Posts by Mark Baker
The number of publishers that will even accept unsolicited fiction manuscripts is very small, so unless you are submitting to some very specific niche market, it is hardly worth talking about. Mo...
One of the things you discover pretty quickly as a writer is that there are all kinds of things that we do not have words for. Worse, even if there were words of them, most people would not recogni...
One of the great misconceptions is that a story can be written in the past tense or the present tense. This is not the case. Individual sentences and sometimes phrases are written in particular ten...
While no one can say for sure, my guess is that you are probably suffering from what seems to be a recurring problem for people posting here: confusing plot with imaginary history. Story never st...
Think of a sentence like a Venn diagram. Each word you add to the sentence is like a circle added to the Venn diagram. Each circle added to the diagram should reduce the area that is common to all ...
The simple answer is that you don't. You don't tell the reader anything that is not needed to support the plot of theme of the story. There are a lot of people who enjoy world building as a hobby...
Publications don't explain why they reject things because: a. It takes time. b. If they do, people will argue with them and call them names. c. If they do, people will try to fix the piece and s...
For the sort of poor soul who can only enjoy themselves if they are rooting for one side in a fight, then I suppose that a story that does not take sides will be boring. But that is not and never...
First and foremost, I would suggest that you resist the urge to describe everything that happens in a scene. In a movie, all the actions of a scene like that are acted out and are visible on screen...
The best place to get critiques is in a critique group or a writing class. In these settings you will get feedback from other writers, or from a writing teacher. These are people who are (to one ex...
I think your premise is a little flawed here. The convention of the novel since its inception is that the narrative is addressed by the narrator to the reader, and that the narrator is free to rela...
It is perfectly acceptable to switch tenses generally, using each as it is appropriate to the thought being expressed. One thing to note in regard to tenses is that the choice of tense has nothing...
Two thoughts: As an author, your job is not so much to show that your character is afraid, but to make the reader afraid for them. The physical expressions of fear are far more often played for c...
This is really all about cadence. You break up a text, at various levels, as an expression of its cadence. A slower cadence tends to express itself in longer sentences, longer paragraphs, longer ch...
Cowardice. Villains who are bold and brave like Darth Vader have a cool factor because of their boldness and bravery. However evil their deeds, they display characteristics that we admire and would...
The problem here is that you are conflating two separate things: the syntax for parameters in a function expression and the list of available parameters. The syntax itself is straightforward enough...
Well, the obvious answer is Project Gutenberg. All the material is there and searchable. The question would be how to confine your search to just the works that fit your definition of classic Engli...
It seems to me that what Pinker is describing at the sentence and paragraph level is substantially what most books on story are describing at the level of a document as a whole. Stories have a cohe...
Yes, it is called Amazon Digital Services. It is where authors publish manuscripts that have been rejected by publishers, or which they have rejected themselves by not bothering to submit. Writin...
You use the full narrative pallet that the novel form makes available to you. Different emotions manifest themselves in different ways. Some are very overt, some and entirely hidden from external v...
To answer any "where should I pitch" question, you should ask yourself the following questions: Who would want to read this? What is its market niche, and how big is it?. What are the other nota...
I'm not sure that the phrase "Curley's wife" was intended to express possession. Be careful not to view things through a contemporary political lens. (Actually, two points here: don't let contempor...
The emotional lives of children, adolescents, and adults are very different. This sometimes lead adults to dismiss the emotions of children and adolescents as trivial or inconsequential, which is u...
Perhaps the most famous example of switching from an involved to external narrator is Dickens Bleak House. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy is a more recent (and shorter) example. It is wo...
There are no original story ideas. It has all been done before. Any originality lies in the telling, not in the story idea. And, the publishing industry cares about originality about as much as t...
