Posts by Mark Baker
Well, there is usually not a lot of inner dialogue in the middle of a sword fight. The slow part of the brain that mulls over stuff switches off and the fast part of the brain the tries to not get ...
For your industrial revolution era character, the whole of their upbringing, education, and training would be designed to develop a high sense of duty in them. It is only after the first world war ...
Well, first, the scenario you posit is a bit unusual. During the Industrial Revolution (on which I did my MA many moons ago) many of the men who made their money in trade and industry at some point...
I think it is important to note that while there is often one particular moment where the choice is faced and made -- what James Scott Bell calls "the mirror moment", the choice may not necessarily...
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...
While emotions do show on the face and in the movement of the body, those are not the major ways that we judge people's emotions in real life. In particular, they are not the principle means by whi...
The way you make a character sound condescending it to have them say condescending things. That's it. That's the whole of the recipe. But I suppose you knew that. I suppose you must have tried tha...
Essentially, you do need a speech tag if the reader can easily tell who is speaking. Under what conditions can the reader easily tell who is speaking: There are only two people in the conversatio...
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...
What is wrong with it is that it is not idiomatic, as you note. Writing idiomatically is the important thing here. It really does not matter whether you can explain or justify an idiomatic expres...
I don't know. What this place needs is not more data but more users. Bringing over a few more months of questions from SE would give the few of us who still check in here something to chew on for a...
Notice that you don't "click" a mouse. You point to an object with the mouse point and you press the mouse button. And the mouse button makes a clicking sound. Click is not an action, it is feedbac...
The "last activity" data on posts appears to be inaccurate. I just answered a question, but while the answer count shows my answer, the last activity data still refers to the time the question was ...
It is almost certainly just a really really bad idea and you should stick to either one. At novel length it has been made to work by people like Charles Dickens and Cormac McCarthy, but at short st...
It strikes me that there was something contrary to the stated aims of Stack Overflow about the accepted answer button. SO set out not to provide an answer to one individual but to create a permanen...
Apropos of the Sequence of Categories can I suggest some standardization of the naming of categories. In particular, I would suggest renaming "Q&A" as "Questions". Yes, questions have answers, ...
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...
Speaking of categories, what about a category for Resources. People could suggest books on writing, write reviews on them, and other resourses, and share opinions on their virtues and vices.
For what purpose would people publish their work here? If it is for critique, this seems like too public a forum for it. It will look like publication and that will make the work ineligible for p...
To solve questions of this kind, you have to understand the role of setting in a story. Stories do not exist to describe settings. Settings exist as a place to stage stories. Settings contribute to...
Lots of people start writing novels in their teens. Most of them are not very good at first. That is to be expected. A novel is one of the most complex forms of art that can be created by a single ...
What happened to the Questions Tab? We used to be able to see multiple pages of questions and view them in different ways, including "Lottery". Now there is just one page of questions with no navig...
Yes, the first page is vitally important. It is the place where engagement happens. It is the place where the reader either sinks into the world of the story or skates of the words without engaging...
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...
