedule. There are days that I spend twelve hours writing and there are days when I do not writing at all. I find that some of my most productive time is when I am not writing, but I am thinking about the story.

If you could write like any author, who would it be?

Mark Twain. He had an amazing ability to cover some of the deepest topics and make people laugh while he was telling them how wrong they were. He looked at the world differently than most people do. I would love to have his humor. People who laugh live longer. I would love to extend a few people’s lives, whether they like it or not. I would also love to have his skill with satire. There are so many things that are wrong in the world right now and some people can’t see clearly enough to know they have a problem.

What would you like to see more of in the books that are coming out today?

Hope. Many of the books that I see today have a complete lack of hope. We expect to see this is the secular marketplace, since many of the authors there are without hope, but many of the Christian novels take a very pessimistic view also. Yes, I know that adultery, divorce, abuse, drugs, death and other things are real. Yes, people need to understand how to deal with these things, but part of what we can do as writers is to show people that things don’t have to be that way. There really is hope, if people only knew where to look for it.