Posts by Mark Baker
Falling in love has the quality that you are often not fully conscious of it while it is happening. The moment where you articulate to yourself that you are in love with someone can often come as a...
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...
I think the point of requiring evidence of prior research is to avoid clogging up the site with endless repetitions of the same basic questions. The point of a Q/A site, or, at least, the stated go...
The question you always have to ask about a reveal is, what is it paying off and how its it paying it off. The narrative technique you use should be appropriate to the type of payoff you are creati...
A wise writer chooses a point of view that enables the reader to see what they need to see of the story. If you choose a point of view arbitrarily, or because it is fashionable, you will often find...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
You can set a story anywhere. The challenge is not to make it consistent with our world but to make it self-consistent within itself. And I think this is a universal literary problem (and therefore...
There are no jobs that pay well for which the only requirement is writing. This is a simple matter of supply and demand. There are lots of people who can write well enough for commercial purpose. T...
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...
Storytelling is about sequencing. If you have a big gap between a detail and major events that depend on that detail, that means you have got the sequencing wrong. This is a pervasive problem in ...
The main thing that distinguishes the speech of different characters is what they say, not how they say it. If you understand the motives and the fears of every characters in your scene, and if you...
If you are worried that it is too complicated, it is probably too complicated. Not there there is not a place for narrative innovation in literature, but the basics are the readers want to be immer...
Stories are fundamentally about people, not places. The psychology of why we like stories has been fairly well worked out, and the archetypes of stories are fairly well understood. At its simplest,...
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...
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...
For an example of just this being done brilliantly, read Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman. A journey is a rite of passage, a gate between worlds. Handled correctly is it a fantastic way to open a nov...
Because evaluating an author's work is expensive. It consumes time that could otherwise be spent finding other authors. That time is a dead loss if the author signs with another agent. In the end ...
Travel stories are about the longing for something with a counterpoint of fear of the unknown and its dangers. To make your story interesting, find the object of longing and find the the source of ...
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...
