Posts by Mark Baker
Publishing is a risky business. Publishers lose money on a lot of the titles they publish and new authors are a much greater risk than established ones. The longer a book, the more it costs to prod...
A big part of the marketing advantage that publishers have is that they have access to this kind of information. This is a problem even for authors going the traditional route, because they are exp...
It depends on what you mean by evil. There are many characters in fiction which exist only as the personification of evil. They are not people, they are evilness in trousers and a mourning coat. Yo...
POV is all about letting the reader see the things they want to see. One changes POV so that the reader can see things from a different angle. We often do this in life. We move around a scene so ...
The structure of most stories is that the main character is led to make some fundamental choice of values. Secondary characters exists to be the subject of those values (the love interest), the pro...
Writing is all about conditioning the reader's expectations. All the big effects in writing come from an appropriate setup. If you want to show a result contrary to the narrator's expectations, you...
You should punctuate dialogue exactly the way you would punctuate the same sentence if it were not in dialogue (excepting the typographic rules around the placement of quotation marks). A sentence...
In the end, the story you are creating will either be convincing or not. But being logically coherent has little to do with making a story convincing. (The fact that there is an entire YouTube subc...
As always in literature, it is all about the setup. In literature as in life, we interpret actions as our previous experience has led us to interpret them. If you want a reader to react to somethin...
I'm pretty sure that the answer at the technical level is no. But this is really a question that needs to be addressed another level up. The thing about structured writing is that it factors out ...
Well, whatever you do, don't convolute the the sentences around those words. Voices don't greet. People greet. "Konnichiwa!" greeted a voice. is grating and unnatural. There are at least four thi...
Excite is the wrong thing to focus on. The real key to successful storytelling is to engage the reader. There are no car chases or gun fights in Pride and Prejudice. It is a story of a courtship, d...
Anything is acceptable if you make it work. For an example of a book that makes this work (brilliantly) see Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. But any change in narrative style calls attent...
Genres are literary ghettos. They are places where people with particular and highly specific tastes (cosy mysteries, sword and sorcery, horse stories) can be assure that they get what they paid fo...
Is it possible to make a living as a novelist? Yes, a few people do. Is it sensible to plan on making a living as a novelist, the way you might plan on making a living as a dentist or an accountan...
Just because markup preferences are personal, I will mention the markup system I developed for writing my last non-fiction book. It is called SAM (Semantic Authoring Markdown). It is a general purp...
This is one of the many cases in which advice about writing is misstated. Long sentences are not bad. Convoluted sentences are bad. A sentence can be long without being convoluted. A sentence can b...
The key to good tech writing is not style. Style helps with clarity, and that is useful, but it is not enough. They key is to present the right information to enable a particular user, with a parti...
The short answer is that you can't. Symbolism is really a property of a culture, not an individual work. Symbols are a kind of second order language, and you can no more make up symbols out of whol...
Algorithms cannot detect plagiarism. They can detect a similarity between two text which might or might not be a sign of plagiarism. Plagiarism is passing someone else's work off as your own. You c...
You need to make a very clear distinction between imaginary history and story. It seems to be quite common for aspiring writers to construct elaborate imaginary histories and then struggle to write...
There is no universal convention for this, and thus no "proper" way to do it. But I would question is editing an existing blog post is the right way to do this at all. A blog is a "web log". That i...
"Use the present tenses when discussing events in literary works" I don't know where you got this from, but it is not true. The default for stories is to tell them in the past tense, or to be more ...
Bollocks. (That's a technical term.) The semicolon is the correct punctuation for a particular kind of sentence structure. So on the face of it, if you want to outlaw something, it should be that s...
You have to understand what show vs tell means in the context of prose. In a movie, you can show something by pointing the camera at it. In prose, all you have is words and all you can do with word...
