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...
Why do baddies have to be bad? (Because that is the question you are really asking here.) Baddies have to be bad because baddies serve an important literary function. Robert E. Lee said, "It is w...
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...
Every scene should produce a change in story values, which almost always means some change of state for the character. From the beginning of the scene to the end, the character should be more in lo...
What Amadeus says about body language is true, but it can be hard to convey in prose. It is the kind of thing you can rely on actors to do well in film, if that is the medium (as the 90 second tim...
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 ...
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...
This notion that a novel has a meaning that we can ferret out and interpret has been a staple of English teachers for decades. Essentially it is an attempt to turn a novel (or any other work of art...
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...
The problem with description is that description is the wrong word for it. The right word is evocation. You are looking to evoke a response in the reader which brings a sense of place flooding into...
Probably the best filter of all is age. Any book that is still around 50 years after is was written is probably around because it is well written. Recent books get liked for all sorts of reasons ot...
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 ...
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...
I think chapter titles are one of the elements that contributes to the sense of a strong narrative voice -- that is, the sense that there is a narrator telling the story. This style is somewhat unf...
Bold is one way to emphasize something in a sentence. Recasting the sentence to put the emphasis where you want it is another method. Is one preferable to another? I'm not sure. The point of any wr...
Simply choose another adjective: I drove past the empty stables and the deserted servant's quarters, and after another quarter mile I entered a very large circular driveway. Or break up the s...
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...
You have to make a distinction between plagiarism and familiar ground. Writers cover familiar ground all the time. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back. It is familiar ground. It is n...
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 ...
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...
Metaphors must be apt. They must make the reader's experience of the scene they are reading more vivid. The problem with many metaphors, particularly those created by inexperienced writers, and mos...
