Posts by Mark Baker
Stories are not organized according to time sequence, they are organized according to narrative arc. A narrative arc is built on rising tension, not the passage of time. Narrative arc can often be ...
Usually when someone says that they have a lot of ideas, they mean that they have a lot of plot ideas. The problem is, they don't understand the difference between a plot idea and a story idea. Gia...
As is typical with tired language and cliches, the main problem here is not simply that the phrase is overly familiar, but that it is inappropriate to the scene. This is not a scene in which two pe...
Any discussion of quality in art depends on your theory of what art is for. There seem to be two dominant theories of art today. Theory: art creates an experience In the case of literature, this...
Humble people don't know that they are humble. Anyone who burns to say that they are humble, isn't. See Uriah Heep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uriah_Heep.
A story is an experience. The reader has to trust that experience. If they stop trusting the experience, they essentially drop out of the world created by the experience, and once that happens, the...
You don't. Turning a life into drama will almost certainly cause pain to those who remember that life. Life is more subtle than drama. Drama needs a definite shape that life lacks. That is why we v...
I would take this as an expression of what I think of as knowing the difference between history and story. Every story is embedded in a history. A history is a sequence of event connected by causal...
I would definitely not recommend using Word for this. It is just not what it was designed to do. There are multiple documentation systems that have been developed specifically for the purpose of ...
It depends what your goal is. If you want to build a readership and make money from your writing, then paying anyone to publish you is not a good idea. If a so-called publisher makes money by charg...
First, TV serials are virtually impossible to end in a way that satisfies the audience. The whole dramatic structure of a TV drama militates against bringing it to a dramatically satisfying conclus...
You evaluate yourself as a professional writer by submitting writing to respected publications and seeing if they offer you money for it. The beauty of writing is that there is no other criteria, n...
Logically, no. The headings delineate the hierarchy of the document. Bullets delineate the structure of lists, not matter where they appear in the document hierarchy. If your style is to indent sec...
Reality is often more complex than our document structures can easily capture. Most of the solutions to this issue simply make the text structures more complex without making the meaning any more c...
You can't. Major publishers publish thousands of books a year that don't sell. Movie studios release hundreds of movies that no one watches. TV Networks create new shows every season that get cance...
I think there are good arguments to be made that rhythm and clarity are closely connected. We tend to have a very puritanical view of prose preached to us today. It is all spare and bleached and sq...
It is easy to imagine that moments of religious experience are great strum and drang affairs, but they are more often moments of quietness. Not the storm but the calm after the storm. Consider 1 Ki...
Is there any other reason to use this device in a narrative, beyond "to build tension"? Yes. In Story Robert McKee describes the structure of a story as a series of attempts at a goal met by ...
There are plenty of examples of novels about adults written for young people in the canon. Look at Rosemary Sutcliffe for example. But this involves a different view of how a reader identifies with...
When we give credit to a designer for an article of clothing, we do not caveat our praise by pointing out that they did not weave the fabric or grow the cotton or design the sewing machine or smelt...
You don't cites the source for a paragraph. You cite the source for an assertion. Each assertion should be cited, regardless of whether it occurs in the same paragraph as another assertion, and reg...
Two dogs. One bone. The dogs are antagonists. Which is the good dog? Which is the bad dog? One dog may have the objective right to the bone, but that does not change how each dog sees things. Ea...
Stories do not have tenses. Individual verbs have tenses. Even an individual sentence can contain verbs in different tenses. Tom is saying that Jane promised that she will marry him in Septemb...
It all comes down to the familiarity of the audience with the interface. The words of a procedure describe parts of the interface. Will the audience immediately recognize which parts of the interfa...
I think you need to remember that the five paragraph essay is not a normal literary form, it is an artificial training exercise (of dubious merit, if you ask me, but that is beside the point). Trai...
