Posts by Mark Baker
I don't see anything wrong with the construction per se. It's just how English works for a structure that is action followed by consequence. It is far more important that your prose should seem nat...
So having said all that, it turns out that my publisher publishes novellas. https://chrismpress.com/books/magdalen-montague/ This may perhaps be something that small presses, particularly those th...
My information is all of the negative variety, but in all the research I have done over the years on publishers and agents I have never seen one that wanted novellas. The novella always was, I beli...
Author royalties depend entirely on the author's contract with the publisher. If the contract says they get royalties, they get royalties. If the contract says they don't get royalties, they don't....
This is the first ever draft of your first ever novel. If you were able to simply pick up where you left off and bring it to a successful conclusion, you would be a phenom. The novel is a highly ...
In this particular case, don't, because the term NASA is more well known than its expansion. Sometimes acronyms evolve into words, such as scuba and radar. Once they become words, use them as words...
At this point you need one of two things, either time or someone you trust to tell you the truth. The problem with most beta readers is that they are friends or acquaintances and they don't want ...
A character is not a human being. A character is a construct created entirely by the author for the purpose of telling a story. This works because stories are much neater simpler things than real h...
Yes, there is an objectively better place to start, and that is with character. This is not to say that it is the only place to start. As long as you put all the bits together in the end, it doesn'...
The conventional term is "programmer writer" or, sometimes, "programming writer". It is generally used to describe someone whose training and focus is programming rather than technical writing, but...
There seem to be three different parts to this question: Does the author's public reputation affect the sales of books? Do the view expressed in a book affect the sales of the book? Do the privat...
Yes, of course it is. What you are describing is merely a story in which nobody speaks. Since it is perfectly possible to have a story in which a character is alone the entire time, why would it be...
First of all, don't confuse point of view with person. You can write in the third person and still tell the story from one character's point of view. Second, third person is the normal mode of st...
This is definitely a high wire act. I had to do it for one scene a novel where I had two lovers who were both misunderstanding the other's motives and actions. The only way to make full sense of wh...
Philipp provides a good answer, but I think there is more to say. First, "show don't tell" has kind of become the touchstone of all advice about storytelling but it is good to remember that it or...
Stories are the way human being make sense of life. They are an attempt to impose order on the chaotic stream of events that we experience day to day. History is the interpretation of the stream ...
As you say, there are many stories that work that start with dialogue. Far too much advice about writing is much too mechanical in nature. Dialogue is just a mechanism for telling a story. Rules ab...
The best approach is to query the agent first and ask them what their preference is. It is unlikely that they all have the same policy. Asking them first shows them that you are aware of the issue ...
Surprise is the cheapest of literary devices. People often reread their favorite books and re-watch their favorite movies. They would not do so if their enjoyment of them depended on surprise. With...
As others have said, the main conflict is what the main character wants and can't get. But I think the point that needs making here is about what plot is. I think it is all to easy to get into th...
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...
Publisher do two things for you, other than those you have listed, and they are things that you absolutely cannot do for yourself. They provide provenance and branding. Once published by an esta...
All stories are morality plays. That is, they all deal with moral questions and moral choices. They may express very different moral viewpoints, but to make a satisfying story, they have to speak t...
For the book I am currently writing, which is not written in docbook directly but is written in a markup that will be translated to DocBook for publishing, I use an XML file to capture metadata for...
I would say that the newest, and in my view most promising, trend in in the use of lightweight markup languages, specifically Markdown, reStructuredText, and ASCIIDoc. Both commercial WYSIWYG too...
