Though he now lives in Canyon, Texas, Timothy Lewis remembers fondly where he came from, as mentions of areas from The Pineywoods to the Gulf Coast show up time and time again in his writings. This Sam Houston State University alumnus has written more than 20 plays, 100 songs, and numerous novels throughout his career. Lewis’ success reached new heights when his novel Forever Friday became a bestseller on Amazon. Local readers will find familiarity in this novel, as Huntsville, Texas is the main setting! A romantic at heart, Lewis has found a way to keep his writing, as he describes it, “clean, but compelling.” Lewis says, “Write what you know,” and it seems what Mr. Lewis knows is this—”faith, hope, and love” is not just something to hang on the wall or write about…it’s something worth living by.
As a student, I transferred from Tyler Junior College in 1974. My senior year, I changed majors from agriculture to music education. I did that because I had begun writing plays and musicals at First Baptist Church. There was a woman there who was my Sunday School teacher and mentor. Her name was Helen Bass. She wrote a play and wanted me to be in it. I said, “I’m not an actor…” Sure enough, I was in it.
Then she said, “I want you to write a musical with me…” And I said, “I can’t write songs.” She said, “I think you can…you play the piano, don’t you?” So, I went home over Christmas break, and I wrote a song, and I came back and wrote 10 more. We wrote the first three musicals together that were done by the college department of First Baptist. We loaded up an old school bus and traveled around all over Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico and would produce musicals Helen and I had written. After that, I began writing plays and musicals. And it continued from there.
[After graduation] I taught 5th grade music at Scott E. Johnson Elementary, then was hired at First Christian Church in Huntsville to do an education program. I became an artist-in-residence in Huntsville and continued to write plays.
Yes. The novel is about a man who goes through a divorce and doesn’t believe in love anymore. He’s an estate salesman, and he finds a collection of antique postcards at an estate sale. He starts going through the poems and postcards to try to discover, “Is there a secret to lasting marriage?”
There is a screenplay for Forever Friday that has been completed. Hopefully, it will be a movie one day!
The inspiration for Forever Friday started because I found a collection of postcards at my great aunt and uncle’s estate sale back in the late 90s. I started digging through these albums, and what I found was not photos, but a collection of antique postcards. It was very obvious that my great uncle either mailed a postcard to his wife to get on Friday or just handed it to her. He did that every Friday for 60 years! That was the basis of the book. I put these albums on a shelf in my office. Five years passed. I couldn’t figure out how to turn it into a novel. One day the phone rang, and it was a friend from high school who was going through a divorce. He said, “I don’t know if I believe in love anymore.” I looked up on the bookshelf and thought, “There’s 60 years of a love story there. What was their secret?”
A lot of my inspiration comes from history. One of my latest novels, Running Downwind, is based upon characters that experienced the UT Tower shooting and the Kennedy assassination. Greatly affected by these events in a personal way, the characters come together to have a love story.
Yes – married 42 years to my wife Dinah. What I realized as a young man is I wanted a marriage that would last. I realized couples who do things to keep their romance active are the ones who had the best chance of working. We try to do something special every 6 months. A scene in Forever Friday where the couple has a first date in Galveston – that’s based off mine and my wife’s first date, because that’s where we went. There are other things in real life from our marriage that appeared in the book as well.
People always ask me, “What’s the secret to a lasting marriage?” What Gabe [in Forever Friday] found is there is no formula. There are three things: total trust, an unbreakable bond, and completeness. All of these are undergirded by the invisible forces of faith and hope. That’s what he found.
It tells me maybe I’m doing something right. All my books are… they can be intense… but they are clean. I have no sex or language in my books. It doesn’t mean it’s not there, but there’s a way to write about it that doesn’t offend people. I teach that when I teach writing. I tell my students it takes more work, it’s harder to write something very compelling without using certain words, but you can do it. My books also all have an element of faith in them. I think people love my books because they’re real, and they tell the truth. They’re compelling, and they’re touching. If I write a scene and I end up in tears, I know the reader probably will, too. If I don’t laugh or cry reading my own writing, the reader won’t either.
I was not a reader as a kid. My mother was a librarian, and she insisted we do the summer reading program. I would barely get books read! Instead of reading about pirates, I wanted to be outside building a pirate ship. What got it all started for me was when I was in the 6th grade. I attended the senior play, “All Because of Agatha.” I remember, at that moment, falling in love with theater and the story.
Early in my career, my wife was a nurse, I was a teacher, and our daughter was still a baby. We were living in Amarillo and were in the Toys R Us parking lot. I looked at Dinah and said, “If I can start writing fulltime, I’ll do the washing, the cooking, the cleaning, the shopping–all you have to do is come home and put your feet up.” She looked at me and said, “I’m not stupid!”
That decision really changed our life right there. When I was in graduate school, I carried our daughter all around the city. I knew every clean men’s restroom in the city where I could change a diaper. My wife’s selflessness of saying, “Yes, I’ll work. You can stay home and write”—that allowed me to have the career at all.
I like to be in my office or out on my back porch. I can edit in a coffee shop; the conversation can be energizing for me while editing. But for writing? I have to be alone. Oh, one more place – I write while I walk! I walk three miles a day. When I was writing Forever Friday, I had all these postcard poems I wrote for the book. I can’t tell you how many times I’d be out walking, and a poem would come to me, and I would literally run home so I could write it down!
Oh gosh, I love seafood. I also love a really good, tender steak… Barbeque. I guess anything that is made in TEXAS is done well!
Gateway to Heaven by Sheldon Vanauken and Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
It has to be the beach. A close second is the mountains!
The best place to purchase my novels is Amazon.
Postcards Magazine
936-293-1188
PO Box 690
Huntsville, TX 77342
